84Mean Girls (2004)

For all the comedies that have come out of Lorne Michaels’ Saturday Night Live creative nest, Mean Girls is one of the more underrated. That might be because it wasn’t a vehicle for a Bill Murray or Mike Myers, it was the first screenplay by Tina Fey, who was then an anchor on SNL’s “Weekend Update” segment. “When I first pitched it to Lorne,” Fey told Entertainment Weekly upon the film’s 10-year anniversary, “I was thinking I’d like to write a movie about what they call ‘relational aggression’ among girls.” A cult favorite and box-office success, Mean Girls is not quite a Pygmalion story, a la Clueless: The main character is immediately accepted into the cool clique, and then un-learns her desire to be popular. The screenplay was nominated for a WGA Award, and helped launch Fey as a writer-performer and voice to be reckoned with.