Name: The Four Seasons
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Released: 2026-05-28
Cast: Tina Fey, Will Forte, Colman Domingo, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Marco Calvani

Six friends pack for an Italian villa they booked months ago. One of them — the one who left his wife for a woman half his age and was killed by a car before he could find out he was about to be a father — is not on the flight. The other five are, and they intend to keep going. The Four Seasons is back, and the midlife ensemble comedy-drama Tina Fey built around a forty-year-old Alan Alda film returns to Netflix carrying a chair it cannot fill.

Season 1 used the show’s signature device — three couples, four shared vacations a year — to surface the ordinary betrayals of long marriages. Nick (Steve Carell) walked out on Anne for Ginny, a dental hygienist his daughter’s age, and the group spent eight episodes deciding what kind of friends they were willing to be while it happened. Season 2 needs the device for something heavier. Nick died at the end of S1 driving back to the cul-de-sac he chose over his marriage; his car insurance policy, his unborn child and his half-built second life are the assets the surviving five inherit. The new season picks up the trips and keeps them running — a winter weekend at the Jersey Shore, then the Italian week Nick was supposed to be on — and what it asks, without ever quite asking it out loud, is whether a long-running ritual like the quarterly vacation is the friendship itself, or whether the friendship was the people inside it.

The choice that makes this work is restraint. Tina Fey directs the first two episodes herself, her first time behind the television camera, and her instinct is to hold a shot one beat longer than the joke wants. Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield — Fey’s two co-creators, who between them carry credits on 30 Rock, Never Have I Ever and Saved by the Bell: The College Years — write the season’s tightest character beats. The bigger surprise is the directing chair. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, the indie filmmakers behind American Splendor and The Extra Man, direct two episodes inside this Tina Fey workplace, and their flat, slightly drained register sits underneath the dialogue like a different show entirely. Lines arrive on their normal comic beat; the framing is paced for something more observational. The double exposure is what lets the season hold grief without ever going earnest. Colman Domingo directs an episode of his own, and his scenes register slightly differently from the rest — a more theatrical relationship to silence than the writers’ room reaches for.

Watch the dinner scenes and you can see the season’s argument before any character speaks it. The format Alda built in 1981 — three couples, six people — composed itself around a six-person table. Subtract one and the geometry breaks; subtract one and never re-fill it the same way, and every group shot is a memorial composition the dialogue is allowed to ignore. S2 keeps shooting the long table. The empty seat is not always at the obvious end. Sometimes a temporary guest occupies it — Steven Pasquale arrives in a recurring role the season uses sparingly, and the way he never quite fits the seating chart is the visual joke and the emotional argument at once. The audience is never told to feel anything in particular about the chair. The production design will not let them stop noticing.

There is a reason this lands harder than a vacation comedy should. The US Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness named middle-aged Americans as one of the most under-friended cohorts in the country, and the post-pandemic evaporation of weekday social infrastructure — offices, school pickup, religious attendance, ad-hoc Friday-night invitations — hit this group hardest. What replaced loose social mesh was the calendared friendship: the trip booked twelve months in advance, the group chat that runs the logistics. The Four Seasons takes that diminished landscape and presents it as warm — three couples who have organised the calendar of their lives around four shared vacations — until you notice it is a workaround. The vacation is the only structure these people have left for being in each other’s lives. Season 2 forces the show to acknowledge what its own format always implied.

The lineage matters. The Big Chill (1983) is the anchor reference for any friend-group reunion shaped by a death; thirtysomething made the form weekly; Grace and Frankie translated it to a Netflix-comfort register for an older audience. What The Four Seasons does differently is keep comedy as the primary register. The Big Chill let comedy live inside an essentially elegiac architecture; this show keeps the architecture comic and lets grief furnish the rooms. That is the rarer manoeuvre, and the season’s most consistent technical achievement.

Netflix sells The Four Seasons as comfort-watching: six characters audiences are now invested in, two glossy travel destinations (the Jersey Shore in winter, Italy in summer), eight episodes that can be cleared in a weekend. The show honours the contract on the surface and breaks it underneath. What you get is comfort food eaten at a long table with a missing person. Viewers who came for the first reading get a second one quietly handed to them, and the gap between the two is where the season’s meaning lives.

The platform context is worth naming. Netflix’s adult-comedy library is structurally thin compared with HBO’s, FX’s, or Apple’s; the streamer has historically dropped one-and-done miniseries and leaned on action, true crime and dating reality for habitual returning viewers. Renewing The Four Seasons within weeks of its May 2025 launch and slotting Season 2 into the same May window in 2026 is a deliberate move to build a returning-comedy rhythm in a category Netflix has not been competitive in. The mechanism is brand-name showrunners (Fey, Fisher, Wigfield) and a property with literal heritage IP — the Alan Alda film, which Alda himself appeared in during S1 — rather than a new-format gamble.

Inside the ensemble, the emotional translation work is unevenly distributed. Kerri Kenney-Silver, as Nick’s widow Anne, has the hardest job in the cast: playing a woman who was publicly humiliated by her husband and is now permanently bound to him by virtue of him being dead. Erika Henningsen, returning as Ginny, the pregnant fiancée a generation younger than everyone else in the room, is the season’s quiet test — the group’s willingness to make space for her is the measure of whether the ritual is about Nick or about itself. Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani’s married couple absorb most of the practical work of holding the trips together, the friends who book the restaurants and run interference when the conversation drifts somewhere a fragile person at the table cannot follow. Tina Fey and Will Forte, as Kate and Jack, play the version of long marriage where staying together is the whole job and the joke at once.

The question The Four Seasons opens in Season 2 and refuses to close is the one any group of long friends eventually has to face: whether the ritual was about the people, or the people about the ritual. Nick is the case study. His death does not end the trips. The trips keep happening. Does that prove the ritual was always more than him, or does it prove that the survivors have nowhere else to be friends? The season sits on both readings at once. The honest one is that it depends on who is in the chair next time, and on whether anyone says his name when the wine is poured.

The Four Seasons Season 2 premieres on Netflix on Thursday 28 May 2026, with all eight episodes available at launch. Returning cast: Tina Fey, Will Forte, Colman Domingo, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Marco Calvani and Erika Henningsen, with Steven Pasquale joining the season in a recurring role. Created and showrun by Tina Fey, Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield. Directors include Fey, Fisher, Wigfield, Colman Domingo, and Shari Springer Berman with Robert Pulcini.