“The Four Seasons” follows three couples on four vacations, two episodes per trip. Everyone is thinking about his or her middle-aged ennui and the routines — ruts? — of marriage, what companionship and friendship and sex look like in this chapter and the next.
The show is based on a 1981 movie with the same premise, written and directed by Alan Alda, who also starred. (He has a brief cameo here.) This Netflix version was created by Tina Fey, Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield, with Fey and Will Forte as Kate and Jack, the roles played originally by Carol Burnett and Alda. Their friend group is filled out by Steve Carell, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani, and the series’s plot is similar but not identical to that of the movie. The biggest change is that the prickly, talky humor and depth have been sanded down into mild, featherweight Netflix chow.
“The Four Seasons,” which arrived on Thursday, is pleasant enough, but it never shakes the fact that most people would rather listen to the cast than the characters. Such talent; such humor; such icons! Anyway, here’s a show where all of those lights are under a bushel basket.
In the first outing, everyone is at a lake house for the 25th wedding anniversary of Anne and Nick (Kenney-Silver and Carell). After a night of toasting one another and congratulating themselves on finding their soul mates, Nick shocks the guys by telling them that he plans to leave Anne. He isn’t happy, and she’s too stagnant.
Every marriage goes through phases when the spouses feel more like roommates than romantic partners, Jack says.
“I wish we were roommates,” Nick says. “Roommates hang out together. There’s porn about roommates. We’re like co-workers at a nuclear facility: We sit in the same room all night monitoring different screens.”
This disruption of the sextet sets the rest of the story in motion, as everyone reacts and recoils, prompted to judge one another and themselves. Everyone’s relationship has, yes, seasons, and each couple weathers a few different ones during the show, with smug closeness eroding into terse bitterness, doting affection into resentful frustration.
Only a few months after the lake trip, it’s time for summer vacation, and this time Anne is not part of the group. Instead, Nick brings his new, much younger girlfriend, Ginny (Erika Henningsen), who has selected an eco-resort for their accommodations, which everyone else loathes.
If you’ve ever seen another show or movie in which old friends let dormant frictions burn anew, you might guess that the fall trip is about college — a visit to some of the group’s alma mater, where Kate and Jack’s daughter and Anne and Nick’s daughter are now matriculating. By winter, it is Nick’s turn to be exiled, and he spends New Year’s Eve feeling out of place with Ginny and her equally youthful pals while his real friends hang together at a ski chalet. (Maybe the funniest moment of the show occurs when Anne’s new beau brings a guitar to that party, which the others regard in horror.)
Fey has depicted teenhood (“Mean Girls”), budding adulthood (“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”), established-and-working adulthood (“30 Rock”) and now the empty-nest era. Some of Fey’s signatures, like social neurosis and a respect for sandwiches, are present here, though deployed less for jokes than for realism. Another common theme in her work is the confinement of her lead characters, how much they bristle against the constraints of their station and yearn for more agency. There’s a through line of that in “Seasons,” too, but with less meaning.
High school is high school, and if you want the perks of being one of the Plastics, you have to play their game. Kimmy endures years in a literal bunker. Liz Lemon has to work with Jack and Tracy because that’s the only way she can make her show. Women have to follow all kinds of terrible rules at work, at home, at school, at large.
While Kate feels boxed in, too — “You are the one who wishes you could blow up your life and start over,” Jack says during a fight — it’s less clear why. She has money, looks, a good sex life, a child at Vassar, a gigantic S.U.V. and enough free time to take four vacations in nine months. The worst thing she says about herself is that she has dry skin. If there’s more to Kate — more tension, more anguish, more self-loathing, more fear, more ambition, more curiosity, more anything — we don’t see it. Her dissatisfaction, however legitimate and probably common, is diffuse and nonspecific.
That’s how most of the show is: legible but vague, relatable to many people but maybe not as many as it thinks. It’s a show about spouses and best friends, the closest bonds and deepest relationships, but the show itself doesn’t have any of that intimacy or intensity. It’s a casual acquaintance — perfectly fine for an afternoon, but shallower and more disposable than the real deal.
Margaret Lyons is a television critic at The Times, and writes the TV parts of the Watching newsletter.
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