Great Expectations

Certain scenarios — think the harried nightly newsroom — lend themselves to humor.

It’s in this setting that Briga Heelan is exercising her comedy chops in NBC’s Great News.

Heelan stars as an ambitious producer at a national cable news show who ends up with her mother — played by two-time Emmy winner Andrea Martin — as the office intern. “I remember reading the script for the first time and thinking it was super funny,” says the Massachusetts native. “Plus, on some level, I related because I’m close to my own mother, and my whole family is pretty goofy.”

The series, premiering April 25, was created and executive-produced by Tracey Wigfield, who also stars as the news show’s creepy meteorologist. Tina Fey, Robert Carlock, Jack Burditt and David Miner are also executive producers.

Heelan started out in musical theater in New York but soon traded the subway for the freeway when she moved to L.A. “Musical theater has totally helped me with comedy,” she says. “My first big jobs were on multi-cam sitcoms, and it’s necessary to take up space and really inhabit your body with that type of filming.”

Case in point: a “light-bulb” moment when she was called to perform an over-the-top interpretive dance as Holly on ABC’s Cougar Town. Heelan recalls thinking, “I can either go big and be unapologetic, or I shouldn’t be doing this at all.”

As fate would have it, the actress discovered she was pregnant with her first child (her husband is actor-writer Rene Gube) during filming on Great News. “Parts of [the first episode] were from the original pilot, where I wasn’t pregnant, and in other scenes I was, so we had to get very creative,” she says with a laugh..

With so much new in her life (she gave birth to her daughter in March), Heelan credits cast and crew for keeping the set of Great News very relaxed. “I think we have the greatest team ever,” she declares. “And if you’re not into checking out a comedy show that Tina Fey is involved with, then whose comedy show do you want to check out?”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 3, 2017