The second season of The Four Seasons has been reviewed as even more fantastic than the first, with the latest take on Tina Fey’s update of the 1980s film praising the show’s sharp mix of grief, mess and jokes. The series, co-created and written by Fey, Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher, keeps its midlife comedy engine running through a set of holiday getaways that keep turning comic and painful at once.
That matters now because the show’s four-season structure has made each return feel like a new chapter in the same broken family. Each season is built around four fancy holidays, split into two gag-packed episodes apiece, and the second run leans hard on the fallout after Nick, played by Steve Carell, died at the end of season one. Kate, played by Tina Fey, remains in the middle of the shifting group dynamic, while Jack, Danny and Claude are all forced into new shapes around him.
The review’s appeal comes from how the show keeps making room for both the ridiculous and the raw. In spring, the grief-stricken sextet go on an upstate hike to scatter Nick’s ashes from his favorite mountain, only for the outing to be derailed first by a Brownies group, then by Danny forgetting the ashes entirely, and later by everyone hating each other while trapped in a retro motel during an active manhunt. The jokes keep coming, but so does the sadness.
By summer, the arrangement has become even stranger. Ginny, the much younger woman Nick left Anne for, has given birth, and Anne is now living with Ginny and a baby, so besotted with her new role that she is testing Ginny’s breast pump on her own nipple. Anne’s own line about women not being meant to be friends with the woman their dead husband left them for hangs over the whole setup, and the show uses that discomfort to keep the comedy from floating away.
That is what gives the second season its bite: it is hilarious while the characters are still working through death, resentment and the wreckage of old relationships. Danny and Claude want a baby, Jack has found a man friend for beach play dates, and Jack and Kate call their decision to grow apart on purpose “freeballing,” a joke that lands because the show never lets the hurt disappear underneath it. Even the family holidays keep mutating, with Big Thanksgiving ending in Jack kicking the turkey down the stairs and twisting his ankle, and Little Thanksgiving sending the story back to the Covid pandemic, when Steve was alive.
The real question left hanging is not whether the show can keep being funny; it clearly can. The question is how long this reconfigured foursome, now stretched by loss, babies and purpose-built distance, can stay in one emotional room before the cracks become the whole story.
