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\n All eight episodes of Adults season two drop on Hulu August 27 at 9 p.m. ET; two episodes will air each week on FXX.\n <\/p>\n
\n In its assured second season, the FX comedy graduates from imitating a great hangout sitcom to actually being one.
\n Photo: Michael Gibson\/FX\n <\/p>\n
There is a certain kind of friend group you might fall into in your mid-20s that\u2019s fond of imagining themselves as characters in a TV sitcom, especially if you all happen to have recently moved to a big city. I played a version of New Girl\u2019s \u201cTrue American\u201d drinking game with one and remember us all joking that, with two straight friends, a gay guy, and a lesbian woman, our roommate configuration would satisfy a TV executive. The fantasy of being main characters helps alleviate the confusion of postcollege adulthood, cushioning the blow of having to actually take care of yourself by treating the trials of dating, getting your own health insurance, or learning to negotiate group conflict as installments in a grand Friends-ian adventure. This sort of friend group is also something you tend to grow out of before reaching six seasons and a movie, as individuals develop different interests and find themselves; sometimes they move to the West Coast and don\u2019t even try to start a spinoff.<\/p>\n
The characters in Adults<\/a>, which actually is a sitcom, often resemble these real-life people play-acting at being in a sitcom. They\u2019re young, sexually and racially diverse in a curated way, and self-aware enough to know just how charming their little group dynamic is. In the cold open of the first-season finale, the characters go through their backlog of snail mail, rushing through a series of updates on the show\u2019s lingering story lines in imitation of a clip-show episode. (\u201cDo your callback,\u201d one tells another.) The eagerness to perform a trope, as in real life, skids past charming toward grating: Just be a good sitcom, I remember thinking at times watching the first season. Stop telling me that you are one.\u00a0<\/p>\n So it delights me to report that, in its second season, Adults grows past the awkward phase of imitating a hangout sitcom to more confidently function as a great little hangout sitcom. The ingredients were always there, including a strong ensemble of young actors and joke-writing that lands on actual punch lines, but now they\u2019re arranged around a clearer sense of purpose and, crucially, conflict. At the end of last season, sexually fluid Canadian himbo Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), in a last-ditch effort to get a green card, married flibbertigibbet people-pleaser Anton (Owen Thiele) despite already having a girlfriend in the group, the free-spirited but flaky Issa (Amita Rao<\/a>), leading to a disarmingly real kiss<\/a> between the newlyweds. The second season picks up with their mutual affection simmering but buried \u2014 Adults is smart about the way that Thiele and Innanen\u2019s low-key warmth together stands out amid the rest of its antics \u2014 and Paul Baker and Issa\u2019s relationship heading toward the rocks. Where the first season bounced between various early-20s shenanigans, the second sets them against a ticking time bomb: These characters are going to have to talk about their emotions.<\/p>\n Which they do, in a virtuosic episode midway through the season where everyone does LSD and then realizes a raccoon has snuck into the house in Queens they share. The proudly sitcom-y premise pushes the characters into expressing their anxieties about wanting to do well by their friends and acknowledging the ways in which avoiding conflict has hurt their relationships, while also trying to wage war with rodents and swerving into a Love Actually send-up. It\u2019s a fitting sequel to the first season\u2019s dinner-party episode, another showcase of the main characters\u2019 complete lack of practical skills (they can\u2019t roast a chicken or trap an animal) that doubles as a glimpse into their emotional shortcomings (they can\u2019t have a real conversation, either). At the end of the raccoon episode, the characters try once again to paper things over with a promise that no one in their group should ever hook up again. Obviously, that doesn\u2019t last long, but as a storytelling gambit, it puts a lot of Adults\u2019s interests in focus. These characters long for a status quo that\u2019s comforting but not tenable. Being in a sitcom is stunting their growth.<\/p>\n That\u2019s an angle for conflict that tracks with a lot of the show\u2019s other obsessions, especially its zippy, mordant humor. Adults\u2019s Gen-Z characters tend to see their comforts as transient, their identities as mutable, and seriousness as an annoying obligation, all of which the second season pokes at a bit. One clever episode that finds Anton accidentally dropping the C-word as a compliment to a colleague pivots around the idea that it\u2019s actually really nice to have a job, because it provides structure and distraction from life\u2019s many other terrors. The second season also makes the show\u2019s most nominally competent character, Lucy Freyer\u2019s tightly wound and now perpetually unemployed Billie, into one of its silliest (in the style of Gillian Jacobs on Community or Elisha Cuthbert on Happy Endings), and an episode about her attempts to find the other girls who used her fake ID also gets in a few dark moments of despair about her rootlessness. The show still has a fondness for an almost-too-cute meta touch \u2014 Girls alum Zosia Mamet pops up to threaten the characters with a line about how they\u2019re not the only ones who were once a charming young friend group \u2014 but those make more sense placed into the context of a general fear of adulthood. Isn\u2019t it nicer to launch into a sitcom scheme instead of thinking about a future with an unstable economy and political system, global warming, and TV networks that don\u2019t green-light long-running comedies anymore?<\/p>\n Not to be too cutely meta myself, but the precarity that surrounds the characters on Adults also informs the reality of the show itself. The series mimics and sends up the hangout comedies that came before it \u2014 from Friends to New Girl to more than a bit of It\u2019s Always Sunny in Philadelphia \u2014 but at eight episodes a season, it has about a third of the space to maneuver than the network hangout shows of old. In a more perfect world, the Anton\u2013Paul Baker slow burn would have so much more time to marinate, and we\u2019d get to see guest stars appear for more than a single episode; Julia Fox as herself is, for now, randomly one of Adults\u2019s most notable recurring characters. Though we do briefly meet a girlfriend of Samir\u2019s (Malik Elassal is great at playing a put-upon straight man who messes things up by trying to be nice), the trick of expanding a sitcom universe by way of a three-episode arc for a fun new love interest, in the style of Friends or How I Met Your Mother, is becoming a lost art. A shrinking television industry has narrowed the horizons available to young, pretty 20-somethings who want to have a series of kooky adventures in New York City. It\u2019s no wonder everyone wants to play-act at being characters on a sitcom, even the characters who are actually on a sitcom.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Vulture Daily<\/p>\n An entertainment newsletter for the pop-culture obsessed.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n