Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold graduated from college in 2018. At commencement, they gave a speech in which they talked about moving on from Yale. As the speech went on, it appeared that Shaw was also moving on from Kronengold. A video clip of the speech went viral, not least because Hillary Clinton, that year’s speaker, can be seen giggling at a joke about Yale’s endowment.
Shaw and Kronengold were briefly famous. Days later, jobless, they moved back in with their respective parents. She returned to the Upper West Side. He was back on Long Island.
“All of my autonomy and independence and this beautiful sense of self I’d cultivated, no one cared about it anymore,” Kronengold said.
Shaw and Kronengold were still together — the breakup had been a comic bit — but separated by the L.I.R.R. They missed school, they missed their friends, they missed having a schedule and a sense of purpose. Adulthood, it turned out, was kind of a bummer.
Bored and isolated, they began to sketch out a show about five housemates living together, clumsily, in Queens, New York, a “Friends” remade for an extremely online, acutely self-conscious Gen Z crowd.
“We were clearly lonely and, like, imagining this fantasy where all our friends lived with us,” Kronengold said.
The fantasy came true, at least on television. On Wednesday, FX will premiere the eight-episode first season of the show they created, “Adults.” Kronengold and Shaw were 21 and 22 when they first imagined it. Now, at 28 and 29, they are newly minted series creators.
Do they feel like real adults now? Yes. Mostly. Honestly, it depends on the day and whether they feel confident about how cashier’s checks work. Their characters are similarly uncertain, and Shaw bets that most viewers will relate.
“The discomfort of just figuring out what it means to be an adult, that has proved to be an unfortunately universal experience,” she said.
In anticipation of meeting Shaw and Kronengold, I had asked them to suggest the most Gen Z activity possible. (Shaw and Kronengold are on the Millennial-Gen Z cusp, as are some of the actors. But the characters, all of whom are just out of college, are strictly Gen Z.) They suggested riding around on a Manhattan tourist bus, which they had never done, despite growing up here. It didn’t seem that generationally specific, but it did sound like fun.
They arrived, on a bright April morning, in full tourist regalia, clutching matching “I Heart NY” travel cups. A plastic bag held novelty sunglasses and Statue of Liberty headbands. As the writer and comedian Nick Kroll, an executive producer of the show, put it later in a phone conversation, “They’re cool, but they don’t play it cool.”
On the bus, they were fizzy, excitable, quick to joke, quick to laugh. The wind blew, the city whizzed by. At one point, shortly after he had used the word “heuristics” in a sentence, a tree branch nearly decapitated Kronengold.
“If my head had come clean off, you would have kept going, right?” Kronengold said.
Shaw assured him she would have.
Although Shaw majored in psychology and Kronengold studied political science and film, they were destined for — or if you’re Kronengold’s parents, who still kind of hope he’ll go to med school, damned to — careers in comedy. They met before college started, at a reception for accepted first-years, and bonded quickly over a shared love of “Late Night” and “Saturday Night Live.” It turned out that comedy nerds occupy a very a narrow Yale subclass.
“That wasn’t something that we realized was so specific to our upbringing until we found ourselves in college, trying to figure out what we wanted to do and realizing that the only thing we seemed to like was trying to make the other person laugh,” Shaw said. They joined rival sketch comedy groups and rarely fought, except on Tap Night, when their groups competed for the same comedy pledges.
That fallow period after college, it didn’t last long. By the fall, they had been hired as writers on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” They wrote together, in a small windowless office. Soon they moved in together. When it comes to work-life balance, they have none, and they subscribe to no particular distribution of labor.
“Trying to surprise each other has tended to work for us,” Shaw said.
On “The Tonight Show” they learned to work fast. They liked the pace of it, the adrenaline rush. ‘We had this feeling of, we don’t know how this happened, but let’s just hit the ground running,” Shaw said. As the youngest, least seasoned staff writers, they wanted to prove themselves.
But after a few years, they felt ready to leave. Their contract said that while they worked on “The Tonight Show,” they couldn’t sell an idea outside NBC, and they felt that if they were going to make a show about being young in the city, they should probably do it while they might still get carded.
“Adults” has an edge to it — an emphasis on body fluids and boundary violations — that sometimes recalls “Girls,” the archetypal millennials-in-the-city show. (In an early episode, one character, Samir, makes a comment about being a voice of a generation, an obvious “Girls” callback. “Gross,” his housemate replies.)
But for Kronengold and Shaw, the bigger influence was “Friends,” a show that each had been obsessed with in middle school. It gave them a picture — aspirational, largely inaccurate — of what their adult lives might be.
As they were fine-tuning the pilot, they sent shot-in-the-dark emails to Marta Kauffman and David Crane, the creators of “Friends.” Happily, Kauffman and Crane agreed to chat with them.
“They reminded us of us, 30 years ago,” Crane recalled. Gently, he and Kauffman suggested that they might rethink their original title, “Snowflakes.” Mostly they offered encouragement, emphasizing the importance of mustering an ensemble of actors who gelled onscreen and off.
For that ensemble, “Adults” hired five up-and-coming performers: Malik Elassal, Lucy Freyer, Jack Innanen, Amita Rao and Owen Thiele. FX paid for them to fly out three weeks before shooting of the pilot began, in hopes that they would bond. They did.
“I loved it,” Thiele said. “It felt like college, which I never went to.” Rao said something similar, if darker. “You form intense relationships quickly when you’re capsuled,” she said. “It’s kind of like war.” A war that involved dinners out, dinners in and the night they threw themselves a prom.
“I hate to say this because it sounds so forced and fake, but we actually are all best friends,” Thiele said.
Because they were at similar points in their careers, they could support one another. And Kronengold and Shaw aren’t far away, which made communication easy. “We have the same cultural lexicon,” Rao explained. They also had the same love of and exasperation with Gen Z.
Much of the show is broadly universal. Finding love, finding a job, finding yourself — those pursuits change year by year, but not too much. Yet there are certain tonal and thematic choices that feel specific and contemporary. Kronengold likes to describe Gen Z as the “Was that bad?” generation.
“So much of our experience is turning to your friends to say, ‘Should I not have done that?’” he said.
Unlike in “Friends,” the feel of “Adults” is not strictly aspirational. The furnishings are shabby, the clothes rumpled. No one has a blowout, and the housemates share a single toilet, which they sometimes use simultaneously. But there’s a sweetness to it.
“Oh my God, I would die to live in this group house,” Thiele said. “Sign me up, yes.”
Kronengold and Shaw are engaged now. Their wedding is this summer. And if making the show has really messed with their wedding planning, it has also made them feel a little more like adults. “Or at least we had a lot of help from real adult people,” Kronengold said. Then he screamed like a child.
The bus had just passed a digital billboard for their show. A few blocks later, it passed another. It was the first time they had seen their ads in the wild. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” Shaw shouted.
So much for maturity. But Shaw was unembarrassed. “The more we’ve talked to people throughout this process, the more that we realize that nobody seems to have grown up,” she said. “Which is sort of liberating.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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