Lily Tomlin embodies a dozen characters in all their glorious idiosyncrasies in this 1991 film adaptation of Wagner and Tomlin’s hugely popular 1985 play, a tale of the elaborate interconnectedness that holds together our peculiar, captivating species.

Writer Hilton Als joins Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner for a wide-ranging discussion of their work across film, television, and theater, punctuated by selections from some of their most iconic sketches.

Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Dolly Parton are office colleagues who exact revenge upon their good-for-nothing boss, in this enduring, prescient comedy that takes on the issue of women in the workplace.

In this slapstick spiritualist comedy, Tomlin is an entitled, imperious millionaire who dies, but then gets to live forever (sort of) in the body of her befuddled lawyer, played by Steve Martin.

Tomlin and Bette Midler pivot nimbly between dual roles in this switched-at-birth farce about a pair of twins who get mixed up in a rural maternity ward and forty years later, are embroiled in a delirious city-versus-country romp of mistaken identities.

Elle—wit, widow, curmudgeon, and a lesbian poet of some reputation—has just unceremoniously dumped her much-younger girlfriend when her granddaughter shows up at her doorstep, needing money for an abortion. Tomlin imbues her performance with grace, tenderness, and rough-edged charm.

Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman play existential detectives in this wild philosophical satire. Few films have dealt so amusingly with the chaos and contradictions of the early 21st century, and Tomlin, as she so often does, electrifies an already impressive ensemble.

Tomlin’s suburban housewife Pat Kramer begins experiencing a most unexpected side effect from life in her consumerist paradise when the products that she uses every day cause her to grow inexorably smaller. Soon her doll-like stature becomes a media sensation.

One of the great collaborations in modern entertainment began after Lily Tomlin saw writer-director Jane Wagner’s exquisite drama on television in 1969, starring Kevin Hooks as a young kid in Harlem who acts out at home and in the neighborhood, until he unofficially adopts and cares for a stray kitten.

Two years after Nashville, Lily Tomlin starred in her second feature, this critically acclaimed character study that tells the story of an over-the-hill detective who meets Margo Sperling, a talent manager who hires Wells—not to find a missing person, but her AWOL cat.

For years nearly impossible to see, this documentary follows Tomlin and her team through the many months of preparing and workshopping The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe before its Broadway debut.

Tomlin was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her nuanced, emotionally moving part in her first movie, Altman’s masterful, panoramic look at the Tennessee capital in the run-up to a presidential primary.

Guerilla television outfit TVTV went behind the scenes at the 1976 Academy Awards for this showbiz meta-documentary, featuring Tomlin as herself, a nominee that year for Nashville, and as one of her most beloved characters, the prim homemaker Mrs. Beasley. Preceded by “The Quiche of Peace,” a sketch for Vito Russo’s pioneering television program Our Time in which Mrs. Beasley visits a gay bar.

As part of Film at Lincoln Center’s survey, Tomlin and Wagner have handpicked an expansive selection of their works for television, which will be on view in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater throughout the course of the series and free to the public.