Among the guests on the third season of HBO’s The White Lotus are a trio of childhood friends who, it is immediately obvious, cannot stand each other. From the moment they step off the boat, these 40somethings are taking passive-aggressive swipes and talking behind each other’s backs. Yet at the end of the week, one reflects sincerely on how time has given their bond meaning. “We started this life together. I mean, we’re going through it apart. But we’re still together,” she says. “And I look at you guys, and it feels meaningful.”
I thought back to that speech while watching a different unhappy clique in Tina Fey‘s new Netflix show The Four Seasons, based on Alan Alda’s 1981 film. That inherent value of shared history might be the only explanation as to why its members continue to gravitate toward each other to the tune of four (!) group vacations a year, despite limited evidence that they enjoy each other’s company. But if time gives weight to their relationships, I can’t say it does the same for the series. Its eight half-hours don’t feel like time well spent so much as just spent, in ways too innocuous to hate but too tedious to treasure.
The Four Seasons
The Bottom Line
A thoroughly mediocre time.
Airdate: Thursday, May 1 (Netflix)
Cast: Tina Fey, Colman Domingo, Will Forte, Steve Carell, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Marco Calvani, Erika Henningsen
Creators: Tina Fey, Lang Fisher, Tracey Wigfield
In fairness to the three couples at the center of The Four Seasons, the friendships between them seem to be in okay shape, if oddly lacking in the sort of easy and idiosyncratic chemistry you’d expect from people who claim to have known each other for decades. It’s the marriages that are headed toward the rocks. What no one but Nick (Steve Carell) knows as the group gathers for a lake house weekend to celebrate his 25th anniversary to Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) is that he’s already decided to leave her.
The news blindsides the friends possibly more than it does Anne, throwing all of their lives into disarray. Over three more trips — a summer vacation to an obnoxiously eco-friendly lodge, a Vassar College parents’ weekend in the fall and a New Year’s Eve ski retreat — we watch as the two remaining pairs are forced to examine the cracks in their own relationships, through storms both literal and metaphorical.
The Four Seasons comes with an attention-grabbing pedigree. Besides Carell and Kenney-Silver, its cast includes Fey as uptight Kate, Will Forte as her anxious husband Jack, Colman Domingo as her cool best friend Danny and Marco Calvani as his fretful husband Claude. Fey also serves as co-creator, along with Tracey Wigfield (NBC’s Great News, Peacock’s Saved by the Bell reboot) and Lang Fisher (Netflix’s Never Have I Ever). That list of names alone might be enough to keep expectations high, even after the first two chapters (directed by Oscar nominees Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini) fail to leave much of an impression.
Alas. Each episode opens with generically seasonal imagery of flowers in bloom or trees dripping with frost over the corresponding Vivaldi concerto, and they rarely get much more memorable from there. The Four Seasons isn’t going for the same kind of densely layered joke delivery as Fey’s 30 Rock and its spiritual successors, which is fine. But I found myself wishing it had at least retained some of those shows’ snappy humor, taut pacing or specifically quirky world-building.
Instead, we get a whole lot of stuff that’s merely … there. There are a few sharp lines (one of my favorites was Nick’s evocative description of his marriage as being “like coworkers at a nuclear facility — we sit in the same room all night, monitoring different screens”) and the occasional solid comedic payoff, but not enough of either to give The Four Seasons any particular sense of humor. There are some pleasantly sweet moments and some poignant ones, but few of them land with much weight since the characters are so thin.
Danny and Kate are one-dimensionally sour, thick as thieves in their shared skepticism of sentiment and their contempt for their spouses. As for said husbands, they’re exhausting in different yet somehow still similar ways: Jack’s prone to spinelessness, Claude to melodrama, and both need their partners more than their partners need them. Nick embodies a stereotypical midlife crisis, down to the sexy new car and the sexy new girlfriend, and the show barely tries to pretend he’s deeper than that. These aren’t characters so much as they are personality quiz results.
The exceptions are the two women in Nick’s orbit. Kenney-Silver delivers a touchingly nuanced performance as Anne, balanced on the fine line between sad as in devastated and sad as in pathetic. You see in her wide eyes the internal tug of war between her despair and fury at the end of her old life, and her tremulous hope for the start of her new one. And Erika Henningsen successfully evolves Nick’s adventurous younger girlfriend Ginny from a one-note joke (as one character meanly puts it, “[her] personality is squats”) to a believably conflicted woman, trying her imperfect best to meet her boyfriend where he is.
Anne and Ginny’s is the sort of dynamic jagged and fluid enough to build a series around — just not this series, which, to its detriment, seems far more interested in watching Kate and Jack and Danny and Claude rehash the same old arguments with each other. The Four Seasons positions itself as an honest examination of marriage, and it’s true that in any long, close relationship, certain disagreements will repeat enough to form nigh-inescapable grooves. But it makes for tiresome viewing when these resentments are basically all we’re allowed to see of these people, to the point that even happier moments start to feel like set-up for blow-ups down the line.
The Four Seasons ends on an unconvincingly romantic note, with one character going so far as to make an about-face on the very concept of “soulmates” that they had derided earlier. But its heart, I think, lies with the cynics who view marriage more as a source of work than comfort. I suppose if you’ve got a quarter-century of memories, a child you both love and a house you both own to show for it, you might find it worthwhile to keep things going anyway — if only because upending everything seems like a real pain.
Fortunately for me, all I have with The Four Seasons is four hours of history. I feel perfectly content to label them a forgettable blip, and move on with the rest of my life.
#Tina #Fey #Steve #Carell #Netflix #Dramedy
