After seven seasons on Saturday Night Live, Tracy Morgan bade the skitcom farewell this year. We'll miss his goofball characters, like Safari Planet host Brian Fellowes and Astronaut Jones. His unflattering impersonation of The View co-hostess Star Jones was wicked fun, too! Next up, he'll star in his own self-titled NBC midseason family comedy, The Tracy Morgan Show.

"Nine years ago," Morgan marvels, "when I first came to Hollywood, I played a character called Hustle Man on Martin, if anybody remembers. And there was no way in the world I was going to have my own... I sat there, I was like, 'Wow, he got his own TV show.' And then, I got Saturday Night Live, right?

"And now, nine years later, I'm out here with my own TV show," grins the 34-year-old father of three. "This is surreal and it's happening and I love it. I'm glad I got my own TV show."

Natch, it's every comic's dream to strike sitcom gold. Ka-ching! But for Morgan, it's more personal than that. "Well, I didn't want to just do a sitcom," he says. "I've played a lot of different outrageous characters, and this character that I play now, Tracy Mitchell, gets to show the public that I'm a dad. [It] gets to show a different side of me. I grew up in a broken home, so this is what it would have been like if my dad would have stayed with my mom. This is what I wanted to see and I'm proud of it."