Happy Tina Fey Day!

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By Matt Haber

December 1, 2008 | 12:29 p.m

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via vanityfair.com

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What else do you call a day when the comedic actress and writer is seemingly everywhere all at once?

First up, Vanity Fair, which enlisted The Times' Maureen Dowd to profile Ms. Fey, whom the magazine's cover trumpets as "A New American Sweetheart!" (Punctuation theirs.) The magazine's Web site also features one of those behind-the-scenes videos of Ms. Fey's photo shoot that all magazines' Web Editors are convinced Internet users love. (In an example of too-weird-to -ignore/too-geeky-to -explicate life imitating art, a very Maureen Dowd-like character played by Christine Lahti once wrote a profile of the protagonists' of Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a show, like Ms. Fey's 30 Rock, set behind the scenes of a sketch comedy show very much like Ms. Dowd's launchpad, Saturday Night Live.)

Ms. Dowd's story was dutifully picked up by The Daily News, The New York Post (whose Page Six also had an item about Ms. Fey today), and The Associated Press, and TMZ. (Apparently a lot of people have been wondering why Ms. Fey has a scar on her face.)

Also out today, The New Yorker's Nancy Franklin's take on Ms. Fey's show, about which she writes:

Fey has surrounded herself with a cast that has one spectacular member and a couple of really good ones, but that averages out to only fair. Her own performance falls into the not-so-great category. It may be that in her effort to keep the show from being a star vehicle—such things have a tendency to crash—she is too generous; although she’s onscreen a lot and is game to do anything for a laugh, I sense that part of her is keeping her distance from the fray. Jerry Seinfeld appeared to do the same thing on his show—make way for his fellow-performers—but then I found him cold, too.

Ms. Franklin also manages to get a quick shot in at Ms. Fey's former 'Weekend Update' co-anchor Jimmy Fallon, whom she calls "a comic nonentity" who "will inexplicably take over the plum Conan O’Brien spot on NBC when O’Brien prematurely takes over the 'Tonight Show' from Jay Leno next year."

Any minute now, we expect The Daily Beast's Tina Brown to call for Ms. Fey to host Meet the Press or become a part of President-elect Obama's cabinet.