‘Four Seasons’ – Fey and Friends Can’t Find the Funny
Hollywood is so eager to reboot classic IPs it turned to the most sensitive man of the ’80s for inspiration.
Alan Alda.
The “M*A*S*H*” alum’s 1981 dramedy “The Four Seasons” isn’t on the tips of most people’s tongues today. No matter. Netflix still saw fit to hand the film’s three-couple blueprint over to Tina Fey. Quick, let’s make this a shared universe with Alda’s “Sweet Liberty!”
Alas, hilarity rarely ensues.
That’s forgivable since the original “Four Seasons” offered gentle laughs between mid-life crises. The bigger flaw permeating Fey’s reboot is it takes too long to care about the core characters.
Fey, who also co-wrote select episodes, stars as Kate. She’s a rational, driven soul in a seemingly solid marriage with Jack (Will Forte). Jack makes Alda look like John Wayne. He’s kind to a fault, and his inability to fight back against life’s minor injustices nags at Kate.
You can’t blame her.
Steve Carell and Kerri Kenney-Silver co-star as Nick and Anne, whose marriage is on Alcatraz-sized rocks. Nick finds his wife irretrievably dull, while Anne has no clue her beau has one foot out the door.
The true lovebirds of the series are Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani), a gay couple a few shades less flamboyant than “Modern Family’s” Cam and Mitchell. But only a few.
Danny’s heart condition consumes the first two episodes of the eight-part series, but it’s never depicted as a serious threat to his life.
At least at first.
The three couples vacation together every few months, their deep ties evident in shared memories and laughter.
Spring. Summer. Fall. Winter. Cue Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” a score that feels more substantive than the unfolding story.
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“The Four Seasons” feels stuck between sitcom-level shtick and a sober look at midlife romance. Sex isn’t distracting the couples in question, at least not initially. That happens later when Nick ditches Anne for the much younger Ginny. That’s Erika Henningsen, stepping in for Bess Armstrong’s character in the 1981 film.
Suddenly, Nick is dressing like a man half his age. It’s as cringe-worthy as Armstrong canoodling with Len Cariou in the original. Yet Fey and her writing team can’t find a rich comic vein beyond obvious observations.
The first few episodes similarly struggle to set the show apart from your average, unnecessary reboot. Fey’s past work remains impressive, from her “Saturday Night Live” days to “30 Rock.” Here, she squanders valuable screen time while the cast scrambles to find an excuse for rebooting Alda’s original.
The veteran actor gets a quick scene in episode one, a cameo that elevates the show in the best of ways. He’s still got it.
Kate and Jack’s marriage takes a dark turn as the series progresses, and the overprotective Claude threatens to push Danny away inch by inch.
With The Four Seasons now out on Netflix, here’s a few BTS pictures I captured with my camera while working on set! pic.twitter.com/1oJ1LIyPT4
— Jake Alda Coffey
(@jakealdacoffey) May 1, 2025
“The Four Seasons” relies too heavily on farcical set-ups when we need richer writing to flesh out the characters’ malaise. An early sequence caps with an explosion, the equivalent of a horror movie “jump scare.”
Later, one of the couple’s now-grown children stages a play that spells out her rage at her parent’s divorce. The sequence plays out in a style that never matches the material.
This isn’t “Little Miss Sunshine.”
Yet it’s hard to turn away from “The Four Seasons” once you’ve invested time in the series. Domingo remains an electric presence, and his character feels fresher than what we initially expect. Carell’s attempts to date a much younger woman seem superficial at first, but “The Office” alum reveals layers later on that grab our attention.
The same holds for the Kate/Jack tension. It takes too long to gestate, but once their first fight erupts we can appreciate their frustration. Sometimes a seemingly perfect couple can be anything but.
Woke doesn’t have a stranglehold on the series, although a mild dustup between Kate and Danny suggests a power dynamic born of liberal guilt. Fey’s reboot is fine, another slice of streaming “content” that fills the “What’s New” section on a major platform. Nothing more.
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