‘The Four Seasons’ Review: A Surprisingly Enjoyable, Grown-Up Comedy-Drama Series from Tina Fey

At first glance, ‘The Four Seasons‘ looks like a fizzy comedy about neurotic friends on vacation, but beneath the wine and weekend rituals, something messier and more honest is already stirring. By the end of its tight, eight-episode run, the show has pulled off something sneakier and far more impressive than its sun-dappled premise suggests. What begins as a breezy sitcom about three affluent couples holidaying together morphs into a subtly bruising portrait of middle-aged drift, divorce, and the strange intimacy of old friends who may not even like each other that much anymore. Through it all, the jokes keep coming—sharp, dry, perfectly timed, even when the show dives into emotional water.

Adapted from Alan Alda’s 1981 film, it stars Tina Fey, who co-created the show with Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher. Fey stars as Kate, a buttoned-up planner obsessed with itineraries and properly portioned wine pours. Her husband Jack (Will Forte) is the kind of man who frets over sunscreen absorption windows and sleeps in anxiety socks. They are, unmistakably, That Couple: tight-knit, mildly dysfunctional, and permanently adjacent to a therapist’s office. Joining them are Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani), a stylish, tempestuous couple who seem pulled from the pages of a luxury travel magazine—but whose quick wit can’t quite mask their simmering anxieties about aging, relevance, and what remains unspoken between them. And then there’s Nick (Steve Carell) and Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), the couple whose implosion kicks the whole thing into motion.

Nick drops the bomb during what’s supposed to be a celebratory weekend: after 25 years, he’s leaving Anne. His reason? “All she does is play that farm game on her iPad. She’s really high on the leaderboard.” It’s a joke. It’s also not a joke. That line, like much of The Four Seasons, lands in the place where humor and heartbreak share a property line.

The show unfolds one getaway per season, but Nick’s announcement detonates their tightly-woven dynamic, especially once he starts showing up with his new 32-year-old girlfriend, Ginny (Erika Henningsen), in tow. By fall, things have soured to the point that Nick’s daughter debuts a college play with the unforgettable opening line: “Once upon a time, my dad destroyed my family and started dating a stupid bitch.” It sets the tone for a series of tension-filled trips, awkward confrontations, and emotional fallout all laced with pitch-perfect comedic relief.

The writing never lets the series drift too far from its comedic spine. Even as marriages fracture and mortality creeps in, The Four Seasons remains funny not in spite of the pain, but because of it. Fey understands that middle-aged tragedy rarely arrives with violins. And the new girlfriend, Ginny, is not quite the villain the group makes her out to be but she’s no angel either. Her generational quirks (mushroom coffee, emotional fluidity, enthusiastic yurt bookings) are the subject of well-earned eye rolls, but she’s not played as a caricature.

It captures the strange ache of familiarity, the way love, resentment, history, and habit form for most long-term relationships.

Carell is magnetic as Nick: alternately charming, pitiful, and infuriating. He navigates his character’s midlife unraveling with a finely tuned mix of wit and weariness. But it’s Kenney-Silver as Anne who delivers the emotional sucker punch, her confusion and fury quietly boiling after years of patience. Watching her recalibrate her life after 25 years is the show’s quietest, most powerful arc.

Fey’s biggest triumph here isn’t just staging an honest midlife breakdown with beautifully timed punchlines. It’s capturing the strange ache of familiarity, the way love, resentment, history, and habit form for most long-term relationships. She gets that some couples survive not because they’re meant to, but because they’ve grown into each other like ivy on old stone. That said, The Four Seasons isn’t perfect. Some storylines feel half-baked. There’s a slight tonal wobble in the middle stretch where the show isn’t sure if it wants to be insightful or just clever.

The show doesn’t try to be tidy—it sidesteps with unpredictability at any given moment. Moments that start light, twist suddenly into something deeper, catching you off guard in ways that feel startlingly true to life, much like real adulthood. It’s not the flashiest series on Netflix, but it might be one of the most grown up and human.

All 8 episodes of The Four Seasons are available now on Netflix.

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