The Four Seasons Season 2 Review (2026): Tina Fey's Netflix Comedy Returns

Last spring, Netflix quietly dropped one of its best comedies in years — an eight-episode adaptation of Alan Alda's 1981 film about three middle-aged couples whose quarterly group vacations slowly turn into therapy sessions. The Four Seasons was supposed to be a midlife dramedy that no one would talk about. Instead, it ended Season 1 with the highest viewer-retention of any Netflix comedy that year, and a finale that pulled the rug out from under one of the central marriages. Season 2 lands May 28.

Where Season 1 Left Off

(Spoilers if you haven't watched Season 1 yet.) The fall episode broke up Nick and Anne's marriage; the winter episode introduced Ginny, Nick's much-younger new partner. By spring, the friend group has fractured along generational and loyalty lines, and the season ended with a literal funeral that the trailer promises will set up Season 2's emotional core.

Who Returns for Season 2

The full original ensemble returns:

• Tina Fey as Kate, the group's emotional anchor
• Steve Carell as Jack, who finally gets his big arc this season
• Will Forte as Danny, in what early reviewers say is his best dramatic comedy work to date
• Colman Domingo as Claude, whose magnetic Season 1 performance generated Emmy buzz
• Kerri Kenney-Silver as Anne
• Marco Calvani as Claude's husband
• Erika Henningsen as Ginny, now elevated to series regular

New additions include a guest arc from Maya Rudolph as a college friend who reappears, and a brief but pivotal turn from Bowen Yang.

The Premise, Reapplied

Like Season 1, each two-episode block is anchored to a season — spring, summer, fall, winter — and a different vacation destination. Season 2 reportedly opens at a beach house in May and closes around the holidays. The show's strongest structural choice is using each vacation as a pressure cooker for relationships that would otherwise drift along on routine.

What Season 2 Is Really About

Tina Fey, who co-created the series with Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield, has talked in pre-launch interviews about Season 2 being explicitly about grief — the funeral that closes Season 1 reshapes who these characters are. That is a tonal shift away from Season 1's lighter "are you secretly miserable in your marriage?" register. Expect more crying, more confrontation, and (still) a lot of jokes that land harder because of the weight underneath them.

How It Compares to Other Adult Comedies

The most useful comparisons are not to other Netflix shows but to This Is Us (for the multi-couple emotional ensemble) and The Big Chill (for the friend-group-aging premise). The Four Seasons sits somewhere between, with the comedic muscle of its 30 Rock and SNL pedigree giving it more genuinely funny moments per episode than either reference.

If you bounced off Season 1 because you found it too talky, Season 2 will probably not change your mind. If you loved it for exactly that reason, you are about to get the more ambitious version of that show.

Should You Watch Day One?

Yes if you finished Season 1. The cliffhanger demands it. Yes if you love adult comedies with emotional stakes. Wait for reviews only if you have not seen Season 1 yet — in which case start there first. The whole series rewards being watched in order.

Track Reviews on Netflix

The free CineMan AI Chrome extension overlays IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes scores on every Netflix title automatically. The moment Four Seasons Season 2 premieres on May 28, you will see how it is rating without leaving the Netflix tab.