‘Reggie Dinkins’’ Co-creator On Daniel Radcliffe, Tina Fey, And Hope

There is a puppet in 30 Rock alum Robert Carlock’s office.

He doesn’t advertise this. But at the end through our conversation about The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, his new NBC comedy, a felt-faced figure appears in the corner of the frame. “Mr. Frumpus,” Carlock says, with the air of a man introducing a disgraced former colleague, which he basically is.

The puppet appeared as (spoiler) a recurring sexual predator in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Carlock’s Netflix comedy with longtime collaborator Tina Fey. It was, by some consensus, taking a couple of steps extra — even for a show in which a woman escapes a doomsday cult and rebuilds her life in New York City. “He’s realised the error of his ways, Mr. Frumpus has,” Carlock says.

This is perhaps a perfect encapsulation of the Robert Carlock creative process: push further than most writers would dare, occasionally get told to pull back, and then crucially, keep the evidence on your desk.

This interview contains mild spoilers for The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins.

What Is The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins?

Carlock is the co-creator and showrunner of Reggie Dinkins, which premiered on NBC in January 2026 and is currently at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. It reunited Carlock and executive producer Tina Fey with their 30 Rock star Tracy Morgan. Morgan plays a disgraced former NFL player who hires Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Arthur Tobin (an increasingly unhinged Daniel Radcliffe) to restore his reputation and, possibly, get him into the Hall of Fame before the window closes. It is, depending on where you stand, either one of the funniest things on broadcast television right now or a show that has not yet found the audience it deserves. Both things can be true.

Why Robert Carlock Sees Reggie Dinkins As A Show About Hope

To understand Reggie Dinkins is to understand the Robert Carlock Extended Universe: 30 Rock, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Girls5Eva, Mr. Mayor. Shows built around characters who have been knocked down and are, in various states of delusion and dignity, trying to get back up.

Although much of his work features very unsubtle undercurrents of cynicism, I generally view Robert Carlock shows as fundamentally hopeful. He is quite enthused to hear it. “Whether you’re looking at Reggie’s desire — whether it’s a quixotic goal or not — his desire to fix everything, and to keep all of these people together at the same time, is very much one that does come from hope,” Carlock says. “So I’m very happy to hear you say that.”

The origin of the show is a phone call from Tracy Morgan himself, reaching out to say he had room in his schedule. Carlock, Fey, and co-creator Sam Means got together. They’d been watching a lot of sports documentaries — The Last Dance, the Pete Rose HBO series, Lance Armstrong, Barry Sanders, David Beckham. They noticed a pattern. “Whenever you’re making something like that, you’re trying to create a narrative,” Carlock says, “and it’s very interesting to watch someone like Pete Rose, who had been banned from the Hall of Fame for gambling, really try to reshape the way his story is told. There’s something very sympathetic about that no matter what — this person knows they’ve done something wrong and is trying to correct course.”

Add Morgan — who was, in real life, an all-city high school running back before 30 Rock — and the mockumentary format suddenly had a shape. Add Radcliffe as the morally compromised filmmaker embedded with the family, and it had a second centre of gravity.

On Daniel Radcliffe, Bearded Infant

The Radcliffe casting was an inspired choice, and an easy one, considering that like many others in the show, Carlock had already worked with him (on the Kimmy Schmidt interactive Netflix special and the animated series Mulligan).

The resulting dynamic between Morgan and Radcliffe has become the show’s most discussed element. In episode three, there’s a running bit about Radcliffe’s character referring to Monica’s fingers as “fingies.” Carlock cut a callback where Morgan’s Reggie, unprompted, asks about the “fingies.” Radcliffe called to ask him to put it back in.

“He called me to say, will you please put Tracy’s joke back in?” Carlock says, still slightly delighted by this anecdote with Radcliffe, whom the show calls a ‘bearded infant’ at one point.

Carlock laughs as he recalls that episode, especially because they usually check first before making jokes about the actors’ appearances. For the record, Radcliffe appears to be entirely unbothered by the nickname. “He approached everything like, is it in character? Is it in character for Monica to call me that?”

Why The Hall Of Fame Won’t Fix Reggie Dinkins

The show’s central thesis — that sport has “filled so much space that other things used to, like community and church” — is not exactly new. But Carlock locates the comedy not in the spectacle of sport itself, but in the gap between what athletes think will fix them and what actually will. Asked about Season 2, he is direct about where Reggie still has to go. “I tend to think getting the Hall of Fame is not going to solve Reggie’s problems. I don’t know that the message is: get the material thing and the gold jacket and everything is solved.”

This is what characterizes the Carlock approach from standard redemption-arc television: the destination is wrong, and the characters don’t know it yet. Erika Alexander’s Monica, he notes, “possibly blamed Reggie too much and doesn’t accept how maybe she’s gotten in her own way.” Arthur Tobin, the filmmaker, “thinks they made one mistake — and I don’t think it’s just one mistake.” The comedy, as ever, is people getting in the way of their own best outcomes. “Our stories and our arcs are about overcoming that and people learning to talk to each other.”

On Keeping Reggie Dinkins In The Real World

The show’s willingness to write about what’s actually happening in the world extends beyond sport and gambling. The gag density on Carlock-Fey shows is no joke, each episode a ceaseless patter of pop culture references from “give her some space, Drew Barrymore!” to poking fun at the absurdity that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe CGI, and how queen RiRi will do anything except release an album.

When I mention noticing multiple Epstein jokes in the season, Carlock doesn’t miss a beat. “I mean, come on,” he says. “Let’s keep people talking about it. I don’t want anyone to forget. Let’s not forget. That all happened.”

I wonder out loud whether the trademark joke-after-joke approach and series of visual cutaways native to shows like Community, Arrested Development and 30 Rock, is sustainable when the word is streaming services are asking to have their scripts spelt out on the assumption the audience is on their phone.

Carlock is quick to clarify that “no one among our partners at Peacock or NBC has suggested that we change anything to accommodate that,” but agrees that it’s “depressing for sure”. “I used to look forward to my show being on and you’d sit there rapt for half an hour,” he says. “The idea that we’re taking that for granted — and again, I haven’t experienced this, but I think Matt Damon said something about it the other week — the idea that he’s hearing that is a bummer.”

He gathers his thoughts for a second. “Look, I’m a believer that there’s an audience out there for what we do. And if other people want to just leave the TV on and look at their phone, that’s great too — they still count as viewers.”

Tina Fey, Puppets, And A Largely Intersectional Venn Diagram

On the subject of Tina Fey, Carlock is both affectionate and precise. I bring up the succession rumors swirling around Fey and Saturday Night Live mogul Lorne Michaels. Would he maybe return to his SNL writing days if that happened? Carlock plays coy, replying only with, “I’ll do anything Tina orders me to do”.

He tried recently to draw a Venn diagram of where they push each other, he tells me. It was mostly agreement and rather hard to illustrate. “I did put on the outside: we agree on puppets, but she disagrees that there should be too many.” He grins. “I think too many puppets is funny. And I do think when we sat down to talk about this show, she was like, I think this is a show where there are no puppets, right?”

Carlock was quick to agree. Broadly speaking.

“There are no puppets in Reggie Dinkins,” he says. “So far,” I add, and he laughs.

Mr. Frumpus sits right outside the frame, saying nothing.

All episodes of The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins are now streaming on Peacock.