The viewing figures are in: Tina Fey’s The Four Seasons has been a massive hit. Despite a slow start on Netflix, it’s suddenly rocketed up to the top of the streamers’ in-house rankings, garnered rave reviews and caused a significant amount of internet controversy with its twist ending (no spoilers here).
Why? Let’s unpack. Like that other mega-hit of recent weeks, The White Lotus, this is a show about affluent couples. It’s a show that digs into the micro-relations between people, and how wildly they can go wrong. Oh, and it has a shock death at the end.
On the surface, there are many parallels. Plus, it’s a satire.
“So many other people have split up or hate each other,” Jack declares as the show kicks off. “It is rare in this life to find your soulmate, yet somehow all six of us have done it.”
The Four Seasons then proceeds to show us all the ways in which that is not true. Kate (Fey) and Jack (Will Forte)’s marriage has stagnated. Steve Carrell’s Nick breaks up with his wife at the very start of the show; Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani’s relationship feels, at times, intensely claustrophobic.
These are couples whose relationships go back years, which makes their resulting interactions feel all the more rich – and their emotional devastation all the more present.
The show itself is based on the 1981 film of the same name. Starring names like Alan Alda, Carol Burnett and Sandy Dennis (all big names back in the day – promise), it inspired a young Fey to go into showbusiness.
“I just always thought the movie was so well observed and I loved how — especially since a lot of the comedies that we’ve written are just high-speed, high joke density — they do inevitably become absurd and explode,” she said in the run-up to the show’s release.
There is absurdism here, it’s one that – unlike The White Lotus – is grounded in peoples’ lived experiences.
The White Lotus is satire that takes place in a heightened state of unreality: a luxury hotel, where the petty grudges of the wealthy people who occupy it are magnified a hundredfold. The comedy comes from watching rich people be mean to each other and make bad decisions.
And while The Four Seasons shares the show’s love of watching wealthy people travel (the show takes us to plush hotels, mountaintop vistas and boats among other things), it mines humour from the mundane.
In one shot, Fey’s Kate and her husband Will have a massive argument, in which Fey’s character’s hair brushing gets more and more aggressive (speaking afterwards, Fey declared that she “wanted to really aggressively brush my hair because I love it. It’s so 70s.”)
Even later scenes, in which the group are introduced to Nick’s new girlfriend Ginny, undermines the traditional image of the ‘other woman’ by making her kind and warm rather than grasping and cruel.
Despite his shortcomings, Nick is also presented as a sympathetic character: the show begs grace for him, and in the most part, the other characters give it to him. This is not a show about rich people nursing petty grudges; it’s about people learning that loss is an essential part of the human experience.
The upshot? Watching The Four Seasons feels like sinking into a warm and cosy bath – the perfect antidote to the stress and heightened tension of The White Lotus. Sink right in, and let’s hope that (like Mike White’s oeuvre) it comes back to our screens for a second go.
The Four Seasons is streaming now on Netflix
