“The Four Seasons” review: the ups and downs of the wedding in Midlife

Before the word “adult” attached to any form of media – books, films, websites – becomes synonymous with “pornographic”, it meant a kind of entertainment that was made for people who had lived a little life. People who wanted to read or see things that reflected their adult experience in which they could recognize familiar challenges, rendered as comedy or tragedy. It was the opposite of “juvenile”.

There was certainly a market for such things, perhaps even a market dominated by them – films like “Kramer vs kramer”, “ “The big thrill” and “A single woman” Pop to my aged mind. Even young people (uh), before having the opportunity to look exclusively, were interested, if memory serves it. (Maybe they do it again; let me know, young people.) Demography “49 and more” may not be the most precious of television, but it is a slice of fat of the population and many televisions.

So there is something old-fashioned in “The Four Seasons”, a new, very observable, windy and Netflix raid comedy by Tina Fey, Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield, refanting a super-sucking film from 1981 on the groom no longer. (Alan AldaWho wrote, directed and played in the film makes a cameo appearance here, so we can deduce its approval.)

The television version adds original twists and turns and new scenes – the series lasts twice as long as the film, after all – but generally follows the shape of the original story and the character of his characters, who share names with their prototypes (although Claudia has become Claude).

It is an entertainment for adults in the original sense, despite a character “only” at the beginning of the thirties, with jokes on the evils and pain, the typing of energy, the hours of sleeping earlier, the stress of long relationships in longer lives, and here and there a feeling of nostalgia for the people they were. Many will refer.

The narrative gambit concerns three couples meeting for a vacation every three months, if you can imagine. These are average courses higher, from the average age and, in such a control of their lives, they can afford to take, as a week of leave four times a year. Their vacation schedule gathers them in spring, summer, fall and winter – in this order, in history – a plan that allows conveniently Violin concerts To fill the soundtrack.

Fey plays Kate, married to Jack (Will Forte), who is a history teacher; Anyway, it is very hot on a biography of Napoleon. (No matter what someone does for work; some of them have jobs, but all have money.) Jack has briefly worked for the Guy Nick cover (Steve Carell), in New York House, shared with his wife Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), the first movement of these “four seasons”. Danny (Colman Domingo), who was at university with Jack and Kate, is an interior designer, married to Claude (Marco Calvani), an emotional Italian, whose main occupation (Pré) cares about Danny's health. (Jack is worried about his own health, but he is only a hypochondriac.)

It starts a little slowly – a little “why should we worry about these people, with their abundance of vacation?” Maybe it was just class resentment on my part. Soon, however, things are starting to percolate, with the announcement of Nick that he leaves Anne; His replacement in their pod is his dental hygienist, Ginny (Erika Henningsen, of Fey's “Meane Girls” Musical), a young woman living in the thirties. (Her age – that is to say that she is an adult – will be underlined.) No one pronounces the words “quarantine crisis” – maybe it is no longer something that someone says? (Research shows The term is with us 60 years, long enough to have a quarantine crisis.) But Nick and Ginny hurt themselves to declare that it is not like that. And it is true that Anne, currently addicted to playing a farm game on his iPad and not to use the repotting hangar, with the oven, that Nick built it, let the joy flee from his life.

Erika Henningsen plays Ginny, the new love interest of Nick (Steve Carell).

(Francisco Roman / Netflix)

The romantic do-si-do nick destabilizes the group and gives them something new to chat and compare their own lives with the oscillations during the following year. Ginny appears in the third episode (summer), which takes place in the Bahamas, where, delivered by Nick, she reserved the six in an uncomfortable vegan eco-resort. (Of course, the writers will have fun at the expense of eco-veganism, and the reaction of older characters.)

Fall takes place during the parents' weekend at the New England College where Kate and Jack, and Anne and Nick, each have a registered daughter (Ashlyn Maddox and Julia Lester, respectively) and where Kate, Jack and Danny were students. Winter finds them in a chalet in a snowy mountain, with a return to the lake house for the circular closure.

Dramaticly, Carell's scenario is dominant, and it is sympathetic in a game that does not hesitate to make it silly. But Fey, being Fey – “SNL”, winner From the Mark Twain Prize for American humor, named the best actor of the 21st century by the Guardian, twice listed on time 100, four times chosen from among the most beautiful people in People magazine, and the least eccentric character in the series – appears as its hub, its central intelligence. (Which puts the definitive eccentric character of strong to a disadvantage.)

If you are also aware of looking at famous faces like Fey and Carell and Strong and Domingo at work as according to the people they play, of course, it is good to see them, and know them because the actors did not relieve the tension that their characters create when they scratch each other. (Everyone has problems.)

Throughout the show, we will learn that marriage is work, that everyone does not believe in soul mate, that people in a new relationship could have more noisy sex than those who have been together for many years, and that humans have the ability to go crazy, perhaps in particular on vacation – a sad irony. There will be tensions inside and between couples; Part of their embarrassment can in turn annoy the spectator.

But it is, I suppose, the desired effect, and when the characters wake up with each other, “The Four Seasons” can be quite moving.