Later on I will discuss the physical (or visual) nature of the comedy used in NewsRadio, a matter of substantial importance to the discussion of Maura Tierney and Lisa Miller. It is only when you understand the style of comedy perpetrated by NewsRadio that the vital importance of Tierney’s acting becomes apparent. Who else was better suited for a physical comedy style than an actor with a physical acting style? Combine this with impeccable timing, superb reaction skills, and a natural instinct for comedy, and you have everything the great Carole Lombard had and more. Moreover, the physicality of Tierney’s acting allows her to dispose of a gag with inordinate efficiency. Tierney simply takes less time to convey a comedic moment than most actors do. A body gesture communicates faster than the spoken word, and the lightning-fast pace of the show’s comedy was often maintained by her involvement. For one of the clearest examples of Tierney’s comedic efficiency I recommend the Lisa Miller scenes from "Spooky Rapping Crypt" [5-10], where the show flows in and out of the Lisa Miller gags without ever slackening the pace. Tierney is far from just a comedic actress (and in fact, I regard her performance as the tortured anti-heroine in Oxygen as probably the best and most complete dramatic performance in cinema history). However, it is only when you realize how exceedingly rare great comedic actresses are that you realize how especially precious Maura Tierney’s acting is.

On NewsRadio, Maura Tierney was sometimes ‘straight man’ and sometimes comedic force. By the fourth and especially the fifth season, Tierney had become so comfortable and had developed so much subtlety in the role of Lisa that she was providing both comedic ‘action’ and ‘reaction’ at the same time. In particular, by the time of "Padded Suit" [4-19] and "Retirement" [4-21] she had become such a completely dominating actress that she could act as ‘set up man’ for Dave Foley. However, Lisa’s most important role in the show was to provide the sexual energy that fueled much of the screwball comedy of the show. Part of the sexual energy came from elsewhere, such as the Bill-Catherine relationship or the never consummated Joe-Catherine relationship, but it was Lisa’s normalcy that made her the perfect focus for sexual innuendo. Certainly, her relationships with the men of WYNX were charged with more sexual tension than those of Beth. Beth’s relationship with Max Louis in season five possessed no sexual charge at all. However, when needed, Lisa’s scenes with Max were replete with sexual tension, such as when she plays her "psyche" game with Max in "Freaky Friday" [4-20]. In fact, Lisa’s relationships with all the men of NewsRadio (yes, even with Matthew Brock) were charged with varying degrees and types of sexual tension. In addition, no matter how many references were made to Dave and Lisa "doing it" in the office or in the bedroom, Tierney could still generate sexual tension at will in the Dave and Lisa relationship through the physicality of her acting style. Tierney never had to be overtly sexy in order to create sublimated sexual tension. Her physical acting style allowed her to interact with other characters while conveying a sense of ‘play’; her physical attractiveness took care of the rest in generating sublimated sexual energy. Furthermore, Dave and Lisa are physically not the type of people we would expect to engage in a wild office romance, and we owe a large part of the success of the Dave-Lisa relationship to its capability to surprise us with sexual innuendo. Some of the best gags in NewsRadio tended to be fueled by Lisa, with Bill starting the fires, and Dave reacting to them and trying to put them out.

Perhaps most subtly but most importantly, Tierney is the most morally expressive of all modern actors, and this is the basis of most of her comedic moments. Not only is every role she plays morally expressive overall, but she acts with moral expressiveness all the time. As already mentioned, comedy arises out of absurdity. Dave Foley’s comedic acting expresses the psychological states associated with absurd situations. By contrast, Maura Tierney creates comedy through moral turns — absurd situations that compromise her character’s moral power. (The entire concept of morally expressive art will be dealt with in full later in the similarly named chapter.)

Lisa Miller was an astonishing combination of many characteristics and impulses, some of them quite divergent. Tierney could bring out any side of Lisa as needed, from sweetness to cold-heartedness and from normalcy to obsessiveness. In episodes such as "Led Zeppelin II" [2-21] (where she is jealous about the possibility of ex-boyfriend Dave going out on a lunch date) and "Arcade" [3-4] (where she fears that she may be losing her intelligence and wants to retake her SATs), Tierney plays up the obsessive side of Lisa Miller. In "The Cane" [2-9] and "Presence" [2-19] we see the cutthroat competitiveness of Lisa. In episodes such as "Bitch Session" [2-12] a more sweet-tempered Lisa tries to console Dave, and she draws our sympathy after she inadvertently offends him. In "Rap" [3-12], the sweeter Lisa makes her embarrassment at being voted "Cutest Reporter in New York" seem more charming. In "Inappropriate" [1-2] she walks a particularly fine line between adversarial competitiveness (making the Dave and Lisa affair a surprise) and the sweet, gentle side of Lisa (surprising us by how torrid and passionate the affair is). In "Super Karate Monkey Death Car" [4-4], Lisa is nervous about taking the efficiency expert’s lie detector test because of her criminal past. Tierney speeds up all her body movements to simulate nervousness and adds inventively brisk hand and body movements. During Lisa’ tenure as News Director in season four we see Lisa’s inherent insecurity manifest in all her body movements. In episodes such as "Physical Graffiti" [2-17] and "The Breakup" [2-4], where she and Dave argue, Tierney gives Lisa a slightly bitchy, mean, and selfish edge, helping the audience to sympathize with Dave. In episodes such as "Beep, Beep" [4-16] and "Stocks" [3-9], where the gags involve sexual innuendo at Lisa’s expense, she plays up the well-adjusted side of Lisa. In "Beep, Beep" Mr. James correlates Dave and Lisa’s job performance with their relationship and tries to get them back together. It is the portrayal of a very well-adjusted and normal Lisa that allows her to turn to Bill (who has been telling fake stories about him and Lisa in order to make Dave jealous) and deliver the memorably sarcastic line "What I meant to say was, ‘I yearn for you to plunder me sexually’" with such devastating effect. Also hilarious was her sarcastic delivery of the line, "I wasn’t upset. I guess I was just irritable because I hadn’t had my morning sex with Bill."

Tierney was the second pillar of the NewsRadio cast. Her role was almost always underrated because so much of what she did was covert. Without Tierney’s Lisa Miller the show would still have been funny, but without Lisa to deepen the comedy it would have been much emptier art. Mise en scène is cinematic ‘writing’ of desires, and through the form of a screwball comedy the expression of those desires must be heightened by sexual energy in order to be powerfully communicated. In her own way, Tierney’s acting allowed all the relationships in NewsRadio to function at this higher level of expressiveness.