Fey co-created and stars in the Netflix series, which surprisingly killed off a key character at the end of the first season.

“It’s been so fun. I don’t know that I’ve ever been a part of something that had this much of an immediate positive reaction,” Tina Fey says of the last few weeks as The Four Seasons, which she co-created and stars in, debuted on Netflix.

The series is inspired by the 1981 rom-com of the same name directed by Alan Alda, and follows three couples as they go on vacations in spring, summer, fall and winter, with marital and friendship troubles along the way. In a surprise twist, Steve Carell‘s character Nick — who had divorced his wife Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) and was dating the much younger Ginny (Erika Henningsen) — died in a car crash in the second-to-last episode, which Fey addressed at an Emmy FYC event on Monday.

Fey and her co-creators, Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher, had the death in mind from the beginning of the show, and told Carell of his fate when first pitching him on the project, she told The Hollywood Reporter. “He was like, ‘Why does this keep happening to me?’” Fey joked, after Carell’s character suffered a somewhat similar ending in The Morning Show, which she admitted, “I didn’t know that when we pitched it, so that’s on me. But I dug my heels in.”

Of the decision to veer from the film and add in a death, Fey also explained, “We felt like at the time that everything was sort of grounded and human scale in terms of story, and we were like we do want something to happen, and that is a thing that happens to humans.”

Fisher added, “We wanted this show to really reflect the time in the lives of these people. And when you’re in your 50s, it’s not like a crazy thing to imagine losing a friend. We wanted this show to have big human stakes, and so someone dying and the group having to come together to deal with that felt right.”

Lang Fisher, Will Forte, Marco Calvani, Tina Fey, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Tracey Wigfield and Erika Henningsen Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Netflix

The series was renewed for a second season shortly after its premiere, and Fey revealed they started the writer’s room last week.

“It’s been really nice, we have the same exact writing staff and it’s already been really interesting for us to come together and share experiences, not just talk about the previous season but also our own lives,” she continued. “The writers have been very generous — a lot of what you saw in season one, a lot is obviously from the movie but a lot also came from all of our lives.” She also added that without the movie to provide a template as in the first season, “we are kind of starting from scratch.”

Wigfield noted, “In some ways it is hard that you’re starting from scratch and don’t have the movie to guide you, but in a lot of ways the second season of anything is so much easier because you’ve made so many choices already. We know who these characters are,” adding, “We set up fun dynamics in the finale. Ginny is pregnant, and this friend group is kind of moving on in the wake of their friend’s death. There is going to be really interesting stuff to play and already we’re starting to talk about it and it’s really exciting.”