Imagine a world in which your favorite funny people were married and all best friends? And then imagine if they were perpetually on vacation, at the archetypal places to be during each season of the year?
Thanks to The Four Seasons, a new comedy series from Tina Fey (30 Rock), Lang Fisher (Never Have I Ever), and Tracey Wigfield (The Mindy Project), you can kick it with your favorite comedians and actors all year round. Based on the classic 1981 film directed by Alan Alda, the new series follows three couples — played by Fey and Will Forte, Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani, and Kerri Kenney-Silver and Steve Carell — as they navigate all the incomparably wonderful and challenging aspects of long-term relationships. “When you’ve had these very long friendships, they are your family,” Fisher said to Netflix. “In addition to having a spouse … you also need this group of old friends who can also tell the story of your life and where you’ve been.”
Over the course of a year, the series follows the friends as old gripes clash with new dynamics during four (mostly) idyllic vacations. “You don’t see them at home, you don’t see them at work. It’s just these friends on vacation,” said Fey. These enviable and unfettered spaces serve as backdrops for exploring heartfelt and poignant questions after the group learns that one of the couples is about to split up. “A specific thing that’s been nice about this series is taking time to have real scenes and moments and relationships between these characters,” added Fey.
The cast of The Four Seasons is so instantly dynamic and easy to root for, however, that you’d be thrilled even just watching them type away in a dreary cubicle, or griping about the minutiae of child-rearing logistics. “What we hoped for the show was to drive home this little perspective shift that if you just looked at your husband or your best friend in a certain light, it’s like, ‘Oh, this is the most precious thing in my life.’ And something that you should be grasping onto with both hands,” said Wigfield. “It’s very hard to do that when you’re busy, and you’ve been married forever, and you have a million things going on.”
Their familiarity makes sense, considering many of the cast members have worked together previously (Fey and Forte on 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live, Fey and Carell on Date Night, Fey and Henningsen on Girls5eva and Mean Girls the Broadway musical, for example) and, much like their characters, have been friends for decades. “It took me only a day to understand that [Fey] really brought all her family here, the people she’s been working with for so long,” said Calvani, who is a longtime friend of Domingo’s but new to most of the group. “Even as a director and as a producer, I’ve never been on a set with so many smiles, with so much warmth.” Added Kenney-Silver, “It’s a ridiculous cast of incredible people. There’s not a dud in the bunch.”
Keep reading to join the travel the world with everyone’s favorite friend group.
Kate and Jack are the only two from the original college friend group who got married after graduation. Kate’s love of her friends holds the squad together, but at times she can be as bossy as she is loyal.
While at the beginning of the series she and Jack are blind to their marital riffs, the show’s eight episodes reveal the ways in which they haven’t been there for each other. They set out to mend their marriage, always operating from the place of friendship they cultivated in their young twenties.
“Tina Fey, for me, was the first and foremost reason I was attracted to this project … I’ve known her for a long, long time and she’s a good friend,” said Carell. “I would go so far to say that Tina Fey is an icon. Anything that she has to do with, I would be honored to be a part of.”
30 Rock, Mean Girls
Jack is as earnestly sweet as Kate is snarky. So, naturally the changes to the friend group can sometimes wear on him. A longtime history lover and now teacher, Jack brings a measured empathy to the group’s kerfuffles.
In real life, Forte and Fey have been friends and collaborators for years after working together on Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock. “Will Forte is one of my oldest friends, and I am so happy that we play husband and wife in this because we are very comfortable with each other,” said Fey of her co-star. “He’s the most thoughtful, kindest, gentlest husband in the whole series. And I feel like all I do is yell at him and fight with him. I hope that really scratches an itch for married women everywhere.”
Added Carell about Forte: “You have an expectation, and then certain people exceed that expectation, and he’s one of them.”
MacGruber, Nebraska
Nick waged a successful career in finance, and now wants to enjoy the fruits of his hard work and embark on new adventures around the world. He’s known Kate, Jack, and Danny since college, but, in an unexpected twist, his response to getting older sets him on a a very different path from that of his friends.
Carell was the perfect person to play this complicated character. “Steve Carell is an American icon,” says Fey, who co-starred with Carell in Date Night in 2010. “Steve Carell, to me, has that Jimmy Stewart quality — even if he plays a guy who’s kind of a jerk, you know that the actual person behind the character is such a good person that you still love the character.”
Added Henningsen: “He’s another example of how sometimes it is OK to meet your heroes and they do not disappoint.”
The Office, The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Anne is a ceramicist, who sometimes would rather play games on her iPad than create new work. The twists and turns of The Four Seasons set her on a path she wasn’t quite expecting, but the changes foisted upon her pale in the face of her vulnerability and sense of humor.
“Anne has this arc of coming back to herself over the course of eight episodes. And Kerri’s just perfect in that you just immediately love her,” said Fey. “She has this amazing face that makes you go, ‘That’s my friend’ from the moment you see her — and she’s an assassin in terms of being precise around a joke, but she also has shown so much vulnerability and heart.”
Reno 911!
Danny is an architect, a profession befitting his adventurous, creative spirit. Dressed to the monochromatic nines at all times, Danny brings flair and fun wherever he goes. He and Kate are like brother and sister — there’s no one who frustrates or knows them as well as the other.
“When we were in the writers’ room, we thought, ‘Oh my gosh, do you think we could get Colman Domingo to play Danny?’ ” said Fey. “When we approached him and he actually said yes, we could not believe he said yes. No one could believe it … And then every time we tell anyone in this whole process about the cast, they're always like, ‘What? You got Colman Domingo to be in this?’ ”
Like his character, Domingo exudes dynamism. “There’s an aura to him,” Carell said. “It drips off of him, his greatness, talent, and charisma.”
Fear the Walking Dead, Lincoln
Calvani describes his character Claude as a “stay-at-home husband.” His raison d’être is Danny’s well-being, and he takes it upon himself to make sure his husband is as happy and healthy as possible — whether Danny likes it or not. Claude is just as expressive as Danny is calm, cool, and collected, and the two make a perfect yin-and-yang relationship.
Claude’s role is an update to the original film, in which Rita Moreno’s character was married to the Danny character. “It’s every gay man’s dream to be Rita Moreno. So I proudly achieved that. Thank you for that,” joked Calvani.
Calvani is friends with Domingo and his husband, Raúl Domingo, in real life. Calvani had left acting 16 years earlier for writing and directing acclaimed films including High Tide and the short A Better Half. After a double date with their husbands, Domingo suggested Calvani to Fey, he auditioned, and Fey found it hard to imagine anyone else playing lovable, adorable Claude. “As you’re reading the scripts, you have this image of who this character is in your mind, and then when we did our first table read, he was exactly, word for word, what I pictured in my mind,” said Fey.
High Tide, A Better Half
A dental hygienist and avid yogi, Ginny is the millennial to their Gen X crew, and has the impossible predicament of being the new person in a group formed long ago.
“She was someone that I wanted to bring in to read for Ginny from the jump,” said Fey of Henningsen. Fey cast Henningsen as Cady Heron in the original Broadway musical Mean Girls in 2018, and they also worked together on Girls5eva.
The age gap between Ginny and the rest of the group was actually a draw for Henningsen, who said, “When have we seen a group of six friends, not living in the crappy apartments, but living in nice homes, married with kids, but still dealing with friendship?’ ”
Harlem, Blue Bloods
