TV Review: "The Four Seasons"
The new Netflix series offers a surprisingly nuanced and poignant--and often hilarious--take on middle age and marriage.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the season follow.
While I’m as thoroughly sick of remakes and reboots as the rest of us–and while I have a particular impatience with TV shows that attempt to remake movies and stretch a feature runtime into numerous hours of television–every so often a show comes along that proves that it’s not always wise to paint with too broad a rush. The Four Seasons, for example, the new Netflix series that is TV adaptation of the Alan Alda film of the same name, is an example of a series that manages to take an expanded narrative scope to deepen and enhance the original white also paying suitable homage to it.
Through eight episodes, The Four Seasons excels at exploring the complexities, frustrations, and rewards of middle-aged marriage and life and romance. The series focuses on three married couples: Nick and Anne (Steve Carell and Kerri Kenney-Silver), Jack and Kate (Will Forte and Tina Fey), and Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani). At first all seems well, but Nick drops the bomb that he is planning to divorce Anne, and the rest of the season focuses on the various couples as they cope with the fallout–including Nick’s dating of a younger woman, Ginny (Erika Henningsen)--and the flaws and faultlines in their own marriages.
Both Tina Fey and Will Forte are perfectly cast Kate and Jack, who are opposites in many ways but who have somehow made a way to make it work. Beneath that placid surface, however, there are tensions that only become more evident to both of them as Nick/Anne divorce and its aftermath continues to send shockwaves through the friend group. Fey, as always, has a sarcastic and cynical edge to her that makes her a perfect fit for someone like Kate, a woman who tends to view the world and everyone in it through her own jaundiced point of view. Forte, likewise, is both goofy and yet oddly vulnerable in his role, and it’s clear that, while he doesn’t feel the same sense of unbearable disillusionment as Nick, he nevertheless isn’t entirely happy with Kate, particularly given her tendency to tear him down at every available opportunity. Watching these two weather the vicissitudes of their marriage is a reminder that it’s not always easy and that marriage–and friendship–take work, both on the couple and the self.
Carell and Kenney-Silver are likewise perfectly cast in their respective roles. Carell always manages to find humanity and sympathy even when he’s playing a cad, and his performance as Nick is no exception. Nick might be a bit of an ass for blowing up his life, but is it better to stay in an unhappy marriage just because it’s easier? The fact that he seems genuinely happy with Ginny–and that they have their own relationship hurdles to overcome–suggests that they really do love one another, as strange as that may sound (more on this in a moment). Kenney-Silver also gives a remarkably textured performance, and her Anne is at times deeply saddened at what’s happened to her life and at others righteously angry. Of all of the characters, she is the most emotionally mature, which means that she tends to be the one who has to do the emotional labor that the others are too self-involved to do.
Unsurprisingly, for me the most interesting couple is the gay one, precisely because we have so few depictions of middle-aged gay couples grappling with the realities of life after being married for years. Both Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani are perfectly cast in their roles. While Danny is a bit of a brutal realist and something of a cynic (which is why he bonds so much with Kate, even as he also finds her irritating and sometimes downright offensive), Claude is increasingly concerned about their aging bodies and the fact that Danny doesn’t ever seem to want to talk about his feelings or take care of himself so that they can continue to enjoy their lives together. Danny, for his part, feels smothered by Claude’s affections and by his too-muchness. Of the three couples, however, theirs is arguably the most stable, perhaps because they also happen to be open.
Their most poignant Danny/Claude moment occurs in the final couple of episodes, when the group has to contend with Nick’s untimely death. While Claude desperately wants to find some sort of meaning in his friend’s passing–going on and on about how he saw Nick in a dream surrounded by butterflies–the unsentimental and deeply cynical Danny just wants to be sad and to experience the shitty situation in which they all find themselves. In the end, they end up finding at least some sort of compromise, and it’s clear that they, at least, know how to overcome their differences (helped along by the fact that Danny ends up seeing a hand-drawn butterfly that Nick’s daughter made for him, suggesting that there might have been something to Claude’s dream, after all).
I’ve seen quite a few reviews comparing The Four Seasons to The White Lotus and, while there are some similarities–in the sense that both shows focus on privileged couples spending time on vacation–I think there are far more differences. For one thing, The Four Seasons is a far more introspective and sincere show than The White Lotus which, as we all know by now, is arguably the most cynical and jaundiced show on TV. It’s also a more straightforwardly funny show, with some moments that had me in stitches (I’ll never forget the moment in which an emotionally overwrought Claude ends up throwing Danny’s clothes out the window, since he clearly can’t wait to be away from him and their life together).
More importantly, The Four Seasons largely avoids easy answers and cliches and, unlike The White Lotus, it doesn’t ask us to condemn the characters wholeheartedly but instead to grapple with the moral morass in which every one of them find themselves. Every time one of the couples has a fight, the show makes it clear that each party has a point. Even Nick, who blows up his entire life and seems at first glance to be just another middle-aged man who’s grown bored with his life and his wife, is shown to be genuinely in love with his new girlfriend (even if he’s not thrilled with her friends). Ginny, likewise, is far more than just a home-wrecker. She is, instead, a fully-fledged character with her own inner life and motivations. While at first the other members of the friend group look at her as nothing more than an interloper and as an embarrassing piece of evidence of Nick’s obvious midlife crisis, the truth is that she didn’t ask for any of this, let alone their thinly-veiled contempt for her.
As I noted at the beginning, the series’ greater length gives it more time to grapple with the struggles and challenges of being middle-aged and married. All of the couples in some way have to figure out how and whether to continue on their chosen path, just as they also have to do some soul-searching about what it is that they want as individuals. Though it has its bitter and caustic moments, The Four Seasons is also a show that’s filled with genuine warmth and compassion for its characters in all of their messy and frustrating complexity.
I’m not surprised that Netflix has already renewed The Four Seasons for a second season. The final episode ends on one hell of a cliffhanger, with the revelation that Ginny is pregnant with Nick’s child. By this point the remaining members of the group–including, notably, Anne–have managed to find their own form of peace with this interloper in their midst, giving her at least a little bit of the benefit of the doubt. It remains to be seen whether this will hold up as they all stare at an uncertain future.