The Four Seasons: 'moving and funny' show stars Steve Carell and Tina Fey
Since her first hit show, the TV satire "30 Rock", the writer-producer Tina Fey has become known for overseeing "absurd, efficiently structured, joke-dense comedies", said Alison Herman in Variety. Her latest show on Netflix – a remake of Alan Alda's 1981 film of the same name – offers more of that, but with fewer laughs and added midlife wistfulness.
The series traces a year in the lives of three affluent couples in their 50s, who've been friends since college, and who now go on four mini-breaks together a year. On the first of these trips, Nick (Steve Carell) drops a bombshell, by revealing that he is planning to leave Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), his devoted wife of 25 years.
"The Four Seasons" promises much but never quite takes off, said Keith Watson in The Telegraph. "There are few gags here, just endless bitching and backbiting"; even worse, there's "little emotional heft binding these supposedly best buddies together", which fatally undermines the show's premise.
On the contrary, the series depicts a testing year in the lives of its protagonists movingly and effectively, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. It starts with a mix of heartbreak and farce as an apparently ignorant Anne secretly plans anniversary celebrations, while her friends debate whether to tell her Nick's intentions; it then deals in the tensions and reckonings that follow when they do divorce, and Nick brings his new girlfriend on the trips. This is a moving and funny show that captures the "warm, weary affection" that only "old friends and enduring couples really know".