This article contains spoilers for The Four Seasons Season 2.
Escapist television always feels more appealing as summer approaches, and Netflix comfortably leans into that appeal with The Four Seasons. Returning on May 28 for its second season, the comedy once again delivers eight episodes split evenly across spring, summer, fall, and winter. Season 2 deepens the series’ exploration of long-term relationships, parenthood, ageing, and grief, even if it occasionally stretches itself too far in search of drama.
Where Season 1 built toward Nick’s (Steve Carell) death, these episodes focus on the emotional aftermath. Grief lingers over every relationship, though it manifests differently for each character. Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani) question whether they have missed their chance to become parents, Kate (Tina Fey) and Jack (Will Forte) begin confronting how unhappy they have become together, while Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) and Ginny (Erika Henningsen) evolve from bitter resentment toward something far more intimate and co-dependent.
Visually, the green screen work remains distractingly poor at times, but the series continues to thrive on its lavish locations. Spring sees the group head to a mountain range to spread Nick’s ashes, while summer relocates everyone to New Jersey’s beaches and boardwalks. Fall centres around Thanksgiving drama at Anne’s home before winter transports the surviving friendships to Italy.
The spring episodes establish the tension that carries across the season. Jack insists on organising an annual memorial hiking weekend for Nick, complete with matching shirts. He treats the ritual as a way of preserving both Nick and the friend group itself, despite everyone’s visible reluctance. Kate convinces the others to indulge him because it’s obvious how desperately he needs it.
Much of the season’s strongest material emerges from this trip, particularly as Anne struggles to tolerate Ginny’s presence. She bluntly points out that women are not supposed to remain friends with the younger women their dead husbands left them for, regardless of how much everyone else has grown to love Ginny. Matters become even messier once the group discovers Nick and Anne never finalised their divorce before his death, leaving Anne in control of his estate while Ginny prepares legal action over financial support for the baby.
The storyline also delivers some of the season’s funniest moments, especially as the group attempts to continue the memorial hike despite no one wanting to participate. In one perfectly timed scene, Danny forgets to bring Nick’s ashes to the summit entirely. A nearby manhunt also traps the group in their motel with no food and escalating tensions until Jack eventually attacks a food truck.
Across all eight episodes, the ensemble remains the show’s greatest asset. Domingo and Fey continue to play brilliantly off one another, balancing decades of familiarity against mounting frustration with the choices the other keeps making. Elsewhere, Forte delivers the season’s most heartbreaking performance as Jack struggles with grief, loneliness, and the growing distance between himself and Kate. His sadness becomes increasingly difficult to watch as the season progresses, even if all ends well come the finale.
Danny and Claude’s storyline is among the season’s strongest. After Nick’s death forces Danny to confront his own mortality, he suddenly decides he may want a child. Claude, meanwhile, worries they have already missed their opportunity. The series handles the disagreement with refreshing maturity, never positioning either man as entirely right or wrong. Instead, it strengthens their relationship rather than threatening to destroy it, regardless of the outcome. Domingo and Calvani are excellent together, making it hard for you to side completely with one or the other – it’s almost a gift to watch them spar and trade barbs.
Surprisingly, it is Anne and Ginny who become the show’s most fascinating pairing as their dynamic shifts drastically between spring and summer. Initially combative, the two eventually develop an uneasy understanding before growing unexpectedly close after Ginny gives birth to Eugene off-screen. By summer, Anne has become an essential part of Eugene’s upbringing, to the point where she tests Ginny’s breast pump on herself to make sure it works. Their chemistry frequently suggests the possibility of romantic development, yet the series never fully commits to it.
Instead, Anne receives a brief romantic subplot involving a man Jack befriends during the summer. However, the storyline feels oddly underdeveloped. Significant emphasis is placed on Anne receiving his phone number, only for him to disappear until the finale. When Anne finally calls him, the interaction proves disastrous, making it difficult not to question why the series avoided exploring the more compelling dynamic between Anne and Ginny instead. Still, the subplot allows for a surprise guest appearance in the finale’s closing stages, which hints at some much-needed growth for Anne should the series continue into a third season.
Kate and Jack’s marriage provides another major emotional thread. Throughout the season, Kate attempts to keep Jack emotionally afloat while falling apart herself. Their marathon storyline becomes symbolic of the broader problems within their relationship. Jack believes they are training together, while Kate secretly skips runs to eat sandwiches alone at a deli because she cannot bear disappointing him.
Fey plays Kate’s exhaustion particularly well as she struggles to admit that she feels purposeless now that her child has grown up, her friendships have changed, her career is not what she imagined, and her marriage increasingly revolves around managing Jack’s emotional well-being. Their “freeballing” approach to their relationship – where they stop trying to fix each other and instead focus on their own happiness – initially sounds sitcom-like, yet the series uses it to expose just how disconnected they have become.
Season 2 occasionally loses momentum, particularly during the COVID flashback episode, which mostly exists to facilitate a guest appearance and flesh out backstory viewers can infer. The transition between seasons also feels abrupt at times, leaving audiences to piece together important developments offscreen, particularly regarding Anne and Ginny’s evolving relationship. Some storylines additionally arrive too late or resolve too quickly, especially Anne’s romantic subplot. Despite this, the season finishes strongly, with each ending feeling emotionally earned.
Like Season 1, The Four Seasons succeeds because it depicts middle age in ways television rarely attempts. These characters carry decades of friendship, compromise, resentment, and love. They care deeply for one another, but that love does not magically solve anything. Season 2 develops that idea even further, allowing grief and uncertainty to coexist with awkward holidays, disastrous flirtations, and the exhausting messiness of long-term friendship.
It remains uneven in places, but when The Four Seasons works, it delivers some of the most emotionally honest and rewarding comedy currently streaming. At its best, it is a heartfelt ode to long-term relationships, finding humour and poignancy in the mess of people who continue choosing each other, even as life changes around them.
