Entertainment

Pregnant again, ‘30 Rock’ star worried about show

DONE?: Alec Baldwin said he (right, with Fey) intends to leave “30 Rock” after next year.

Tina Fey — the reigning queen of TV comedy — is pregnant again.

But the people on her sitcom, “30 Rock,” may not be laughing.

Is Baby No. 2 for the TV star a threat to the future of her show?

That was the question the cast and crew of the show were asking yesterday when news broke that, during a taping of “Oprah” this week, Fey, 40, revealed that she’s five months pregnant.

Fey is the star, chief writer and an executive producer of “30 Rock,” and it would be hard — if not impossible — to continue the show if she were absent for long. NBC officially refused to comment yesterday on how the pregnancy might effect the future of the show.

Fey publicly debated whether to have a second baby in a recent New Yorker essay about working moms and feeling guilty.

The essay was played strictly for laughs — including what impact a second pregnancy would have on her TV show. So it was surprising to find out that the debate was, in fact, real.

“I debate the second-baby issue when I can’t sleep,” she wrote. ” ‘Should I? No. I want to. I can’t. I must. Of course, not. I should try immediately.’

“But the math is impossible,” she went on. “No matter how you add up the months, it means derailing the TV show where two hundred people depend on me for their income, and I take that stuff seriously. Like everyone from [TV critic] Tom Shales to [ex-NBC boss] Jeff Zucker, I thought ’30 Rock’ would be canceled by now.”

The future of the show is clouded too by co-star Alec Baldwin’s announcement that he intends to leave “30 Rock” after next year.

Baldwin went on to say that “next year is our last year of the show.” Yesterday, Baldwin seemed to take it all back.

“Although my days on network TV may be numbered,” he wrote on his Huffington Post blog, “I hope ’30 Rock’ goes on forever. Or at least as long as everyone involved desires.”

No matter, Fey and husband Jeff Richmond’s second baby is due in August, typically around the time shooting begins for a fall TV series.

If past form holds true, Fey may be back at work fairly quickly.

In 2005, she returned to work at “Saturday Night Live” only six weeks after her daughter, Alice, was born.