Everything You Need to Know About The Second Season of Tina Fey’s Netflix Comedy
Kate (Tina Fey) and Jack (Will Forte) are one of the core couples in The Four Seasons. (photo: courtesy Netflix)
The Four Seasons, Tina Fey’s middle-aged comedy of manners and marriage, is back for its second season on Netflix. The series, which stars Fey, fellow SNL alum Will Forte, Colman Domingo (Wicked for Good) and Kerry Kenney-Silver (Reno 911), as a group of married friends who regularly holiday together, makes light of the growing pains of midlife and draws real laughs out of how quickly youthful dreams of love and adventure can morph into the more mature realities of "celebrating" Dry January and playing farm games on the iPad.
It’s funny, cringe-y and keeps a lively comic pace. Here’s everything you need to know about season 2.
Once Again, There Are Four Destinations
As with season 1, each seasonally appropriate destination (upstate New York, the Jersey Shore, Anne's lakehouse and the Italian alps) is allotted two episodes to play out. It’s a handy storytelling device that puts the characters into unique, ever-changing climates that are ripe with comic opportunity. It's fun to watch the couples bounce from locale to locale rather than adhere to the rigid scheduled reality of most middle-aged people's lives, i.e. the daily circuit of work-gym-home. The series takes big dramatic swings at times, but it also doesn't shy away from depicting how humdrum events like training for a marathon can loom large in a couple's relationship.
Nick Is Still Dead
At the end of season 1, unhappily married hedge funder Nick (played by Steve Carell)—who left his age-appropriate wife of 25 years for a younger woman—dies in a car accident. He’s still dead in season 2, and the series’ surviving couples are left to grieve his loss—and comically attempt to scatter his ashes at the top of a mountain in upstate New York. The cast remains largely the same, but this time around Nick's ex Anne (Kenney-Silver) has to learn to tolerate the presence of Nick’s girlfriend, Ginny (Erika Henningsen), who is pregnant with his child.
Not every holiday is a four-star banger for our couples. Episodes 1 and 2 see the group spend a weekend honouring Nick’s life in a less-than-spectacular small town (there’s an active shooter at one point). The vibe is so grim that one character comically refers to the town as the one “Tracy Chapman sped away from.”
The Drama Is Dialled Up
Nick may be gone, but he leaves behind plenty of drama for Anne and Ginny, who are locked in a legal battle after his death. The midlife marital conflicts also live on in the up-and-down relationships between the surviving couples, especially between Danny (Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani) and their conflicting ideas about having kids.
But don't worry, the series isn't entirely full of angst. The drama is as fizzy as diet soda and doesn't fall flat with sentimentality. More than that, it's yoked in service to humour. The comedic tone remains similar to 30 Rock; one memorable moment in Season Two sees Fey's character Kate reassure Forte's Jack that it’s really OK to do nothing to help people in distress.
“I do nothing all the time,” she tells him. “I saw a lady faint in the grocery store. I froze. She hit her head.”
It's the kind of joke you'd expect from a milder, middle-aged Liz Lemon—which makes sense, because Fey created the show alongside 30 Rock collaborator Tracy Wigfield.
Four Seasons is streaming on Netflix now.
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Flannery Dean is a writer based in Hamilton, Ont. She’s written for The Narwhal, the Globe and Mail and The Guardian.
