Before the word “adult” attached to any form of media — books, movies, websites — became a synonym for “pornographic,” it meant a sort of entertainment that was made for people who had experienced a little bit of life. People who wanted to read or see things that reflected their experience in a grown-up way, in which they could recognize familiar challenges, rendered as comedy or tragedy. It was the opposite of “juvenile.”
There was definitely a market for such things, perhaps even a market dominated by them — films like “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “The Big Chill” and “An Unmarried Woman” pop to my aged mind. Even young(er) people, before they had the option of watching themselves exclusively, took an interest, if memory serves. (Maybe they still, do; let me know, young people.) The “49 and over” demographic may not be TV’s most prized, but it’s a fat slice of the population and many own televisions.
So there is something old-fashioned about “The Four Seasons,” a very watchable, breezy, bumpy new Netflix comedy from Tina Fey, Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield, remaking a super-successful 1981 movie about no-longer-young marrieds. (Alan Alda, who wrote, directed and starred in the film makes a cameo appearance here, so we may infer his approval.)
The TV version adds original twists and new scenes — the series lasts twice as long as the film, after all — but generally follows the shape of the original story and the character of its characters, who share names with their prototypes (though Claudia has become Claude).
It’s an adult entertainment in the original sense, notwithstanding a character “only” in her early 30s, with jokes about aches and pains, flagging energy, earlier bedtimes, the stresses of long relationships in longer lives, and here and there a sense of nostalgia for the people they used to be. Many will relate.
The narrative gambit concerns three couples who meet for a holiday every three months, if you can imagine that. They are upper-middle class, upper-middle-age, and in such control of their lives that they can afford to take, like, a week off four times a year. Their vacation schedule brings them together in spring, summer, fall and winter — in that order, in the story — a plan that conveniently allows for Vivaldi’s well-known violin concerti to fill up the soundtrack.
Fey plays Kate, married to Jack (Will Forte), who is a history teacher; anyway, he is very hot on a biography of Napoleon. (It doesn’t really matter what anyone does for work; some of them have jobs, but all of them have money.) Jack briefly worked for hedge-fund guy Nick (Steve Carell), at whose upstate New York lake house, shared with wife Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), the first movement of this “Four Seasons” takes place. Danny (Colman Domingo), who was in college with Jack and Kate, is an interior designer, married to Claude (Marco Calvani), an emotional Italian, whose main (pre)occupation is worrying about Danny’s health. (Jack worries about his own health, but he is merely a hypochondriac.)
It begins a little slow — a little “why should we care about these people, with their abundant vacation time?” Perhaps it was just class resentment on my part. Soon enough, however, things start to percolate, with Nick’s announcement that he is leaving Anne; her replacement in their pod is his dental hygienist, Ginny (Erika Henningsen, from Fey’s “Mean Girls” musical), a lively young woman in her 30s. (Her age — that is to say, she’s an adult — will be pointed out.) No one speaks the words “midlife crisis” — maybe that’s not a thing anyone says anymore? (Research shows the term has been with us 60 years, long enough to have a midlife crisis of its own.) But both Nick and Ginny take pains to declare it’s not like that. And it’s true that Anne, currently addicted to playing some farm game on her iPad and not using the potting shed, complete with kiln, that Nick built her, has let joy leak from her life.
Nick’s energized romantic do-si-do destabilizes the group, and gives them something new to gossip about and compare their own lives with as they wobble through the ensuing year. Ginny comes into view in the third (summer) episode, set in the Bahamas, where, indulged by Nick, she has booked the six of them into an uncomfortable vegan eco-resort. (Naturally, the writers will have some fun at the expense of eco-veganism, and of the older characters’ reaction to it.)
Fall is set during parents weekend at the New England college where Kate and Jack, and Anne and Nick, each have a daughter enrolled (Ashlyn Maddox and Julia Lester, respectively) and where Kate, Jack and Danny were students. Winter finds them in a chalet up a snowy mountain, with a return to the lake house for circular closure.
Dramatically, Carell’s storyline is dominant, and he’s sympathetic in a part that doesn’t hesitate to make him look silly. But Fey, being Fey — “SNL” headwriter, winner of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, named the best comedian of the 21st century by the Guardian, twice listed on the Time 100, four times chosen one of People magazine’s most beautiful people, and the series’ designated Least Quirky character — comes across as its hub, its central intelligence. (Which puts Forte’s definitely quirky character at something of a disadvantage.)
If one is as aware of watching famous faces like Fey and Carell and Forte and Domingo at work as following the people they’re playing, of course it’s nice to see them, and knowing them as actors doesn’t relieve the tension their characters create as they scrape against each other. (Everybody’s got problems.)
Across the course of the show we will learn that marriage is work, that not everybody believes in soulmates, that people in a new relationship might have more and noisier sex than those who have been together for many years, and that humans have the capacity to drive one another crazy, perhaps especially on vacation — a sad irony. There will be tension within and between the couples; some of their annoyance may in turn annoy the viewer.
But that, I suppose, is the desired effect, and when the characters do wake up to one another, “The Four Seasons” can be quite moving.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
