‘The Four Seasons — Season 2’: Gorgeous, empty, exhausting

Who doesn’t love a travel-soaked friendship drama? The picturesque melancholy, the oddballs running away from their emotions, the inevitable screaming match over dinner before everyone reconciles amid a soft chorus of crickets stitching the night together.

For the fifty-somethings of ‘The Four Seasons — Season 2’, the group holiday comes with one small complication: they are travelling to scatter their dead friend’s ashes.

All the genre staples are firmly in place. Conveniently timed midlife crises? Check. Raunchy conversations lubricated by rosé? Naturally. Oh, and also, there’s a secret pregnant girlfriend young enough to make everyone deeply uncomfortable.

Season 1 ended with Nick (‘The Office’ alum Steve Carell) dying suddenly after contemplating leaving his wife Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), alongside the revelation that he had fathered a child with Ginny (Erika Henningsen), a woman in her early thirties.

Season 2 picks up in the emotional debris left behind.

The now widowed Anne reluctantly joins Kate (Tina Fey), her relentlessly chipper husband Jack (Will Forte), and husbands Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani) on a trip through New York’s Catskills to scatter Nick’s ashes — with Ginny tagging along like the world’s most emotionally complicated carry-on luggage.

Based on Alan Alda’s 1981 film of the same name, both instalments of the series follow the friends across the titular four seasons, with each pair of episodes inching the title card further along the calendar. It is neat, clever, and perhaps a touch more organised than the lives of the people onscreen.

On the Catskills trip (spring), the serenity quickly reveals itself to be little more than scenic repression. Jack, taking Nick’s death the hardest, hurls himself into activities with the desperation of a Labrador denied emotional regulation, while Kate treats optimism less as a feeling than a professional obligation.

Danny and Claude — initially the group’s suspiciously frictionless couple — begin splintering over the possibility of parenthood, exposing anxieties neither can joke away. Meanwhile, Anne and Ginny circle each other through simmering inheritance disputes, before slipping into an increasingly uncomfortable co-dependence, after Ginny gives birth.

Comedy legend and first woman ‘Saturday Night Live’ head writer Tina Fey slips effortlessly into her trademark cadence of weary wit; ‘Euphoria’ scene-stealer and Emmy winner Colman Domingo, as always, is magnetic.

Calvani is wonderfully theatrical as Claude, leaning into every inch of the character’s Italian excess. Forte turns what could have been a one-note manchild into someone unexpectedly layered. It is Kenney-Silver who’s the most compelling presence of the show: eccentric, wounded, strangely lovable, even if traces of her Jerusha Sturgis of ‘Superstore’ occasionally wander in.

And yet, despite all this, something stubbornly refuses to click. Which perhaps makes ‘The Four Seasons’ harder to review than an outright disaster: nothing is objectively bad. The performances are strong, the dialogue polished, the characters thoughtfully written.

The problem is that the series never becomes… interesting.

The conflicts lack bite, dissolving almost as soon as they emerge; while the comedy never quite reaches the delirious heights one expects from Fey and co-creator Tracey Wigfield, long-time devotees of the cult of TV absurdism, from ‘30 Rock’ to ‘Great News’.

Without that sharp implausibility, what remains occasionally resembles a travel vlog made by someone who perhaps should rethink their career choice. Still, there is warmth here. By the end though, the series feels less like prestige dramedy and more like six simultaneous Zoom therapy sessions accidentally left unmuted.