The Four Seasons

This really felt like something special to me beforehand. Why did it feel like that? I love Tina Fey. I Consider 30 Rock to be one of the most underrated sitcoms in TV history and have laughed more at a single season of it than I have at nine seasons of Seinfeld. Much more, in fact. Beyond that, I always like Steve Carell. Whether he’s more serious as in Beautiful Boy or more bombastic as in Anchorman, he’s always good in my book. Will Forte is in here, too. Another of my comedy favourites and as brilliant in many a Saturday Night Live sketch as he is fantastic in the role of MacGruber in the utterly hysterical feature film. The fact that these three comedians are now playing the lead roles in a remake of M*A*S*H creator Alan Alda’s cosy romantic comedy from 1981, meant that I had pretty high expectations beforehand.

I shouldn’t have.

The story is the same as in the 45-year-old original. Three pairs of friends gather in the countryside to celebrate a week’s holiday together and in the midst of all the hubbub – talk of New York’s parking problems, barista coffee, and stock investments – one of them (Nick, played by Carell) tells them that he intends to file for divorce, thus breaking up the original gang who have been holidaying together, all six of them, for decades. While some of the friends are trying to get Nick to reconsider, the others are just trying to weather the shit storm that will blow in once the news is shared with Nick’s wife Anne. Before the friends know it, Nick has separated and we quickly jump ahead to the following summer when they holiday in the Caribbean together (all six of them) with Anne replaced by a woman 30 years younger, who of course doesn’t fit into the old community/dynamic at all.

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Sound like fun to you? Not really, right? On paper it sounds like every Jennifer Aniston comedy ever made and a show/movie we’ve all seen 1,200 times already, but it could have been hilarious and just a little bit special if Fey’s script had been on par with 30 Rock. Unfortunately, the previously hilarious Fey seems to have suffered some kind of significant age crisis, which has led to the entire script on which The Four Seasons is based feeling like one long, sentimental, humourless, palpably awkward sob session packed with so much sentimentality and situations that are so disastrously humourless that it almost feels bizarre.

Fey is not funny for a single second in this series. She just comes across as neurotic and annoyingly identity-less. Will Forte is not funny for a single second in this series either, and only appears as a filler. Sometimes he tries to squeeze in a funny reaction here and there but it’s never funny and he never has a single line to work with that contains any kind of joke. As for Carell, it gets even worse as he feels out of place and chronically bored, playing a sort of tired mix between his character in 40 Year Old Virgin and Dan from My Brother’s Girlfriend.

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I imagine there are those who might enjoy this, especially if you’re a middle-aged woman who just wants to see human relationships, in a more comedic form, which is boiled down and typically American (without much substance or real emotion). Because yes, there are plenty of shows that are worse in terms of pure production values. However, I don’t like anything on offer in The Four Seasons and can only conclude that this is a waste of essentially brilliant resources.