Note: This story contains spoilers from the entirety of “Adults” Season 2.
A love triangle has been simmering on “Adults” since a Season 1 finale kiss unlocked some chemistry between the (now legally-wed) duo of Anton (Owen Thiele) and Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), as well as a flash of jealously from Issa (Amita Rao).
But as “Adults” creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw started writing Season 2, they knew those feelings certainly wouldn’t manifest in a mature conversation.
“We knew that for a group that is so close and intimate, often the way that these feelings of insecurity or jealousy manifest is in these sideways ways,” Kronengold explains to TheWrap.
Instead, the FX comedy picks up with Issa spiraling upon discovering that Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) has a secret, shame-ridden friend group of frat bros.
“The issue of the day is he has this double life, and it’s not anything that Issa expected, but … it’s just the first crack in the foundation of his relationship that is going to play out over the course of the season,” Kronengold says.
By Episode 2, Issa and Paul Baker are reckoning with a lack of chemistry outside of the bedroom. Episode 3 makes it clear they’re not on the same page for their vision of their future.
“We wanted to let people in on this relationship and really test it out in some ways — stress test it, I guess — so that by the time it crumbles, you have the sense that it’s not because of an external factor,” Kronengold says. “It’s not because of the love triangle. It’s because maybe they’re not meant to be each other’s people.”
“As much as there is a pull, there’s also a push,” Shaw adds. “It was very important to us to … look under the hood of Issa and Paul Baker’s relationship in addition to turning the camera towards Anton and Paul Baker.”
And when Issa and Paul Baker’s relationship crumbles in Episode 4, audiences aren’t privy to their breakup conversation. Kronengold reveals the writers cycled through several different iterations of how the breakup would play out, with one version seeing them break up in between episodes.
“One thing we really loved is in an episode that is so much about getting in your friend’s business, and in an episode where Billie and Samir in particular cannot help but try to insert themselves into every room, into every conversation, the conversation that Issa and Paul Baker really needed to have was one that had to happen behind closed doors,” Shaw says. “Their friends were not allowed to be a part of it, and we’re not even allowed to be a part of it.”
The friend group navigates the breakup throughout the back half of Season 2 — making way for a room swap that shifts dynamics — but the connection between Anton and Paul Baker is picked back up in the finale, when Issa sees Anton’s feelings for Paul Baker and encourages him to go for it.
“It was a big revelation in the writers’ room that this season’s love story is actually between two friends — it’s between Anton and Issa,” Kronengold says. “It’s very intentional that they are the ones that have the beautiful monologue to each other.”
Little do they know that their conversation at the Homeowners Association voting polls was broadcast on local TV, meaning that everyone back at the Queens house is expecting them — including Paul Baker.
By the time Issa and Anton return to the house, everything fades behind Anton and Paul Baker as the rest of the friends celebrate Paul Baker losing the election due to the threat of the incumbent’s daughter (Zosia Mamet) to report the friend group’s zoning violation.
Audiences don’t get to hear what Anton and Paul Baker say to one another before they do eventually kiss.
“We all knew that this wasn’t for the audience to hear —we didn’t even script it, frankly,” Kronengold says. “We had a lot of conversations about, What does Anton want to say? What is he able to say? How does Paul Baker receive it?”
“That was a conversation we had with them, and then we stepped away and let the two of them talk to each other,” Shaw adds, with both creators confirming they don’t know what the characters said prior to the kiss.
“They’re choosing each other,” Kronengold says. Shaw adds, “Even if it makes the group more chaotic.”
Speaking of chaotic, the Season 2 finale throws audiences another curveball by revealing that Samir (Malik Elassal) and Billie (Lucy Freyer) have hooked up as well.
According to the series creators, that new connection makes for a perfect storm, as Samir is mourning the end of his relationship. Meanwhile, his threat to leave the house makes Billie realize that she’s content just the way things are.
“For Billie, I think there’s a lot of wanting things to stay the way they are. And for Samir, it’s a lot of wanting a partner and wanting someone to love,” Shaw says.
“It’s going to play out very differently than Anton and Paul Baker waking up in the morning,” Kronengold says. “That’s going to have pretty major consequences for their friendship and for the group.”
Below, Kronengold and Shaw tease the chaos to come in Season 3, discuss fans’ desires for filler episodes and explain those big cameos.
