Four men from Rome, all of them past forty, sat through a course designed to take apart the man they had been raised to be. They share a group chat called Maschi veri, real men, and they walked out of that course convinced the job was done. The joke of the new season is written into its own synopsis: they now describe themselves as deconstructed from toxic masculinity, and every relationship around them has flipped anyway.

Real Men (Maschi veri) is the Italian comedy series Netflix adapted from the Spanish hit Machos alfa, and its second season brings back the same four leads: Maurizio Lastrico as Mattia, Matteo Martari as Massimo, Francesco Montanari as Riccardo and Pietro Sermonti as Luigi. Netflix’s description of the new episodes is unusually blunt about the plan. The four couples are found in the exact opposite position from where the first season left them, the men are as out of place as ever, and the friendship between them is tighter than before. Matteo Oleotto and Milena Cocozza direct from scripts by Furio Andreotti, Giulia Calenda and Ugo Ripamonti, with Matteo Rovere producing for Groenlandia, part of the Banijay group.

The course is over. The practical exam starts now

The first season sent the four friends into that course because the old script had stopped paying out. Massimo, a television executive, lost his job over sexist remarks. Mattia, separated from his wife, was pushed onto dating apps by his teenage daughter Emma. Luigi’s marriage to Tiziana had gone cold, and Riccardo, a habitual cheater, found that his partner Ilenia had ideas of her own about what a couple owes itself. That was the setup, and the premise rested on the distance between the seminar room and the lives waiting outside it.

The second season moves that gap to a new place. The men no longer claim ignorance; they claim graduation. Netflix’s synopsis says they feel deconstructed yet are still chasing a balance between the sexes that keeps slipping away, now that fresh changes in status, relationships and couple dynamics force them to look for it again. The trailer is cut to Annalisa’s song “Maschio” and carries a line that works as the season’s thesis: Maschi si nasce. Uomini si diventa. You are born male; you become a man. The phrase is doing two jobs at once. It sounds like the lesson of the course, and it is also exactly what their fathers would have said.

That doubleness is where the premise has room to be funny. A man who has learned the vocabulary of change has a new way to be right, and the reversal the synopsis promises reads like a device built to test him on it. If the partner who used to wait is now the one who leaves, and the man who used to leave is now the one who waits, the question stops being whether he knows the theory. It becomes whether he can stand on the other side of it without turning the experience into another speech about himself.

An Italian answer to a Spanish format

Machos alfa, created by Alberto and Laura Caballero, became one of Netflix Spain’s most durable comedies and ran for five seasons. Netflix then rebuilt the same premise locally in four countries. France got Super Mâles, the Netherlands got Haantjes, Germany got Alphamännchen, and Italy got Maschi veri. The French version ended after a single season. The Italian one is back, which makes this second run a useful measure of what the format needs in order to survive translation.

What Rome gives it is a tradition. Italian cinema has been staging middle-aged men who refuse to grow up since the commedia all’italiana, and the four-friends machine is one of its oldest tools. Mario Monicelli’s Amici miei turned a band of Florentine friends and their pranks into a portrait of men hiding from age. Gabriele Muccino’s L’ultimo bacio made the same fear generational, and Paolo Genovese’s Immaturi literally sent a group of forty-year-olds back to retake their school-leaving exam. Real Men belongs to that line, with one twist: the exam these men are retaking is about how to be men at all.

The casting reads that lineage knowingly. Sermonti and Carolina Crescentini, one of the season’s new arrivals, both appeared in Boris, the cult satire of Italian television production, which is a sly echo for a show whose most visible casualty in the first season was a TV executive. Montanari carries the memory of Il Libanese from Romanzo criminale – La serie, one of the most swaggering men Italian television has produced, and here plays a man whose swagger is the problem.

Five new faces on a map turned upside down

Crescentini joins as Simona, alongside Silvia D’Amico as Paola, Alessio Boni as Giordano, Giancarlo Commare as Augusto and Ilenia Pastorelli as Tecla. Netflix has not described their roles beyond saying they enter the already tangled personal and romantic lives of the four leads, and that restraint is worth respecting: none of the plotting around them is public. The names themselves suggest range. Boni is remembered for La meglio gioventù, Pastorelli won a David di Donatello for Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot, and Commare is known to a younger audience from SKAM Italia, three generations of Italian screen acting arriving in the same group of friends.

The returning ensemble keeps the women who shaped the first season: Thony as Tiziana, Sarah Felberbaum as Ilenia, Laura Adriani as Daniela, Alice Lupparelli as Emma, Nicole Grimaudo as Federica, plus Davide Iacopini as Eugenio. In a format that is nominally about four men, the women are the fixed points the men measure themselves against, and a season built on reversed couples depends on them more, not less.

What the course cannot certify

A comedy about unlearning has a structural trap. The more fluently its heroes talk about change, the more their progress looks like a new costume, and the more the series risks rewarding the performance it claims to mock. The first season could laugh at men who did not get it. The second has to deal with men who think they do. Whether a role that was praised for decades can really be dropped, or whether it can only be replaced by a better-rehearsed version of the same man, is the question these four friends carry into the new episodes, and no seminar hands out an answer to it.

Real Men season 2: what to know

When and where does it premiere? Real Men season 2 premieres on Netflix on 7 October 2026.

Is it a remake? Yes. It is the Italian adaptation of the Spanish Netflix series Machos alfa (Alpha Males), created by Alberto and Laura Caballero.

Who is in the cast? Maurizio Lastrico, Matteo Martari, Francesco Montanari and Pietro Sermonti lead, with Thony, Sarah Felberbaum, Laura Adriani, Alice Lupparelli, Nicole Grimaudo and Davide Iacopini returning. New this season: Carolina Crescentini, Silvia D’Amico, Alessio Boni, Giancarlo Commare and Ilenia Pastorelli.

Do I need to watch season 1 first? It helps. The first season, eight episodes released in 2025, is on Netflix, and the new season starts from the reversed situation of all four couples.

How many episodes are there? Netflix has not listed the episode count in its announcement.

What song is in the trailer? “Maschio” by Annalisa.