If they can keep all the dads satisfied with shows about burly men going on secret missions and feuding families in the American West, they can certainly take care of the moms as well. Netflix’s The Four Seasons, a comedy drama that follows three married couples across one year, is designed as something of a palate cleanser for middle-aged audiences to watch between the latest true crime offerings. It’s pleasant enough to qualify as undemanding, and has enough moments of insight to elevate it above the ambient TV line. The Four Seasons isn’t good, but it’s good enough.
And good enough is good enough these days, especially if you’ve just survived stuff like Jewel Thief or Nadaaniyan. Co-created by and starring Tina Fey, The Four Seasons features a stacked cast that also includes her Saturday Night Live buddy Will Forte — they play a couple — as well as Steve Carell and two-time Oscar nominee Colman Domingo. Think of The Four Seasons as the Friends reunion you never got. These characters could just as easily have been living in New York City apartments back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, worried about where life will take them.
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A still from Netflix’s The Four Seasons.
Now in their late forties, they’re all in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Carell plays Nick, who is clearly the wealthiest member of the group, and also the least likeable. In the opening episode, while hosting his friends for a weekend getaway at his lakeside home, he announces that he is divorcing his wife of 25 years. Nick feels that he needn’t worry about their adult daughter any longer, and that he can finally prioritise himself. He comes across as viciously selfish, which is something that his daughter points out to him in a later episode. But he insists that he’s a complex man who’s going through his own emotional ups and downs.
This may well be true, but Nick certainly doesn’t score any fans when, in the very next episode, it is revealed that he is dating a 32-year-old blonde named Ginny. Fey and Forte’s characters, Kate and Jack, are going through their own difficulties, but they seem like the most well-adjusted couple of the group. They’ve learned to live with each other’s flaws — Kate is controlling and Jack too vanilla — but haven’t exactly addressed them. This causes a simmering resentment that bubbles to the surface in the show’s third act.
Domingo and Marco Calvani play Danny and Claude, a flamboyant gay couple who are in an open relationship. Danny feels smothered by Claude, whom he flippantly describes in one scene as someone who ‘lives in his own opera’. It’s quite an accurate description, if a little mean. As played by Calvani, Claude isn’t unlike one of those caricatures that Chunky Panday does in Hindi films. Every scene centred around him is pitched to 11 — that’s just the sort of person he is. But this creates a tonal imbalance that The Four Seasons is incapable of reconciling. While Claude’s scenes are largely comedic, Nick’s divorce and its subsequent fallout, on the other hand, is played for drama.
Nothing, however, can prepare you for the plot twist in the penultimate episode. It comes out of nowhere, and can’t help but feel contrived. But more troublingly, it sends the show’s already compromised tone for a toss. The Four Seasons has no idea how to go about the final episode, after writing itself into a narrative corner. The twist looms large over every scene, and the storytelling simply isn’t fleet-footed enough to save the show from dislocating its shoulder from such a big swing. There are, of course, a few moments of actual depth scattered across the show’s eight episodes — each ‘season’ gets two.
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A still from The Four Seasons.
Nick’s relationship with Ginny isn’t as empty as The Four Seasons initially leads you to imagine, and despite his stereotypical portrayal, Claude reveals himself to be a perceptive person. Domingo, as you’d expect, can do no wrong as an adventurous man whose body can’t keep up with his spirit. But The Four Seasons is largely framed through the perspective of Kate and Jack. One would imagine that their issues are universal enough for all sorts of couples to relate to. But the resolution to their arc is far too convenient.
Unfortunately, the show is best enjoyed as a distraction. Television can offer comforts that are often elusive in real life. The smallest hurdles can be impossible to cross on a bad day, but on TV, no problem is big enough. As with every other kind of long-form storytelling, The Four Seasons is made for a specific audience, and what might seem like an inadequacy to you might feel entirely satisfying to the folks for whom it is designed. It’s important to recognise this as you begrudgingly concede defeat and realise that you’re going to be seated for the second season.
The Four Seasons
Creators – Tina Fey, Lang Fisher, Tracey Wigfield
Cast – Tina Fey, Will Forte, Steve Carell, Colman Domingo, Marco Calvani, Erika Henningsen, Kerri Kenney-Silver
Rating – 2.5/5