TheWrap: We’re queuing up for two relationships in the house. How will that leave us for Season 3?
Shaw: We always love giving ourselves a little bit of a challenge — letting these characters make decisions that feel right for them in the moment. But like so many decisions in your 20s, the decision that feels right in the moment one day means a lot of unraveling and analyzing or not analyzing to do the next day. We understand why all four of those people had the nights that they had in our finale, but I think now we really get to say, “What next?” What is next for Billie and Samir is going to look really different than what is next for Anton and Paul Baker. They all made decisions that they can’t take back, which is always a really fun place to find ourselves.
You came back just over a year after Season 1 plus a prequel episode. Are you hoping to stick to that release cadence?
Shaw: We’ll start writing whenever anyone tells us to start writing. The truth is, we already have. What is so fun, even from Season 1 to Season 2, is that there’s so many stories that you couldn’t fit into the first eight episodes, and I think we feel the same way about this. There’s so many ideas that made us laugh, things that came up on set — ideas, jokes, backstories, combinations of characters, ways that they could all ricochet off of each other. That’s all just to say we’ve got a lot of stories in mind, and we’re ready to tell them as soon as anyone will let us.
Do you have any ambitions to break into longer episode-counts?
Shaw: We’ll write as many episodes as we are given … I think even getting to do this prequel, nine felt better than eight. The more stories we get to tell, the more that we get to live with these characters, the better.
Kronengold: We see fans asking for “filler episodes,” which is so funny and kind of media-literate, right? … We didn’t get to do that this time around, but that is something that we aspire to do in the lineage of sitcoms that came before us. What are the off days like? The more seasons — not just more episodes, but the more seasons that we have — the more we get to play around with the fluff.
What was the inspiration behind the prequel episode and why did you want to do it at this point?
Kronengold: The thing that we get the most questions about is how did this group come to be? In our first episode in Season 1, we dropped viewers into just sort of an average day with this group. It could have been Episode 3. It could have been Episode 5. We had always sort of imagined what the origin really was, and had always had this idea for this marathon as this really iconic New York event, and also a really fun way to deliver not just one meet cute between Paul Baker and Issa, but kind of two meet cutes between Paul Baker and Anton as well. So when it was time to do the second season, we had spoken to FX about the potential to do a flashback episode like the kind you’ve seen in shows like this before, but do it in this way that primes viewers for Season 2, which is really a season about this love triangle and the way that this friend group implodes and rebuilds itself around these complicated feelings between a best friend, a boyfriend, a husband, as it were.
Shaw: We viewed it as a really cool opportunity to roll out the welcome mat for new viewers before we start Season 2 — the idea that we’d be able to sort of grab people who maybe were on vacation the first time when the show came out, for one reason or another, hadn’t found us, to welcome them in and really show them how this group came to be, teach them about each of these characters and really send them on their way before they get into some pretty ridiculous hijinks together.
Season 2 threads in a fair amount of internet personalities, including Jake Shane, Recess Therapy and more of those man on the street interviews. How important are those trends to the show?
Kronengold: One thing that we love about our show is the ability for it to be a sandbox for some of your favorite actors, personalities and, yeah, creators to come and show their comedic chops and show different sides of themselves. Jake Shane came in and just crushes, to no one’s surprise, but also God, this man belongs on our TV screens, in every capacity, scripted, unscripted, etc. To get to write to these people that we’re such fans of and present them to audiences in new and exciting ways, it’s one of the most fun things about making this show.
Shaw: The really fun challenge with a TV show is always getting to cast in a way that feels really true to each of these characters, but often casting surprisingly. We had the privilege this time around, frankly, of people having seen the show … This time to be able to send a couple episodes and have people say, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that show. I’d like to be a part of it.”
And Julia Fox is now a recurring guest star.
Shaw: She’s going to have to come back every season.
Kronengold: We already have an idea. It’s very lucky that we have a few recurring characters. But in many ways, in some shows, they say the sixth character is New York … our sixth character is very much Julia Fox playing herself, and we wouldn’t change a thing about that.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
“Adults” Season 2 is now streaming on Hulu.
The post ‘Adults’ Season 2 Finale: Series Creators Unpack That Curveball Hookup and Tease ‘Major Consequences’ in Season 3 appeared first on TheWrap.
