The Four Seasons
Winter, spring, summer, and fall, come rain or come shine, at home or abroad, Anne and Nick, Kate and Jack, and Danny and Claude, get together. Of the three married couples, Nick and Anne and Kate and Jack are white and heterosexual with college-age daughters, and Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani) are a cross-racial (black American and white Italian respectively), out-gay couple with a devoted but open relationship.
These are not run-of-the-mill friendships. Most of the group have bonded across years (since their college days) become godparents to each other’s children, and seen each other through difficult times. They know each other’s foibles, patterns, and secrets. They are not just fair-weather friends. They are friends that have seen each other through good and bad and their profound bonds are exemplified by their ritualistic group vacations (or stay-cations) which they take four times a year, hence the four seasons.
This eight-episodes dramedy comes from the creative minds of Tina Fey (who plays Kate), Lang Fisher, and Tracey Wigfield. Fey is of course also famous as a creator and actress in such big screen hits like Sisters (2015) with Amy Poehler and television triumphs like 30 Rock (2006-2013). Although there are plenty of laughs, The Four Seasons is not a raunchy comedy like The Hangover franchise (2009, 2011, 2013) and it has some of the ride-or-die friendship connectedness of the characters in the Sex and the City and And Just Like That franchises. It is perhaps closest in feeling to The Big Chill (1983) and it is similarly punctuated by life-changing milestones, human dramas, difficult dilemmas, and touching relationships.
Each of the four seasons is mapped out across two 30-minute episodes. The pivotal drama emerges in the spring when Nick (Steve Carell) reveals to his friends that he intends to leave his devoted wife Anne (Kerri Kenney). Shocked and flailing to provide sound advice, they attempt impartiality, an impossibility since they are all within the same friend group. What’s worse, they have gathered at Nick and Anne’s place for their seasonal get-together, so they are literally trapped under one roof. But the drama keeps coming as Anne, who has sent Nick on a long-distance hunt for bagels reveals to all that she has planned a vow renewal complete with music, a minister, and a gaggle of invited friends and family (including her dad played by Alan Alda of the original The Four Seasons movie from 1981, that co-starred Carol Burnett ). Ah, awkward!
Now it falls to Kate (Tina Fey) and Jack (a subdued, awkward, and rather overly pensive Will Forte) to figure out whether to warn Nick by phone before his imminent return. They don’t of course, and he literally drives into his vow renewal and saunters down the aisle, flabbergasted, towards his wife of twenty-five years, Anne, who is standing under a flower arch in a white wedding gown in front of dozens of guests. We need to say it again, awkward! But Nick “escapes” his vow renewal in the most spectacular and improbable way. After Anne completes her vows, the pottery kiln he had insisted on installing himself (against the advice of a professional) for Anne in her shed/art studio explodes into a fireball.
In the following episode, Nick and the gang are on vacation sans Anne who has been unceremoniously replaced by a thirty-something, nubile, blonde named Ginny (Erika Henningsen). The discomfort is both social and physical as the group settles into the hippie-not-chic, stripped down, yurt landscape of the tropical “resort” that Ginny has picked (or shall we say, imposed upon them). As Domingo’s Danny puts it hilariously to Fey’s Kate, this hotel “is the equivalent of a white guy with dreads” instead of what it should be, “Lenny Kravitz”! Nick is desperation personified. Desperate to prove himself worthy of Ginny’s attention, desperate for his friends to like Ginny, and desperate for Ginny to fit in with his dearest friends. For their part, Kate and Jack do their weary best to play along while Danny and Claude escape to the nearby four-star resort for some upscale relaxation, only to accidentally bump into Anne whose choice of hotel is decidedly not an accident. Awkward!
A particularly hilarious plot unfolds as Nick and Anne’s almost-grown daughter Lila (Julia Lester) hosts everyone at her university for the performance of her play in which she stars as a devastated daughter whose selfish father has disgraced himself and his family by having an affair with a younger woman (symbolized by a plastic blow-up sex doll), thereby betraying her unsuspecting mother (played by an oversized green, mascot-looking witch). It is only after Nick, Anne, Ginny, and the gang sit through Lila’s cringe-worthy theatrical performance, that Nick is confronted by the full scope of the damage he has inflicted upon his family.
As the episodes and seasons unfold, the habits, patterns, and challenges of the group – individual, romantic, and collective – are revealed. As the angst-ridden, “is this all there is?” Nick enters his quintessential mid-life crisis complete with younger girlfriend and sports car, Anne who has devoted far too much of her life (as so many good wives and mothers do) to taking care of their husbands and children, must figure out who she is and what is left for her on the other side of a twenty-five-year marriage. Meanwhile, Kate is sick and tired of care taking every little detail of the life she shares with her husband Jack, and Jack feels overlooked and neglected by Kate who constantly seeks out Danny as her chosen intellectual companion, leaving him to spend time with Claude who they all tend to see as needy, flighty, and emotionally demanding. But Claude is also caring and nurturing, something which Danny certainly needs as he first heads into and then recovers from heart surgery. But it is the nature of his often-smothering love language that leaves Danny desperate for space. At the resort, when Claude rubs sunscreen on the brown skin of Danny’s feet under protest, Claude pipes up reminding him that “melanoma of the feet is how Bob Marley died”.
It is these patterns and the relationship crises they provoke that are exposed in hilarious and bittersweet ways across the eight episodes and four seasons of the show. But as much as the show is about celebrating the bonds of friendship, it is also about the limits and boundaries of such bonds and what happens when relationships are tested. Kate, out of synch with Jack both sexually and emotionally, turns to Danny for companionship in destructive ways, stating plainly that Danny relies on her for “intelligent conversation” to avoid his handsome and ridiculous husband. But Kate’s mean-spirited dismissal of Claude is a bridge too far for Danny and we see in his defense of Claude a renewed appreciation of all that his loving husband does to keep him safe, well, and happy.
But all is not necessarily well with Nick and Ginny as they increasingly come to find that their worlds – at least in terms of friendships – do not fit seamlessly together. By New Year’s Eve, it becomes clear that each of them do not understand or embrace the cultural references, interests, music, and culinary tastes of the other’s friend group. But will this be enough to break them up? When on the New Year’s Eve ski trip with Ginny’s pals, Nick retreats to their bedroom to video chat with his friends who are vacationing with Anne and her new love interest Terry (Toby Huss), his answer to Kate’s query about how his “Real World Snow Town vacation” is going (a dismissive reference to the MTV Reality TV franchise), he responds, “there’s no booze and no meat and they made me drink mushroom coffee”.
But just as all of the relationships seem to be teetering on the edge between breakthrough and breakdown, tragedy strikes and it’s all hands on deck. The truest test of their love and devotion comes in the winter as they must band together to see one of their own through an unexpected storm. But even then, the sorrow is tinged with humour as the outsider Terry serenades the group with his tone-deaf rendition of Candle in the Wind.
The Four Seasons is a touching, funny, and dramatic take on love, marriage, and friendship at mid-life. Interestingly, all the episodes are set when the core group of friends gather for leisure and family moments, so work and career (although sometimes mentioned) are peripheral. This allows the narrative interactions and dialogue to focus on the development, transformations, triumphs, and heartbreaks of romantic love and friendship. Winter, spring, summer or fall, these friends are worth spending time with.