Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Netflix's charming comedy The Four Seasons saw the return of Tina Fey starring in a TV show. And we think it's a great weekend binge.
The show is about a group of couples whose friendship dynamic is rocked by their midlife crises. The cast is pretty impressive. It includes Coleman Domingo, Will Forte, and Steve Carell. And while the jokes may not fly quite as fast as they did on 30 Rock, Faye's comedic sensibility is written all over it.
The four seasons just returned for a second season, so we thought it would be a great time to revisit our conversation about the series. I'm Glenn Weldon.
And I'm Aisha Harris. And today we're talking about the four seasons on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
Thank you.
Joining us today is entertainment journalist Christina Escobar. She's the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Latinamedia.co. Welcome back, Christina. Thanks so much for having me. Great to have you here. So in the four seasons, three married couples come together for their semi-regular vacation weekend hang. There's Kate and Jack, played by Tina Fey and Will Forte.
You know, even in a ruffle, somebody's got to clean the air for her.
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Chapter 2: What is the premise of Netflix's The Four Seasons?
Claude and Danny are played by Marco Calvani and Coleman Domingo.
You know I need to be there in person to see all the furniture, touch all the fabrics. Why do you have to be so tactile all the time? I mean, it's sexy, but it's a little frustrating.
And then there's Nick and Anne, played by Steve Carell and Carrie Kenny Silver. Nick and Anne are celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, but everything's thrown out of whack when Nick announces to some of the others in the group... that he's unhappy and plans to leave Anne.
I built her that pottery shed.
Chapter 3: Who are the main characters and cast in The Four Seasons?
She hasn't made one thing. All she wants to do is play this farm game on her iPad. I look over her shoulder some nights. She's really high on the leaderboard.
What a way to throw a grenade in the middle of a vacation, man. So the rest of the show follows the couples as they navigate the fallout from their breakup and their own relationships to one another over the course of the next year or so. This is based on the 1981 movie that was written, directed by and starred Alan Alda.
Tina Fey is a co-creator of The Four Seasons, and it's streaming on Netflix now. Glenn, I am going to start with you because I know that this is, this is catnip for both of us. There's this cast, the premise. So how did this strike you?
That's the thing. I mean, I love these individual components, every member of this cast and the premise. I love the Ellen Alda movie back in, I saw it as a tween, age like 12, but I was really, I thought it was so wise about, you know, middle age. Yeah. I really liked it more than I should have. But as a whole, it kind of didn't hit me as hard as I thought it was going to.
I mean, for instance, I love Carrie Kenny Silver getting to dig a little deeper than she gets to do in a very broad, silly show like Reno 911. The only actor in this entire main cast that I don't have a preexisting, longstanding, parasocial relationship with is Marco Calvani, who you mentioned, who actually he wrote and directed a pretty great indie film called High Tide. He plays Claude. Mm-hmm.
And Claude is a character you keep waiting to get a moment to deepen or complicate or surprise us in any way, and that never really comes. And I guess it counts as progress that a character that underwritten is played by a gay man instead of a woman, as it would have been done in years past. I guess that counts.
This is not a sign, Danny. Thunder, volcano, when a fish looks at you right in the eye for no reason. These are signs. This, this is a fixable problem, and I'm going to fix it. Okay, just breathe, okay?
The rhythms of the show, as you mentioned, are not those of 30 Rock or Kimmy Schmidt. And that's fine because that's the way it should be. Different comedies have different rhythms and pacing, but it is less broad. It's less manic. And because it is deliberately less joke dense, it ends up being less funny.
And again, that's intentional because the show wants to trade, you know, mile a minute yucks for depth, for insight, for saying something about marriages and long term relationships of all kinds. And that means we have to want to spend some time with these couples even when they're not making us laugh. And I mostly did. I mostly did.
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Chapter 4: How does the show portray midlife crises among couples?
