“I don’t want to be famous, you guys. Stop making me!” Paula Pell is kidding—kinda, sorta, not really. She is famous, but in what might be the best possible way: beloved by those who know her work, but able to get a cup of coffee without being mobbed like her pals and sometimes costars Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Maya Rudolph might be. “I’ve been around a lot of fame with my friends, and fame kind of sucks sometimes,” Pell says in a recent Zoom call. “It’s got a lot of privileges, but it’s also got a lot of things that limit your life.”

Try telling that to the characters on Girls5eva, a sitcom about four women straining to restart their music careers 20 years after experiencing a blip of success in the Backstreet Boys/Britney Spears era. The show, like its subjects, is already on its second act: After two rapturously received but little-watched seasons on Peacock, it’s moving to Netflix for season three, which begins streaming March 14. 

Pell admits that it was frustrating to make a great comedy for a streaming platform few actual humans subscribe to—“A lot of people were like, ‘I can’t add another channel to my credit card bill’”—but is also trying to keep her expectations in check. Netflix could bring millions more eyes to the show and lead to an even longer run; Girls5eva creator Meredith Scardino was previously a writer and co-executive producer on the streamer’s own Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which ran on Netflix for four seasons and a movie. But “the more you get excited about something,” Pell says, “the more you’re opening your heart up for getting hurt.”

She knows a few things about industry-induced heartache. Pell spent 18 years writing for Saturday Night Live, gaining a reputation as the show’s secret weapon—she created the Spartan Cheerleaders and Debbie Downer—but rarely appearing onscreen, even though she’d originally aspired to be a performer. “At SNL, my job a lot of times was the comedy triage of, ‘Can you make this funnier?’” she says. “Or after I left the show, I rewrote other people’s movies for a long time,” including adding jokes to Bridesmaids and helping rewrite This Is 40.

Her own projects had trouble attaining liftoff. In the mid-aughts, she wrote a pilot for NBC about how the relationship between a pair of sisters changes when one of them suddenly slims down. It didn’t get picked up—“I was always writing about weight and it was always misunderstood because at that time, men were a hundred percent running everything”—but Pell got another shot at a similar premise when she pitched a movie about women on a Richard Simmons–esque weight-loss cruise to an unnamed producer.

At first, he was receptive. “He kind of lit up. He was like, ‘Oh, this sounds really good.’ And I was explaining all the things I would want to cover in it from the perspective of a big woman, how she was experiencing this. And he was like, ‘And then the boat could sink.’”

Pell pauses for my gasp. “I am not kidding you. I am sitting there, over 200 pounds, in a meeting, and he’s like, ‘And the boat sinks.’ Laughing.”

These days, the meeting would have gone differently. “Now, of course, I have zero filters,” she says. And unlike in her SNL days, she’s also vocal about her sexuality. Pell is divorced from her first wife and happily remarried to Janine Brito, a writer for Girls5eva season three as well as an occasional guest actor on the show. (Brito plays the estranged wife of Pell’s character, Gloria.) 

They live in upstate New York with a motley pack of pets, usually “about five dogs, three cats, two horses,” and would happily spend their lives ministering to the animals’ various maladies if they could. “At least once a week, where we’re just sitting with some senior dog trying to get a pill in them, we’re like, ‘If somebody could pay me enough money to pay my bills and do [only] this every day, I would,’” says Pell. “I don’t know how I found her.”

Playing Gloria seems like a worthy consolation prize. Pell’s character has evolved from the most no-nonsense member of Girls5eva to its sexual id; she spends season three systematically trying to sleep with 178 hilariously specific types of gay women (including “Cigar Mommy” and “Female Popeye”), as detailed in a spreadsheet that Brito helped write. The 60-year-old still can’t quite believe that’s the way things worked out. “Of all these hotties that I work with, these three absolutely drop-dead gorgeous women and forces of nature”—that would be Sara Bareilles, Busy Philipps, and Renée Elise Goldsberry—“I’m the one getting the action.” 

It’s further evidence of how the culture has changed along with Pell. “If we’re going to be inclusive, let’s be inclusive with age too. And I certainly feel like content is more inclusive now with queer people, which is making me very thrilled because I had an absolute desert of it when I was growing up,” she says. “I had to search and search for one movie that was not a porn movie, that was two women having an actual connection.” 

Pell has a different but no less passionate connection with her costars, one forged by shooting seasons one and two during the depths of the pandemic and cemented by making the show’s current season, the first where COVID restrictions didn’t prevent them from socializing unmasked when the cameras were off. In an ensemble, Pell says, “there’s usually the one person that people are like, ‘he’s a pain’ or ‘she’s a pain.’ And then the others have a little text chain about that person.” But that’s not true of the Girls. “We fell in love with each other, and now we’re like family. People have said that the magic of the show is that they can tell we like each other.”

The end of season three hints that Gloria and her friends might manage to claw their way back to the top, should the show return for a fourth installment. But Pell probably isn’t spoiling anything when she says that she hopes they won’t actually succeed. Like Scardino, she says, she’s long had an affinity for underdogs and the folks she calls joyful losers, “the ones that keep getting a chance and then fucking it up.” And as she knows, show business is fickle. There are endless ways for the women of Girls5eva to attain notoriety only to screw things up, then let the cycle repeat itself. 

Which brings us back to the pleasures of being just famous enough. Pell has plenty of irons in the fire, including a Netflix film that she and Brito are writing for Kim Kardashian (who is very much not a loser: “She’s a really sharp cookie,” says Pell. “She really knows what she doesn’t know and she really knows what she knows. And she’s been great.”). But she’s also content with living in the “medium time,” as Bareilles puts it in a song featured in season three’s finale. 

In the entertainment industry especially, Pell says, it’s easy to feel insecure even after reaching great heights because there’s always someone more accomplished than you. And once you reach the top, there’s nowhere to go but down. You may as well buy a couple of horses and move upstate instead.

“I’ve been really trying at my age to stop and go, ‘everything isn’t a step to something else,’” Pell says, the midmorning light hitting her soft gray hair just so. “Let’s just be on the flat ground, running around and enjoying it and not feeling like you’re on to the next thing. It’s a real illness in our society, I think—it’s like, ‘I want the bigger house.’ Well, you have a great house. Sit in your house and love your house.”