Tina Fey’s ‘The Four Seasons’ Has Nothing Funny to Say About Middle-Aged Problems

In the series premiere of 30 Rock, created by Tina Fey, TV showrunner Liz Lemon (Fey) meets Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), GE’s new Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming and, thus, her new boss. Most of the time, the humor of their relationship derives from the gap between Liz’s quasi-adolescent mess of a life and Jack’s suave self-assurance. Liz is the one who can (for instance) eat a foot-long sandwich in a few gigantic bites rather than abandon it at a TSA checkpoint, whereas Jack is the one who’ll change into a full tuxedo after 6 p.m. on an average weekday because he’s not “a farmer.” 

But Jack can get up to nonsense too: picking up an Eastern European sex worker and bringing her to ruin one of his stars’ Valentine’s Day plans; bringing a seemingly catatonic patient on a date with his girlfriend Elisa (Salma Hayek), the man’s caregiver; intentionally backing over his mother Colleen (Elaine Stritch) with his car. Being in his 48th year, in other words, doesn’t preclude Jack from being ridiculous sometimes. But based on The Four Seasons, it seems like many of the people who have created and starred in some of the most ridiculous comedies of the past 25 years are done being silly.

In its original iteration, The Four Seasons was a 1981 feature film. Alan Alda wrote, directed and starred as lawyer Jack; with his magazine editor wife Kate (Carol Burnett), Jack joins two other long-married couples on regular vacations, in chapters that correspond to the titular time periods. When Nick (Len Cariou) ends his marriage to Anne (Sandy Dennis) in the opening “Spring” segment, everyone has to make uncomfortable adjustments, most especially to accommodate Nick’s new girlfriend Ginny (Bess Armstrong). 

Netflix’s series remake was co-created by Fey with Lang Fisher (a one-time 30 Rock writer who went on to co-create Never Have I Ever) and Tracey Wigfield (a longtime 30 Rock writer who also created Great News, on which Fey was an executive producer). Like Alda (who had a recurring role on 30 Rock as Jack’s biological father Milton Greene), Fey works on both sides of the camera. She stars as Kate, a recent empty-nester married to Jack (Will Forte). This time, Nick is played by Steve Carell, and Anne by The State’s Kerry Kenney. While the movie’s third couple, Danny and Claudia, were played by Jack Weston and Rita Moreno, the show’s Danny (Colman Domingo) is in an open marriage with Claude (Marco Calvani). Like the character names, the show’s story beats echo the film’s, and play out on holidays at regular intervals: a marriage ends; a much younger partner enters the scene; a parents’ college weekend ends in bruised feelings; a ski lodge is the setting for potentially fatal catastrophes.

Despite the capers Jack Donaghy was capable of in his day, what makes The Four Seasons depressing is that it feels so grown-up. Remember, it stars Carell, Fey, Forte and Kenney, all of whom have been sketch comedy superstars for decades. The first time you saw Chicago Second City veteran Carell might have been in this Dana Carvey Show sketch, in which he and Stephen Colbert played waiters with an especially unfortunate affliction.

Carell went on to play the world’s most confident moron in the American remake of The Office. Yes, his Michael Scott matured enough to be worthy of his eventual wife Holly (Amy Ryan), but with all due respect to their beautiful love story, was it remotely as memorable as the time he cooked his foot on a George Foreman Grill and then made it everyone’s problem by covering it in bubble wrap and coming in to work?

Even if Fey had never gone on to create 30 Rock — in which she pretends to believe she’s Princess Leia to get out of jury duty, blackmails Jack when they are mistakenly married in a French-language wedding ceremony and takes a stranger hostage on a plane — she would be an eternal legend for writing “Colonel Angus” during her time at Saturday Night Live.

The challenge with Forte is determining which of his past characters is the craziest. You might want to say MacGruber until you remember that, in service of playing Phil/Tandy on The Last Man on Earth, he spent a significant period of his real life walking around with half his head shaved. 

And as for Kenney: consider that Reno 911!’s Trudy Wiegel might be the most conventional sketch comedy character she’s ever played.

Meanwhile, every credited Four Seasons writer has previously written on at least one Tina Fey production — the exception being Lisa Muse Bryant, an executive producer on the comparably joke-dense Primo, my pick for the best comedy series of 2023. So given everyone involved, you’re perfectly justified to expect that The Four Seasons will be madcap insanity of a comparable caliber. Sadly, those expectations will not be met, and all you’ll find here are gently dramedic stories befitting the characters’ ages and stations in life. How much should we blame Nick’s marital boredom on Anne’s complacency? Is Danny being reckless by delaying a scheduled medical procedure? Questions to chuckle at, knowingly and not too loudly! Probably nothing made me feel less excited to finish the season than a storyline about Kate getting too mean when she drinks. A Tina Fey character getting dragged for casual, unthinking cruelty? We’ve already done this, and it was much more satisfying when she just stomped out on the accusation, ultimately unrepentant.

I understand that, as the years roll on, even the most fearless performers have to mellow, if for no other reason than that their orthopedists have urgently told them to. It’s potentially dangerous enough for Molly Shannon (age 60) to show up at the SNL50 special and do Sally O’Malley kicks; no one expects her to throw herself into a stack of chairs à la Mary Katherine Gallagher. Even Forte is in his normal era. But there could have been ways for this Four Seasons to have started with relatable middle-aged stories and heightened them into absurdity. The proof is Girls5eva, also executive-produced by Tina Fey. While half the musical comedy of that show was built around soundalike late ‘90s/early ‘00s pop, the other half was about women in their 40s hilariously turning their current lives into fodder for their new songs.

All I could see watching this take on The Four Seasons was evidence of joke opportunities producers let go by. If Anne’s addiction to a cheapo mobile resource management game is an issue for Nick, why just make it the real franchise Farmville and not something fictional and thus even more inane? Why is Jack trying to bond with Claude over Jack’s gift to him of a Napoleon biography, and not a book about something or someone even more obscure or less compelling? (Why does Claude keep working his way through it instead of trying to ditch it in increasingly outlandish ways, only to get caught by Jack?) If Kate’s desire to cut her hair short against Jack’s wishes is a running debate in their household, why don’t we get to see her do it and immediately regret it? We’re told there are crocodiles at the resort in the “Summer” episodes, yet no one runs afoul of them? We’re told Nick doesn’t understand how the family iCloud works, yet none of his nudes show up on it? Unlike everyone on the staff of The Four Seasons, I’m not a professional comedy writer who’s worked on some of the best sitcoms of the 21st century, which is why all of the above look like first-thought jokes. I still stand by them with more conviction than anyone should the no-thought jokes of The Four Seasons.

A hanging plot thread sets up a possible second season I personally don’t need. I’d respect these writers’ and performers’ desire to break from their past work in elastic-reality sitcoms and do something more grounded if the product that resulted didn’t seem so defeated, but everyone who made this seems to have arrived at it already exhausted, resentful and running at 50-percent capacity. I get it: I probably don’t get enough sleep, exercise or fiber as I could, either. But that’s all the more reason for me not to clamor for more of The Four Seasons. I don’t need a trip to OTHER people’s conventional middle-aged problems. I have those at home.