In the opening scene of the new FX situation comedy “Adults,” premiering Wednesday, Issa (Amita Rao), the most aggressively forward member of a five-person pod of 20-something friends, masturbates back at a man masturbating on a New York City subway train, in a “How do you like that, buddy?” way, as if to teach him a lesson. It doesn’t, but a tone is set.
The title is, of course, ironic.
Issa, along with Billie (Lucy Freyer) and Anton (Owen Thiele), is living rent-free with Samir (Malik Elassal) in the house of Samir’s parents, who are traveling. Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), always called “Paul Baker,” is Issa’s boyfriend, and she would like him to be accepted into the house. As a group, they’re immature, incompetent and naive, not without good qualities but prone to misunderstandings, mistakes and mishaps, which as characters in a sitcom they can scarcely fail to be.
Issa is full of bad advice and frets that “my friends don’t take me seriously.” Billie fears she peaked in high school, whose halls she continues to haunt. Anton is “a friend slut,” who has “this thing where you have to make people feel like the most important person in the world so they fall in love with you and then you immediately forget about them.” Samir, who has known Billie at least since middle school, needs a job (and to get the water heater fixed) and is flummoxed by simple interactions. Paul Baker, who is Canadian and amiable, just goes with their flow, but he does have a bad habit of leaving used condoms in the toilet and shower. (Issa: “See I told you, we have to stop using protection.”)
Like “Friends,” to which “Adults” will inevitably be compared, it’s a story of young people living in close quarters, conveniently both for them and for the purposes of comedy. (See “The Golden Girls” for a geriatric variation.) Add “Broad City” and “Girls” and you have the syllabus for my imaginary course “Biting the Apple: Television Images of New York Youth in the Early 21st Century.”
I am not qualified to say how closely “Adults” represents or how sharply it satirizes the youth of 2025; but creators Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold, who wrote for “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” after getting internet famous for their hilarious 2018 tandem Yale commencement speech, are not beyond taking a shot at their generation. When a friend of the housemates becomes famous for being groped at work — “I can’t believe that someone we know is a big f— deal already,” is Billie’s jealous reaction — and exploits the situation for personal gain, Anton reminds them that “Kyle sucks. … He orders, like, $20 drinks and never Venmos for them.” (He wears a lanyard with a pass reading “victim,” which Issa matches with ones reading “woman,” “child of immigrants” and “sex worker”; for the purposes of the joke, she reads horoscopes on Only Fans.)
If their circumstances are straitened, dreaming is free; Issa and Anton build an imaginary future for him on the basis of watching a dot move on a GPS map. In another episode, Anton’s compulsive friendliness gets him mixed up with a psychopathic “stabber,” leading to funny scenes in a police station and a gun shop and some horror-movie excitement. When Billie winds up in the hospital, Samir, as her medical proxy, convinces himself he is a man of action, while Paul Baker and Anton turn the place into a playground, with the cooperation of charmed nurses.
The characters can be annoying in a way that is supposed to be funny and often is but is sometimes just annoying. (“I always thought the world was going to be waiting for me and instead everyone’s annoyed that I’m here,” says Samir, not wrong.) Things improve over the six (of eight) episodes out for review, however, providing more amusement and less annoyance as the season goes on, as one becomes familiar with the cast and their quirks and, in some cases, actually looks forward to their company; Freyer as Billie and Thiele as Anton stand out for emotional relatability. But people (like us) love watching people (like these) who’ll be there for one another when the rain starts to fall, when they’re stuck in second gear, etc. This is proved by the reported $20 million in yearly residuals the cast of “Friends” still receives. Each.
Having declared herself “done with the version of me who asks you boring guys to choke me and then says ‘What? Just kidding,’” Billie attempts to live up to the series’ title by “throwing a dinner party, despite what everyone says about people our age. That we’re neurotic, irresponsible, directionless. … We are in the roast chicken phase of life. We can mature, we can be normal.”
But not as long as they’re in this television show.
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