One of the great things about television, as a storytelling medium, is its ability to adapt. So many so-so first seasons are followed up with dynamite sophomore efforts — “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation,” “Casual,” “BoJack Horseman,” “Industry,” “The Bear” — precisely because the creators learned from what they tried initially and got to apply those lessons to a developing narrative. The chance to pivot into plots and dynamics that are working (while pivoting away from ones that aren’t) is part of what makes serialized TV so thrilling: Year after year, you don’t lose what came before. You build from it.
Or, I guess, you don’t.
The potential glimpsed in the first season of “The Four Seasons” remains stubbornly out of reach in Season 2. Arguably, it’s the same potential that was evident from the series announcement: Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Colman Domingo, Will Forte — these are great performers to build a sitcom around, and co-creators Lang Fisher, Tracey Wigfield, and Fey are ideal craftspeople. But rather than engage with the project in front of them, as it evolves from episode to episode and season to season, the assembled team appears content to sacrifice every modicum of ambition and simply coast on their innate appeal.
Take, for instance, the biggest swing in Season 1: Nick’s unanticipated death. In the penultimate episode, Steve Carell’s character dies in a car accident, which works out surprisingly well for his friends: His ex-wife Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) gets closure for her abruptly terminated marriage, Danny (Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani) reconnect over disparate grieving methods, and Jack (Forte) and Kate (Fey) rekindle their love after escaping a frozen lake together.
Despite the shocking loss of their friend, each couple ends up better off by season’s end than they were at the start — save for Ginny (Erika Henningsen), Nick’s young girlfriend, who admits to being pregnant with her dead lover’s baby right before the credits roll. That last-second reveal tees up Season 2 to embrace change in any number of ways.
For one, the baby ties Ginny to the friend group even more than their promise to honor Nick’s memory with yet another holiday, which is important, because otherwise she could lift right out. It also provides a clear call to action: the trip to honor Nick. Not only does it offer a reset after a death that felt too heavy for a show of this frivolity to handle, but it could also rally the friends “Three Couples and a Baby”-style, wherein they commit to helping out the single mom until she gets on her post-pregnancy feet (thus eliminating the need for all of these increasingly disconnected couples to find a reason to take a vacation every three months — they can hang out in one of their palatial homes, all our clever comics under one roof, taking care of a cute little kiddo).
Except… is it important to keep Ginny around, when Season 2 shows even less interest in unpacking her perspective as the group’s outsider or establishing her identity within it? Probably not, and a misconstrued flashback episode further diminishes Ginny’s role in Nick’s life, albeit accidentally. Season 2 also doesn’t reset, instead charging forward with implausible quarterly vacations and Nick as a main character in absentia, which leaves a sizable Steve Carell-sized hole with only an unspeaking infant to fill the void.
Really, even those missed adjustments may not have mattered if “The Four Seasons” chose to either earnestly wrestle with mortality (and accept the tear-jerking drama that requires) or run the other way and turn their altered group dynamic into a chaotic comedy of errors. Instead, Season 2 remains frustratingly mediocre; a kind-of funny, sporadically poignant “comedy” in which every scene feels like it could be vastly more effective if it weren’t in service of a series so stubbornly committed to being OK at everything that it’s never great at anything.
The cast, as it did in Season 1, makes it easy enough not to think about what could’ve been. Fey and Forte don’t have an ounce of romantic chemistry, but their best-friends marriage elicits pleasant vibes and a few chuckles when she lies about taking up running (in a decent season-long gag rooted in Fey’s lifelong disdain for exercise — onscreen, anyway) and he grows a handlebar mustache to exert his independence after making waves with a new guy friend. Domingo and Fey are even better, achieving an honest rapport that too many other dynamics lack, while Kenney-Silver arguably gets the juiciest arc, filled with showy slapstick and a challenge unique to sitcoms but relatable outside of them.
The fourth episode, written and directed by Wigfield, comes the closest to reaching the high ceiling “The Four Seasons” never hits. Domingo and Fey get snarky, a clever visual gag earns a surprise laugh, the dialogue is sharper than usual, and the main pairings get jumbled up with purposeful, delightful results.
“Why do I keep making these jacked-up decisions?,” Anne asks Danny, in one of their rare one-on-one sit-downs. “Maybe it’s because we’re old,” he says. “The stakes are too high. Every decision feels like I’m trying to stick the landing on my entire fucking life.” Then, quietly, as if she knows this conversation is unlike so many others she’s been in of late, Anne slyly says, “Well, at least it’s almost done.”
For once, the big laugh she gets out of her friend can be shared by their audience, in part because “The Four Seasons” is broaching the darker territory it typically only feigns toward. But it doesn’t last. The series is built to sustain those conversations, but it doesn’t evolve enough to allow space for them to land. It’s exactly what we saw in Season 1, no better, no worse — unless you factor in wasted potential.
Grade: C
“The Four Seasons” Season 2 premieres Thursday, May 28 on Netflix. All eight episodes will be released at once.