And then once she's like dealing with the breakup, there's a very sad and very cringy moment where she is trying to open a gift. It's so real if you've ever been to a gift shop on a resort or whatever. And They're like, we're packing this for you to fly away with it. And she's trying to open it, like to impress someone or to flirt with someone. And it just goes so wrong.
They wrap it for the airport.
Yeah, I can see.
And it went on just a little too long. And I liked those moments. Like, those moments kind of worked for me.
Yeah, it gets a surprising number of things right. I'm speaking to you all from the doldrums of middle age, so I can say it gets something. I was surprised about how it gets something right about gay couples. There are ways that a gay couple acts around their straight friends that is different from how we act around our gay friends. Yes.
I liked how, like, Coleman Domingo's character has a different relationship with the character played by Carrie Kenny Silver than she has with, say, the Tina Fey character, because I think that speaks to him as... having a different relationship to the concept of traditional marriage than the Tina Fey character does.
So Tina Fey looks on this woman with pity, whereas Domingo's character is encouraging her to take next steps. I think that's a smart little nuance there. You don't need to hide. You need to get yourself a massage, go shopping, have yourself an adventure, spend all his money. You could pair off pretty much any two of these characters in a scene and get something different except for Claude.
Claude would just be, I love my husband. Where's my husband? It gets something right about middle age. When Will Forte's character buys Tina Fey's character some record albums, they're all my favorite bands. And it was like, oh, I feel targeted, ruthlessly targeted. And as an ex-theater critic, it gets something right about terrible theater.
At one point, we see a play that the daughter of Steve Carell and Carrie Kenny Silver.
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Chapter 5: What themes are explored regarding marriage and relationships?
There's an intellect there. Maybe that's the writer's sensibility or in this case the producer's sensibility, but it leads her to kind of hold back a bit. And you kind of get a sense of her standing outside herself, kind of next to the character, listening to how she's saying the words. Do you guys know what I'm talking about here?
Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I can totally see that at the same time. I think for this character, it works just because of her whole, like, especially Kate and Jack's dynamic as a couple together, like. I kind of – not including Nick and Anne, but, like, out of the three couples, it feels as though they are the most, like, afraid to step on each other's toes in a way.
And for me, that sort of guardedness and her feeling a little – maybe still did is what you're getting at, Glenn. But, like, I felt it worked for the interactions that she has, especially with Jack. I didn't mind it. But –
i don't know i i think for me i'm like a tina fey apologist sometimes uh she has she's definitely done a lot of things where i'm like okay dina i don't know it was nice to see her back in a show and you know being a little bit vulnerable or trying to be a little bit vulnerable in a way that like you know 30 rock could get to sometimes but not always because that wasn't it wasn't the same show so this is different this is tina fey in her 50s and i'm i don't know i'm curious to see more of that from her
For sure. Yes, I felt that distance, but I found her mostly charming and vulnerable, right? Like she's a person who always thinks of herself as the smartest person in the room. And when that doesn't work, she doesn't really know how to handle herself.
And I felt that that was a good fit and that she was able to be kind of slyly funny without hamming it up, which, you know, I appreciated at the end of the day. Absolutely.
Yeah. And again, I do love Kate and Danny's relationship. I feel as though they were the most like I could totally see them being friends in real life. They just had a very good rapport. So I would love to see more Tina Fey and Coleman Domingo teaming up together because that's fun.
Now, I know it's a nightmare for you because you're just like me. You love making jokes and picking fights.
I don't like picking fights. I like winning fights.
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Chapter 6: How does the show compare to Tina Fey's previous work?
You should definitely check it out if you haven't already. That brings us to the end of our show. Glenn Weldon, Christina Escobar, thanks so much for being here. This was fun. It was. Thank you. Thank you. And just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio. And you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor free.
So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash happy hour or visit the link in our show notes. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and edited by Mike Katziff. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy. And Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thanks so much for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Ayesha Harris. We'll see you all next time.