‘The Four Seasons – Season 2’ Review: A Stronger But Still Modest Outing For A Talented Cast

From an exceptional ensemble, one tends to expect great things. The Four Seasons had everything it needed to deliver — but landed, unfortunately, in a middling and somewhat unremarkable place: a dramedy about three middle-aged bourgeois couples who vacation together four times a year — hence the title, drawn from Vivaldi — and use each trip to air their accumulated problems, conflicts, and grievances. Amiable but discreet, the first season did land a late punch that reshuffled the whole deck. And it’s that punch that makes Season 2 slightly better: more complex, more adult, more melancholic than what came before.

But talking about that requires spoiling what happened in Season 1. If you haven’t seen it, bookmark this and come back later. In the penultimate episode, Nick (Steve Carell) dies in a car accident. Nick had been the show’s primary dramatic engine — he separates from his wife Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) and begins dating a younger woman, Ginny (Erika Henningsen), who, we learn after the crash, is pregnant. The other two couples are Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani) and Jack (Will Forte) and Kate (Tina Fey), each carrying their own baggage — all of which is now compounded by the task of grieving a close friend. The group’s first trip of the new season, fittingly, revolves around scattering his ashes.

Season 2 proceeds without Carell — except in a flashback episode — and what might seem like a liability turns out to be something closer to a relief. With Nick gone, there’s no longer a gravitational center; the ensemble breathes more democratically. At first, the rhythm feels familiar: the couples cycle through their respective crises across a series of vacation settings. But grief hovers over everything. It’s Jack who begins exhibiting some quietly alarming behavior, and Kate who has to live alongside it — until both start pulling in opposite directions, each acting out in their own conflicted way.

Danny and Claude, meanwhile, wrestle with the question of adoption, and the divergent paths each considers put at risk what they’ve worked hard to build. The group also expands this season to include Nick’s two ex-wives and his baby, all of whom vacation alongside the others and navigate, in their awkward and sometimes comic ways, co-parenting and their own romantic lives. A good portion of the early episodes are devoted, half-earnestly and half-absurdly, to finding Anne a new partner. But gradually the comic register gives way to something with a bit more weight, and The Four Seasons begins to take its characters’ pain more seriously.

«The decisions we make now matter more because they’re the ones we’ll carry to the end of our lives,» one of them says — played for a laugh, but landing with a certain density beneath the lightness. Having a child, ending a marriage, reinventing yourself, daring to start over: at this point in their lives, any of these could be the last major bet they place, and what’s frightening isn’t the change itself but the possibility of getting it wrong. The Four Seasons doesn’t dig too deep into that unsettling idea, but the thought hovers over every scene.

The cast is predictably solid, and even when the show’s compulsion to land a joke every two minutes tips into excess, the sheer talent on screen keeps things watchable. This isn’t the series those names might lead you to expect — but it doesn’t entirely disappoint, either. It’s simply another agreeable dramedy about the troubles of a comfortable, insulated group of people while the chaos of the world around them passes by completely unnoticed.