The Four Seasons Season 2 Review: Tina Fey’s Brilliant Follow-Up Rivals 30 Rock on Television
Tina Fey’s The Four Seasons returns with a second season that is sharper, funnier, and more emotionally precise than the first, using middle age as both comic material and dramatic territory. Fey, working again with Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher, adapts and updates the 1980s film into a modern ensemble series built around four luxurious vacations spread across the year. Each season is told in two tightly constructed episodes, allowing the story to focus on the aftermath of major events rather than the events themselves. That format gives the series room for deadpan dialogue, emotional fallout, and sharply observed jokes about aging, marriage, grief, and mortality.
The story begins after the death of Nick, played by Steve Carell, whose absence reshapes the relationships among the central group. Kate and Jack remain locked in a long-running marriage defined by affection, irritation, and constant re-evaluation. Danny and Claude continue as a stylish, bickering same-sex couple whose conversations are often both funny and unexpectedly moving. Anne, Nick’s ex-wife, is now navigating life with Ginny, the much younger woman Nick left her for, who is pregnant with his child. Their unusual bond becomes one of the season’s most surprising emotional threads, as Anne evolves from bitterness and loneliness toward a more stable and even joyful version of herself.
Across the spring, summer, Thanksgiving, and winter chapters, the series moves from hiking trips and awkward reconciliations to beach outings, holiday disasters, and a snowy Italian setting. The spring section centers on a mountain hike to scatter Nick’s ashes, which goes badly in several increasingly absurd ways. Summer brings shifting domestic arrangements, a baby, and changing friendships. Thanksgiving features a chaotic family gathering, while the winter episodes reflect on the pandemic era and unresolved tensions from the past. The show mines comedy from small, painfully specific details: forgotten ashes, secret vapes, ridiculous clothing, and the frailty of middle-aged men trying to hold themselves together.
What makes the season stand out is its balance of cynicism and warmth. The comedy is often ruthless, but it is also deeply sympathetic to people who are stuck between the lives they planned and the lives they actually have. Long-term couples are shown as both exhausting and enduring, and the series treats emotional fatigue as a real part of love rather than a sign that love has failed. Even the show’s glossy settings, from lakeside estates to alpine resorts, are used to underline the contrast between outward comfort and inner turmoil.
By the end, The Four Seasons has established itself as a rare midlife comedy that understands how funny, sad, and disorienting this stage of life can be. It is stylish, intelligent, and frequently hilarious, but its deeper appeal lies in its recognition that middle age is less a stable destination than a long, strange negotiation with regret, change, and the people you still cannot quite let go of.
