Tina Fey Looks Back at ‘Terrible’ Pop Culture Trends That Haven’t Aged Well: ‘We All Cosigned That?’

 
Tina Fey Pop Culture

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Tina Fey is looking back at infamous moments and trends in pop culture that she believes have aged poorly.

The topic emerged at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival during a panel for her new Peacock comedy series Girls5eva, which follows a ‘90s girl group reuniting after 20 years.

On the show, executive produced by Fey, the girl group comes to realize that some of the messages from their songs – ones that supposedly touted female empowerment – are no longer culturally acceptable.

“We’re culturally looking back at stuff that we all took as totally normal, fun and just cool… whether it’s the way David Letterman dismantled Lindsay Lohan or an underage Britney Spears singing ‘Slave 4 U,’” Fey said during the panel. “We’re all looking back at those things now and being like, ‘Oh, we all cosigned that? Oh, that’s terrible.’”

Lohan, who co-starred with Fey in 2004’s Mean Girls, was famously brought to tears on Letterman’s talk show in 2013 when he repeatedly asked her about going to rehab.

Although Lohan received much of the public’s mockery at the time of the interview’s release, Letterman faced backlash on social media this past February when the the segment resurfaced on TikTok.

The interview had reemerged following the release of the documentary Framing Britney Spears, prompting fans to look back at how other stars of the early 2000s were treated in the media.

As for Spears, the singer was just 19 when she recorded the sexually-charged ballad “I’m a Slave 4 U.”

Fey had previously admitted that some of the jokes on her own show, 30 Rock, haven’t stood the test of time. Last year, the star and creator of the series penned a letter to streaming platforms asking that they remove four episodes featuring characters in blackface, apologizing “for pain they have caused.”

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