“The Four Seasons” might look at first glance like a knockoff of “The White Lotus,” Mike White’s astringent comedy about the ultrarich and the staff serving them at a luxury hotel chain based on the Four Seasons resorts. Here, too, wealthy vacationers, played by the likes of Tina Fey and Steve Carell, both of whom have built careers on exceptional satire, agonize over first-world problems in opulent settings.
But “The Four Seasons” comes out of a different comedic strain entirely. The eight-episode miniseries is based on the popular 1981 Alan Alda film of the same name, which New York Times film critic Janet Maslin praised at the time as “a fond, generous movie about characters who might have easily lent themselves to satire.” That the potential satire never quite materializes is key; this is a straightforward feel-good story that loves its characters too much to really lampoon them. The original starred Alda, Rita Moreno, Carol Burnett, Sandy Dennis, Jack Weston and Len Cariou as six middle-aged friends — three middle-class couples — dealing with the aftermath when one of the three pairs splits up.
Co-creators Fey, Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield decided to remake the movie as a miniseries. The result is a warmhearted but uneven TV rom-com that feels like the throwback it is. (Think “Friends” if the gang had kids in college.) The first two episodes are tight, ultracompetent comedy, wry and polished and cringey. From that point on, though, the show works so hard to fair-mindedly avoid turning any of its characters into bad guys that conflict barely has time to surface before it’s good-naturedly squelched.
The chemistry of the ensemble is almost good enough for this not to matter. Fey plays Kate, the planner of the gang’s quarterly excursions and the pragmatic counterpart to Will Forte’s Jack, an amiable hypochondriac prone to sentimental speechifying. (Alda played Jack in the film.) Carell plays Nick, a restless hedge fund manager married to Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), a flighty potter who spends more time playing online farm games than making ceramics. Rounding out the group are Colman Domingo’s Danny, a hard-partying designer, and his dreamy, sensitive Italian husband, Claude (Marco Calvani).
“The Four Seasons” is named for the four different vacations the three couples take together over the course of a single year. (Yes, you read that right: one vacation per season.) That premise, at a time when Americans are socializing less than ever before, might be the main thing preventing the show’s world from feeling even a little bit real. Maybe in 1981 it was unremarkable for six middle-aged adults to gather that frequently. It’s sufficiently unusual these days (unless you’re super-rich) that the setup plays against the “ordinary people” typologies the show otherwise works hard to sketch out.
The series starts with a sharp, vivifying crisis: Nick reveals to his fellow husbands that he wants to leave Anne. The show explores how the group metabolizes the split and Nick’s new, much-younger girlfriend, Ginny (Erika Henningsen). The result is an extended, frequently amusing obituary to the ease and comfort with which the friends used to gather. There’s also some gentle, largely generic comedy about the generational divide between Gen Xers and millennial/Gen Z cuspers (including one extremely good joke about how well each demographic skis).
It’s all pleasant and watchable and elaborately over-narrated; even the clashes with their college-aged children feel predigested. Because the characters are written as relatively intelligent, they are (almost) all able to comment, with irony and accuracy, on their own situations — and analyze themselves and the way others are reacting. Calvani routinely steals the show as Claude, the one exception, whose approach to love differs from the thoroughly American, therapy-first approach everyone else uses to muscle through conflict. Kenney-Silver is particularly good as the left-behind spouse trying to gauge whether her place in the group was ever real.
The show never persuasively answers her (very good and objectively interesting) question, because the truth would be too sad. Instead, Anne receives warm and polite assurances, which the show seems to at least partially endorse. No one in “The Four Seasons” is difficult. No one is mean. In character-building terms, that’s a little weird: There’s altogether too much courtesy for a group this tight.
