{"id":608191,"date":"2026-05-28T09:11:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T09:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/608191\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T09:11:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T09:11:08","slug":"the-four-seasons-season-two-review-tina-feys-brilliant-follow-up-is-up-there-with-30-rock-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/608191\/","title":{"rendered":"The Four Seasons season two review \u2013 Tina Fey\u2019s brilliant follow-up is up there with 30 Rock | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

Middle age is a brutal time of life. As those of us mired in it know, it\u2019s perfectly suited to being mined for laughs (the unhinged type of laughs that are bound up with tears, crisis, and, inevitably, death.) But still too few comedy series take this pressured segment of time and squeeze it for all its acidic worth. Enter middle-aged joke machine Tina Fey<\/a>, who with The Four Seasons \u2013 her zippy 2020s update of the 1980s film of the same name, co-created and written with Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher \u2013 has triumphed once again. The second season of her midlife comedy drama is even more perspicacious, poignant and hilarious than the first.<\/p>\n

Again there are four fancy holidays split across the seasons, each one given two gag-packed episodes \u2013 a rigid but neat structural device that allows the big moments to happen off-screen. Meanwhile we get the aftermath soundtracked by an avalanche of Vivaldi and bracing jokes about sad lonely donkeys, secret vapes mistaken for thumb drives, and the tragicomedy of being an angry, unravelling fiftysomething man in a T-shirt printed with \u201cKeep Calm and Fuhgeddaboutit\u201d.<\/p>\n

The three couples have been reconfigured after the death of Nick (Steve Carell) at the end of season one. So there\u2019s Kate (played by Fey) and Jack (the uptight\/softie duo relentlessly workshopping their marriage into the ground), Danny and Claude (gay, unbearably chic, forever bickering) and Nick\u2019s ex-wife Anne and the much younger woman for whom he left her, Ginny \u2013 now heavily pregnant with his baby. \u201cLadies aren\u2019t supposed to be friends with the woman their dead husband left them for,\u201d wails Anne. \u201cYou\u2019re right,\u201d says Kate. \u201cThere is no Beyonc\u00e9 song about that.\u201d Anyway, come summer the two women and a baby have moved in together, and Anne\u2019s so besotted with her new role she is testing Ginny\u2019s breast pump on her own nipple.<\/p>\n

Catering for all \u2026 Tina Fey as Kate, Kerri Kenney-Silver as Anne, and Colman Domingo as Danny. Photograph: Emily V Aragones\/Netflix \u00a9 2025<\/p>\n

Springtime. The grief-stricken sextet go on an upstate hike to scatter Nick\u2019s ashes from his favourite mountain. The first time they\u2019re interrupted by a Brownies group. The second time everyone hates each other, plus Danny forgot the ashes. The third time they\u2019re reeling from an active manhunt in the area that traps them in a retro motel overnight, in a town so depressing \u201cTracy Chapman sped away from it\u201d \u2013 a joke so specific I felt it was written for middle-aged me, which is Fey\u2019s special power. There are moments in The Four Seasons so hilarious I laughed like I do (re)watching 30 Rock. Which, considering I have a Romanian rescue dog called Lizzie Lemon, is a compliment of the highest order.<\/p>\n

Summer: to the beach. Ginny has given birth, Danny and Claude (sort of, maybe) want a baby, and Jack has found a man friend to have play dates with on the beach. Aw, says Kate (at first): \u201cI didn\u2019t think middle-aged straight men could make new friends!\u201d The conversations between Danny and Claude are particularly funny, moving, and sensitively wrought. Meanwhile Kate and Jack are \u201cfreeballing\u201d: the name given to their decision to \u201cgrow apart on purpose\u201d. If anyone else was writing these characters they would be insufferable. Instead, what unfolds is a beautiful meditation on the endurance test of long-term relationships.<\/p>\n

Big Thanksgiving culminates in Jack kicking the turkey down the stairs and twisting his ankle. Little Thanksgiving travels back in time to the Covid pandemic when Steve was alive, and Anne almost left him. In many ways this second season belongs to Anne. She makes a joyous transition from lonely, fearful ex-wife to contented (enough) single woman willing to dress up as an folkloric old witch at an Italian Christmas pageant. She gets many of the best lines, and the most fabulous wardrobe.<\/p>\n

\u2018Life is not a Nancy Meyers movie!\u2019 \u2026 Colman Domingo, Marco Calvani, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Tina Fey, Will Forte and Erika Henningsen. Photograph: Emily V Aragones\/Netflix \u00a9 2025<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth watching The Four Seasons for the knitwear alone. The laughably exquisite settings are straight out of a Nancy Meyers movie, and this being Fey, there\u2019s a joke about that, too. \u201cLife is not a Nancy Meyers movie!\u201d claims Anne after an attempt at a summer fling goes awry. Of course, the joke is that The Four Seasons looks like a Nancy Meyers movie, but is nothing like one. Pull back the woven rug and the neutral linen curtains and \u2013 how would Meyers put it? \u2013 it\u2019s complicated. This is a dark and difficult world in which good men smash up vintage snack shacks, regrets must be lived with, sacrifices made, childhood traumas kept buried, and people who love each other want completely different things.<\/p>\n

I found the levels of lush lakeside lawns and lobster rolls ludicrous at first but by the time these flawed, flailing friends were wintering in the Italian alps and Kate was delivering an Emmy award-deserving speech to Jack (while running a marathon!) about her secret levels of despair, I was all in. The sublime locations are a lure to reel you into the murky depths of midlife experience. \u201cI worry that you and I are going to get weirder and weirder and keep pulling apart until we\u2019re living like strangers,\u201d she wheezes, \u201cand all the neighbourhoods kids are gonna skip our house at Halloween because we\u2019re too creepy. And sometimes honestly I\u2019m afraid to die and other times I\u2019m like sure, it seems nice, the big sleep \u2026 let\u2019s fucking do it!\u201d At which point Kate and Jack cross the finish line together, and embrace.<\/p>\n

The Four Seasons is on Netflix<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Middle age is a brutal time of life. As those of us mired in it know, it\u2019s perfectly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":608192,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,391,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-608191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}