Nicole Richie Answers Every Question We Have About Great News

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https://www.vulture.com/article/nico...interview.html

By Devon Ivie, a staff writer covering classic rock and TV

Portia Scott-Griffith doesn’t seem like someone who should be delivering news on an afternoon broadcast in suburban New Jersey. This is a woman who rebrands diet pills as rat poison for a side hustle, won Most Schwaisted Party Peep at the Kids Choice Awards, and took nudes of herself and Tupac … last year? She might also be Banksy. Yet there she is, every weekday, strutting around Great News’s offices like she owns the place, even if she can’t explain what “a journalism” is. “You know what I think would really help the show?” she earnestly suggests in one episode. “If we got rid of the desk so people could see my legs. My mentor Roger Ailes suggested it.”

Great News didn’t last long, which wasn’t too great for us. In 2018, NBC pulled the plug on its teleprompters after 23 episodes, despite executive producer Tina Fey and a solid premise: A local-news producer (Briga Heelan) has to deal with the antics of her overbearing mother (Andrea Martin) after she’s hired as an intern by an executive producer (Adam Campbell) at the station. But it was Nicole Richie’s portrayal of Portia, co-anchor of the fictional Breakdown, that became the sitcom’s standout performance, thanks to a holier-than-thou demeanor that demanded fear and respect from everyone in the newsroom, most of all her older co-anchor (John Michael Higgins, never not deserving of hoots and hollers). Richie never acted in a starring role prior to Great News, and she’s still unsure, all these years later, why creator Tracey Wigfield took a chance on her. But with her return to comedy this month for a Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead remake, Richie was happy to try to better understand what this opportunity represented: “Anything that has Tina Fey attached is a dream come true.”