Why is new Tina Fey comedy The Four Seasons so toothless?

I never thought I’d say this but I think I’m starting to go off what was previously my favourite genre: Rich Americans Having Problems on Vacation. I know! I don’t recognise myself. Usually this stuff is like catnip to me. Give me a sad divorcee in a hotel gift shop or an alcoholic CEO on the verge of a meltdown and I’m happy as a clam as I sit on my not-quite-paid-off IKEA sofa eating a Lidl yoghurt.

Perhaps it was the ultimately disappointing third season of The White Lotus that did it for me. Despite the presence of Walton Goggins and his anguished mahogany forehead, or Jason Isaacs sweating over the world’s most disgusting piña colada, it just felt like a very long advert for Trailfinders. Or perhaps it’s the fact that rich Americans are systematically destroying democracy? 

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Anyway, now we have The Four Seasons which should be the catnippiest of catnip. Tina Fey! Steve Carell! Good-looking people in their 50s marinating in micro traumas in a variety of lake houses, island resorts and ski lodges! Adapted from an Alan Alda movie! All these things score so high on my Middle Aged Ladyometer that it’s enough to make me drop my reading glasses into my soup.

But like a cantankerous old crone shooing children out of her garden, it just irritated the hell out of me. For a start there were hardly any reading glasses in sight. Everyone could see their phones without holding them two metres from their faces. These friends, who were all over 50 and had known each other for years, had energy, good hair and kept saying how much they loved each other. As if!

There was even a gay throuple scene, and at one point they bought a bottle of tequila and did shots at the table. (Everyone knows that when you’re over 50 the only shot you’ll willingly volunteer for is your Covid booster.) Also, the four seasons of the title doesn’t refer to a Mike White-style resort full of murder and mystery, but to the actual seasons – each split into two episodes – which makes it such a long watch that by the end of it I felt like I’d grown a beard. 

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We were meant to be moved by their off-the-cuff realness, health scares, divorces, age-gap affairs, marital bust-ups and tragedies. But as they were all constantly on holiday in places that most of us couldn’t afford in a million years, it made me somewhat inclined not to give a shit.

Also, these fiftysomethings were spectacularly self-absorbed and badly behaved. At one point, someone threw an acai bowl at a car, and a wronged wife bought six figurines and hit them off the ledge of her hotel balcony with a novelty oar. As I’m a grown-up, I was on my feet, shouting ‘GO AND PICK THEM UP AND PUT THEM IN THE RECYCLING!’

Obviously, I understand that watching a group of friends doing the recycling isn’t going to make for amazing TV, but a little bit more realism would have been appreciated. Nobody mentioned the menopause, and even when a hurricane threatened to sweep away their island resort, nobody mentioned climate change.

I mean, I did enjoy some of it. There’s a very funny/sad moment towards the end featuring an extremely mistimed cover of Candle in the Wind, and I laughed out loud when someone misreads a label on some charity soap that says ‘Made by Saint Demetrius’s Church’ as ‘Made by demented children.’ Steve Carell was great, and Colman Domingo was vulnerable and believable as an interior designer who refused to slow down, despite having a heart condition.  

But Fey’s legendary sharpness was blunted all the way through, like an old vegetable peeler at your gran’s house. Your fifties are when everything starts to bite you in the arse – so why was this so toothless? It should have been a witty, wisecracking, glorious Gen X triumph but sadly, The Four Seasons just made me check out. 

Lucy Sweet is a freelance journalist.

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