Four Seasons is an American comedy miniseries featuring a group of six friends in their middle age, the series is an intimate portrait of how the lines between love and friendship start to blur over a long enough timeline. Told across 8 episodes, each about half an hour in length, this ensemble drama of travel and friendships invites us into the shifting emotional landscapes of three couples navigating long-term relationships, midlife crises, and unexpected sparks.
Tina Fey, who is also a writer on the show, stars as Katherine, who reconnects with her long-term friends and their spouses in four vacations taken across a year. Steve Carell stars brilliantly as Nick, in pursuit of finding a new life in his fifties, bringing a rupture to a long-lived married life with his partner Anne, played by Kerry Kenny-Silver—an actor and comedian who does justice to Anne’s delicate balance of quirks and self-deprecating humor. We also meet Danny and Claude, played respectively by Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani, portraying an intimate picture of two husbands in a marriage.
Four Seasons originally refers to Vivaldi’s quartet of compositions, consisting of four individual pieces based on the seasons—spring, summer, fall, and winter. The limited series, with only one season, often feels like a journey that surpasses the confines of a single season. Not only does the series adhere to the original idea of Four Seasons, but the friends also take four trips across these seasons. With two episodes dedicated to each trip, it genuinely feels like we are witnessing four seasons of a TV show neatly covered in a single season.
What makes Four Seasons work is its unwavering focus on the inner lives of the friendships. Jack, Katherine, and Danny shared the same alma mater, but with the addition of spouses, now their lives are close-knit in a circuit where love, temporary hatred, and reconciliation play their roles as needed. The crisis point of the show is not a nuclear disaster, a serial killer on the run, or an evil alien attack—it is simply the breakdown of a marriage. Four Seasons is entirely relevant to the contemporary struggles of people in their middle age, looking back at their youth with rose-tinted glasses and hopelessly trying to live unlived moments. The series explores four locations across the trips but does not quite put a finger on their names—a clever narrative device to never avert the eyes of the audience from the inner lives of the protagonists. The first trip begins at Nick and Anne’s lakeside cabin on their 25th anniversary, where the group realises that their marriage is falling apart. After a feeble attempt by the group torn between helping to salvage the marriage, picking sides between two friends in a failing relationship, and a vow-renewal ceremony gone wrong, the show jumps to the next phase in their lives—a summer vacation by the beach. This is where Nick’s new 32-year-old love interest, Ginny, is introduced, played by Erica Henningsen, with a “buttered-toast on a sunny morning” personality.
Four Seasons, even though dealing with a lot of emotional undercurrents, never paints their characters in a black and white palette. There is good and bad in the characters—flaws that make them a little more human—flaws like suspecting your partner over silly changes, getting jealous over little matters, or harboring hatred towards the “other woman” for jeopardizing your best friend’s marriage. Ginny becomes the punching bag of hatred for the group on the first trip; however, the series does an extremely good job of turning the trope of the “Other Woman” on its head by offering an unexpected reconciliation in the end.
We come across different archetypes among the friends in the series, which spoils the viewer with an abundance of personalities to choose from while identifying with a protagonist. Even though Nick and Anne’s falling marriage is the pivot, the series holds a mirror to the other relationships unfolding in the background. We have Katherine, who uses gentle parenting techniques with her husband, Jack, who is bad at logistics; we have Mama-Bird Claude, Danny’s Italian husband; and we have Anne—frail, quirky, and travelling ‘solo’ after her marriage falls apart. Along with the complexities of love and friendship, the series does a great job of exploring the strained relationship between parent and child in a broken vow. Lila, Nick and Anne’s child, who goes to college, harbors a deep hatred towards her father for “breaking” Anne’s heart. However, we see a lesson of quiet resilience in Anne’s character and what it means to be a family, even if staying connected only in the family iCloud.
The series is a journey—from shock to resistance and finally towards acceptance. In the end, Four Seasons evolves from being a drama of relationships to being more about how relationships are weathered by the passage of time. Relationships come with the risk of unexpected fractures, uncomfortable silences, and passive betrayals—but as human beings, we can only take smaller steps towards accepting things for what they are. It is entirely human to fail. Whether it is in Anne’s acceptance of Ginny or in Jack and Katherine’s symbolic revival of their marriage by rolling on the frozen lake, the show doesn’t offer grand resolutions but something gentler—mutual understanding. It also gives us a beautiful lesson in how human beings are not made to survive alone, and seeking out comfort from your friends in times of your need is the best thing that can happen to you. The show takes a look at the beautiful bond between once lovers Katherine and Danny, who now share a platonic, deep friendship and are not willing to give it up even when it causes jealousy. At the same time, Danny is careful in drawing boundaries when Katherine critiques Claude—painting a portrait of spousal integrity that has to be commended.
By the end of the show, when the friends gather by the lakeside for a somber gathering, they have not become better people, but more honest. They are willing to sit with discomfort and look inward. In its bittersweet, dialogue-driven way, Four Seasons offers a portrait of middle-aged love and friendship that is deeply contemporary—where endings are soft, new beginnings are tentative, and the people we love are not always the ones we stay with, but the ones who weather life’s seasons alongside us.
