The creators of FX’s Adults must have known that comparisons between their show and Girls were inevitable, because they leaned way into them. Beyond the similar titles, both comedies follow 20-something friend groups in New York City. There’s even an explicit callback in Adults’ May 28 premiere—one begging to be cited in reviews like this—to the indelible scene in the Girls pilot where Lena Dunham’s narcissistic aspiring-writer protagonist, Hannah Horvath, informs her parents that she might be “a voice of a generation.” The new series abbreviates this cliché as “V of our G,” and applies it to a media-savvy young man who becomes the envy of his peers by going public with workplace sexual harassment allegations and scoring a six-figure payout.
Equal parts tribute and sendup, the moment cleverly heralds the arrival of a new generation anointing its own voices, skewering its own pieties, and distinguishing itself from the wave of millennials that swept pop culture in the early 2010s. Adults is the creation of Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold, a couple and comedy team who first tasted fame when their Yale graduation speech went viral in 2018. (They’ve since written for Jimmy Fallon and co-authored a collection of short stories titled Naked in the Rideshare.) Along with comedian Benito Skinner’s college-set Amazon romp Overcompensating, it’s the second hangout comedy set to debut in May from creators born in the mid-’90s. Neither as internet-addled nor as pandemic-damaged as you might expect, these distinctly current yet familiar shows update the genre with all the absurdism and self-awareness of a generation that distracts itself from a world in crisis by bingeing Girls, Friends, Sex and the City, and the rest of the friends-as-chosen-family canon.
While previous zeitgeisty series about young adults in New York were set in aspirational environs (the north Brooklyn hipster corridor for Girls, the post-bohemian Village for Friends), Adults gestures toward Gen Z’s limited horizons by packing its five characters into one guy’s childhood home in an unfashionable part of Queens. Timid sweetheart Samir (Malik Elassal) is the man of the house, fumbling through challenges like paying by check for water-heater repairs. Issa (Amita Rao) is a loud, dramatic, sexually liberated heir to Broad City’s Ilana; her chill, pansexual boyfriend, Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), is, inexplicably, always addressed by his full name. Anton (Owen Thiele, who also appears in Overcompensating) makes friends everywhere he goes—including, in one episode, with a violent criminal who’s terrorizing the neighborhood. A striver afflicted with anxiety-induced anal bleeding, Lucy Freyer’s Billie is the only housemate who thinks much about her future.
The Gen X Friends had the luxury of slacking on a coffee-shop couch for years before ascending to the kind of high-powered careers the SATC women already had when we first met them in their 30s. As much as they flailed in pursuit of them, the millennial Girls, who graduated amid the grand-scale rug pull that was the Great Recession, had dreams and ambitions. But for the Adults, just being able to confidently claim the titular identity seems a sufficient life goal.
Adulthood is, unsurprisingly, even more elusive for the two freshmen at the center of Overcompensating. Surrounded by homosocial groups of new acquaintances egging them on to prove their hetero horniness, Skinner’s innocent ex-jock character, Benny, and Carmen (Wally Baram), a girl whose high tolerance for alcohol and love of video games reflect the influence of a late older brother she’s still mourning, attempt a first-night hookup. When he can’t go through with it—because, as he’s struggling to admit to himself, Benny is gay—they become best friends. That relationship is, in turn, tested by an undergrad social scene where everyone is desperate to look like they’re having more fun, sex, and success than they actually are. Though Skinner situates this competition mostly within the physical world of parties, a ridiculous secret society, and an on-campus performance by Overcompensating executive producer Charli XCX, it’s also clearly a reflection of the peer-pressure panopticon that is growing up on social media.
Critics too often do a disservice to the art of younger generations, overstating the similarities between works that have little in common besides the age of their makers or failing to account for the aesthetic prejudices of their own cohort. So I want to be clear: Overcompensating and Adults take divergent approaches to the Gen Z sitcom. Both play on coming-of-age tropes, but Overcompensating feels more old-fashioned in its coming-out storyline and earnestness about being true to oneself. And if I was put off by Skinner’s over-the-top ingenuousness—Benny’s eyes are so wide they almost pop out of his head—that is likely in part because I wasn’t raised on the kind of shouty, exaggerated, rapidly edited character work favored by the wave of social video creators among whom he got his start. (It could also have something to do with some widely discussed confusion over whether Overcompensating is meant to take place in the present or during the years when the real, 31-year-old Skinner, who doesn’t exactly pass as a freshman, actually attended college. Either way, there’s nothing more Gen Z than 2010s nostalgia.)
Still, there are elements the shows share that differentiate them from TV for and about Gen Z conceived by 40-somethings like Mindy Kaling (Never Have I Ever, The Sex Lives of College Girls) and Sam Levinson (Euphoria). The young creators seem less concerned with authenticity or empowerment or grand political statement-making than generations past; in their place is a “LOL Nothing Matters” sense of whimsical absurdity. “We are in a post-De Blasio, pre-Avatar 3 moment. We have to live!” Adults’ Issa declares, in a nonsensical rewrite of the kind of utterance you often hear from Vs of Gs. Benny tells his problems to the Megan Fox poster hanging in his dorm room like a talisman of straightness—and the miniature Fox replies.
The shows have a certain irreverence, too. Their casts are as effortlessly diverse, from race to sexual orientation, as the New York of Friends, Girls, et al. was unrealistically white. Yet their humor telegraphs exhaustion with a decade’s worth of millennial social-justice discourse that performatively polices language and identity in the face of ongoing global catastrophe. In the Adults premiere, multiple characters make cynical attempts to capitalize on the workplace misconduct scandal, and Anton crows that the victim “looks like he was molested.” Paul Baker recoils, in another episode, at a stereotypical gun-shop clerk who uses the R-word and asks if Paul is “fruity,” only to find out the man has a beloved sister with an intellectual disability and is, himself, gay. Overcompensating has a gentler tone, but a scene where Benny calls a girl the C-word (no, he’s not reclaiming the slur) would’ve sent Twitter ca. 2015 into convulsions.
What keeps these series from coming off as crass is the genuine camaraderie that connects their characters and shelters them, to some extent, from the precariousness of their lives. The Friends idly bantered, arranged themselves into couples, and got married. The Girls were so self-centered, it doomed their friendships. But even when the young people in Adults and Overcompensating do betray one another, out of callowness or insecurity, the love they share remains pure. The kids probably aren’t alright, but at least they have each other’s backs.
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