Lauren Graham Was Once the Office Disruptor on This Cult Sitcom

In her 30 years at the Atelier Advertising agency, Monica (Lauren Graham) has climbed the ladder of success. As we meet her, she’s CEO, she’s winning industry awards and she’s working on a commercial for Boppin’ Burgers to run during the Super Bowl. She’s even throwing a party at the office for the launch of a new campaign for Vibezz headphones! As everyone gathers to watch it air on TV, Monica seems unaware of its deficits. Playing into stereotypes — a Black guy breakdancing to hip-hop; a monk listening to vaguely Eastern New Age music — is bad; closing the spot with the slogan “All Vibezz Matter” is much worse. The office’s social media team, all young twentysomethings, probably would have tried to stop this ad from getting to air if they’d been involved in the creative process, but they weren’t, which is a mistake the agency’s owner Oliver (Peter Keleghan) doesn’t plan to repeat. He fires Monica and installs Kriska (Madison Shamoun), the 24-year-old head of the social team, to replace her as CEO. 

Kriska comes to the position with a lot of big ideas about shaking up the office culture, while Monica schemes to get her job back. Actually, “schemes” is an overstatement; she just shows up to work the day after her termination and acts like nothing happened. Graham’s new role — in The Z-Suite, Tubi’s first scripted original comedy — represents a complete reversal from the one this comedy fan knew her from when Graham broke out in Gilmore Girls in the fall of 2000. Three years earlier, Graham had a four-episode arc as efficiency expert Andrea on NewsRadio, which probably taught her everything she would ever need to know about working in an office (or, at least, pretending to on TV).

NewsRadio was Paul Simms’ first creator credit. He came to it from writing on a 1990 Spy magazine TV special, writing on Late Night With David Letterman, and both writing and executive-producing on The Larry Sanders Show — with, in other words, a résumé even the snobbiest comedy nerd could admire. NewsRadio also boasted a cast headed by sketch superstars Phil Hartman and Dave Foley, and came out of the gate with what is still one of the strongest sitcom pilots ever. But: NewsRadio premiered on NBC in 1995, a time when the network was also airing Seinfeld in its imperial period and Friends in its phenomenally popular first season. No one was shepherding NewsRadio because no one needed to, which is probably why, in its five-season run, NBC changed its time slot 11 times. In an era when live ratings were the only metric for a show’s success, it mattered that the only people who would ever find NewsRadio on the schedule were its most devoted fans. (Before you ask: Yes, this devoted fan watched every episode.) 

Over the years, the show made meta-jokes about its underdog status — for example, the late Season Three episode “The Real Deal.” Radio producer Lisa (Maura Tierney) and host Bill (Hartman) are discussing how to save their interview show, The Real Deal, from cancellation due to its low ratings; what they need, they decide, is a spectacular guest, which is why it’s lucky that Jerry Seinfeld (as himself) is dining in the restaurant at that very moment. Their plotline for the episode then finds them aggressively pitching Jerry to appear and rescue them from oblivion — you know, kind of the way actor Jerry is doing for NewsRadio by appearing on it. Season Four starts with “Jumper,” an episode about the titular character (Jon Lovitz) threatening to end his life by leaping from Dave’s (Dave Foley) office window — you know, just a fun and frisky way to kick off another season of getting undermined by the network. 

After that entirely self-contained episode, “Planbee” gets us into the arc that will define the first half of the season. WNYX owner Jimmy (Stephen Root) is sick of the station losing money when his many other companies are so profitable, so he’s hired efficiency expert Andrea (Graham) to streamline the operation. Everyone knows this means she’s expected to identify candidates for layoffs, which means it’s all hands on deck to keep Andrea from noticing what a mess Matthew (Andy Dick) is. (Could this have also been a meta-joke about what it’s like working with the infamously, er, “eccentric” Dick? Who can say.) Alas, Matthew’s incompetence can’t be concealed; he does get laid off, and spends the next several episodes staying as close as he can to his former colleagues in the hopes of getting rehired at WNYX — pretending to be a waiter at the restaurant where they’re all having lunch, strategizing over a teeth cleaning when he returns to his original career as a dentist, and doing as Monica later would by returning to the office he was removed from under duress. 

Graham gets to show off her comic talents as the writers make Andrea more than a plot device and shade in personality traits. In her first episode, we see she’s read up on all the key figures at the office, identifies them based on how they react to her following Jimmy’s introduction, and brightly answers their questions. Then Lisa asks what Andrea means when she says her job is to “smooth out the rough edges.” Andrea: “Oh, you must be Catherine or Beth or Lisa. Okay, does anybody have any other questions?” 

The light misogyny that presumably helped Andrea attain status such that someone like Jimmy would hire her gives way to a friend crush on Lisa, which the staffers try to use to their advantage when Andrea announces she’s going to give them all polygraph tests — can’t Lisa find out what Andrea plans to ask them? It turns out they’re largely about legal offenses they may have hidden during their hiring, and that Lisa has the most checkered past of all of them. She’s committed multiple criminal offenses, all grade-grubbing-related (breaking into a library, for example), and when she anxiously confesses, Andrea uses it as an opportunity to connect. Andrea, it seems, also has a criminal past, having committed arson the previous year. “And they never caught me,” she sing-songs.

Though all the staffers are justly wary of Andrea, a cheerful double-talker whose response to their legitimate concerns is to laugh them off, her affection and respect for Lisa are real: Andrea ends her time at WNYX by promoting Lisa to replace Dave as News Director, installing Dave in Lisa’s old job. This eventually turns out to be the wrong call — Lisa hates managing and misses reporting, while Dave is a born boss — but by the time everything settles back out, including Matthew getting his job back, Andrea is long gone. Anyone who’s crossed paths with a consultant will recognize the arc: she only needs to stay long enough to be seen making changes, not to remain to justify them.

There are dozens of reasons NewsRadio was NBC’s best ‘90s sitcom. Joke-dense scripts! Compelling choreography! An uncommonly excellent cast, any of whom could have led their own sitcom! (Fine, probably not Joe Rogan. But we didn’t know then what we know now!) Its status as a perennial victim of NBC’s violent scheduling choices meant that NewsRadio’s producers were (presumably) calling in every favor they could to book not just Seinfeld but James Caan, Bebe Neuwirth, Bob Costas, Dennis Miller, John Ritter, Norm Macdonald and the band Anthrax, all in the hopes that putting them in splashy promos might drive viewership. Lauren Graham was in the tier of stars NewsRadio booked when they were on the come-up, like Ben Stiller, Jon Stewart, Bob Odenkirk, Jane Lynch and Toby Huss. But in a show full of them, Graham delivers an S-tier guest performance. If The Z-Suite’s Monica keeps washing out convincing Oliver to take her back at Atelier, maybe she could give consulting a shot.