The Four Seasons

Netflix's The Four Seasons is a warm and quietly heartbreaking comedy about middle age, long marriages, and the way friendships both sustain and complicate our lives. Based on Alan Alda's beloved 1981 film of the same name, the series follows three couples who vacation together across four seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter. What begins as a celebration of decades-long friendship becomes a reckoning with everything those decades contain, including the secret that one couple is separating — and the disruption that announcement sends through the entire group.

Tina Fey heads the ensemble and her presence — both as a creative force and its most prominent face — gives the show much of its tonal intelligence. The comedy is deeply funny in the way that only works rooted in emotional honesty can be: the laughs arrive from truth, not from performance. Steve Carell, Colman Domingo, Will Forte, Marco Calvani, and Kerri Kenney-Silver round out an ensemble that plays with the genre's romantic comedy conventions while consistently exceeding them. The series never condescends to its characters — these are people in the middle of their lives, trying to figure out what still matters.

The Four Seasons arrived on Netflix as a passionate alternative to youth-fixated content, and found an immediate audience among viewers hungry for comedy that took adult relationships seriously. Praised for the naturalistic ease of its ensemble performances, for each seasonal episode's distinct mood, and for Fey and her collaborators' refusal to resolve the show's central tensions too neatly, it quickly became one of the platform's most-discussed originals of the year. Three couples. Four trips. A lot to unpack.