I think Netflix's The Four Seasons proved that a mid-life crisis can be as chaotic as a coming-of-age comedy

Netflix has recently become a brand ambassador of sorts, for coming-of-age teen comedies. While I enjoy a chaotic teen comedy, it has been overdone on the network in recent years. Therefore, Tina Fey's newest comedy The Four Seasons interested me, because it promised a maddening ride into the mid-life crises of three couples.

While I expected the show to be humorous and heartfelt, I did not expect it to be as chaotic as a coming-of-age tale. Watching six adults in their late fifties making bad decisions was not what I expected, but it only made me realise that growing up is a constant process and thus never stops.

The Four Seasons follows three middle-aged couples who explore heartbreaks and friendships on four seasonal getaways. Turbulent yet tender, the show proves that a midlife crisis can be just as chaotic and unexpectedly humorous as a coming-of-age tale.

More on The Four Seasons in our story.

The Four Seasons: Healing, heartbreak, and couples therapy

While all three couples desperately needed couples therapy, only one pair actually got it. The emotional centre of the group, Kate (Fey) and Jack (Will Forte), are the poster couple who usually plan the group's lavish and seasonal escapades.

The supposedly happy couple starts to question whether their shared jokes and sarcasm are a defense mechanism to conceal the facade of a failing marriage underneath.

When Nick (Steve Carell) announces that he plans to end his marriage to Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) on the couple's 25th wedding anniversary, the group goes into turmoil, the repercussions of which followed them in all the successive getaways.

Nick and Anne are separated in Episode 1, following which he starts dating a young and attractive woman, while the other couples also seem on the verge of breaking up. Each episode feels like a ticking bomb and as the layers of these 'happy' couples, settled into the grooves of midlife, start to peel, and chaos erupts.

I found Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani) to be sharing the most interesting dynamic out of the lot. A middle-aged gay couple in an open marriage, Danny and Claude's marriage represented another dynamic of LGBTQ+ relationships, seldom explored on the small screen.

While their dynamic did not have the familiar tropes of a gay teen comedy like coming out of the closet, homophobic parents, or society's shame at large, they had their own roadblocks.

The supposedly stable couple of the group also undergoes a potential falling out when Danny gets a health scare that reshapes their core foundation of love and loyalty.

The Four Seasons: Grown-ups behaving badly? Yes please!

If you are expecting to take back some life-changing advice or a magical mantra to make relationships successful, The Four Seasons is not for you. All the couples depicted in the show are deeply flawed and if anything, I learned that marriages are about constant work and that does not stop even when you reach your fifties or sixties.

All the couples on the show were always just one fight away from a nasty divorce and while the show had its heartfelt moments, it also showed the ugly ones.

Funnily, I found all the similar tropes of a teen comedy, but six middle-aged people doing them made it all the more funny. Danny is hiding his smoking, Claude is lashing out at his husband, Jack is getting jealous of Kate and Danny-- and all the chaotic moments of the show were plainly childish.

However, the beauty of these conflicts, bittersweet fights and regret culminated into a portrait of people beginning the second innings of their lives.

As Lila said in the show, teenagers often forget that their parents are also humans first. The Four Seasons prove that even with the persistent nudge of time, the messiness and the chaos do not stop but you ultimately pick up the pieces and reinvent yourself for this second coming-of-age of your life.

The Four Seasons is now streaming on Netflix.

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