Netflix’s 8-Part Comedy Drama Got Better After Losing Its Biggest Star

We need to say something disloyal about Steve Carell, a man we would defend in almost any court. The Four Seasons is better without him. At the end of Season 1, Nick (Carell) dies in a car accident just as he was starting his shiny new midlife crisis with Ginny (Erika Henningsen). On paper, this seemed like an insane decision by Tina Fey and company. You don’t cast the most recognizable face in the TV comedy pantheon and then write him out after eight episodes.

Except Fey and co-creators Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield did exactly that. With Season 2, there might’ve been some second-guessing. A finale without your biggest star is one thing; a whole season is another beast entirely. And yet the show’s sophomore outing, which hit Netflix on May 28, doesn’t slump; it soars, making comedic work of grief in a way few shows would dare.

‘The Four Seasons’ Season 2 Builds Its Best Vacations Around Nick’s Death

Season 1 of the Four Seasons was a pleasant, low-stakes hang. Three couples, four trips, one divorce bomb. As far as comedy premises go, it’s a goldmine. But Season 2 came with baggage, and not the kind you can tip a bellhop to carry. The first episode opens with the surviving friends hiking up a mountain to scatter Nick’s ashes. (As if we could forget this hedge-fund executive died doing DoorDash duty for a roomful of millennials he was trying to impress.) Every quarterly trip now has a ghost on the itinerary, and that turns out to be exactly what this ensemble needed.

Somehow, grief doesn’t suck the air out of the funny moments; it pressurizes them. Kate (Fey) and Jack (Will Forte) keep failing to comfort each other because they’re mourning at completely different speeds. Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani) handle their grief the way plenty of couples do: by floating the baby question. The debate is hilarious and a little heartbreaking because we all know a baby has never once fixed an existential crisis, and on some level, so do they. When they bail on the idea and move to Claude’s hometown of Trento, Italy, instead, you get it. Sometimes the only answer to death is a dramatic change of address. And then there’s the odd couple nobody asked for: Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), the ex-wife, and Ginny, the girlfriend, stuck haggling over Nick’s estate before baby Gino turns them into reluctant co-parents. It’s the season’s strangest, sweetest pairing, and the show is smart enough to know it shouldn’t last.

‘The Four Seasons’ Season 2 Belongs to Will Forte and Kerri Kenney-Silver

Forte has spent his career being the weirdest guy in the room, so watching him play the season’s most grounded tragedy is a small revelation. Jack copes with Nick’s death the way a lot of mild-mannered men cope with anything: by holding everyone else together while privately falling apart, with a little help from a robust personal weed regimen and a newly-picked-up marathon hobby. Episode 8 is his season-best, and on paper it’s pure sitcom: Kate strong-arms a clearly not-okay Jack into running an Italian marathon to “turn this year around.” It’s two people having the fight they’ve been dodging for seven episodes, except now they’re having it mid-race, sweaty and furious, while strangers in foil blankets cheer them on. And Forte sells every second of it as a guy who can’t pinpoint when he stopped being okay. If we complain too much about fragile masculinity and men who can’t express their feelings, his Jack is the answer to that. But he’s not the only supporting player who finally gets their due in Season 2.

The Four Seasons’ first outing mostly used Anne as the wronged woman, the wife Nick discarded on the way to his new life. Season 2 hands Kenney-Silver the keys. Anne and Ginny start by squabbling over Nick’s estate and end up co-parenting baby Gino. Then, in the move that gives the finale its spine, Anne does the last thing anyone expects from her: she stays. While the rest of the group flies home from Italy, Anne volunteers to housesit Danny and Claude’s place in Trento… alone, in a country where she knows nobody. Then David Tennant strolls in as a charming local stranger, and the show closes on Anne flirting in broken Italian with the energy of a woman who has finally remembered she exists. It’s the most satisfying cliffhanger Netflix has produced in ages, and it belongs entirely to a character who spent her first season as collateral damage in someone else’s storyline.

For a while now, Netflix has been positioning The Four Seasons as its cozier answer to The White Lotus, but Season 1 never had the stakes to back that up. Season 2 does, and it gets there without a single murder mystery. Even when Carell returns for a flashback episode, the show resists the urge to build a shrine. Nick shows up as he actually was: charming, selfish, beloved, and, in a way, already gone. By killing him off and sticking to that choice, The Four Seasons didn’t lose its biggest star; it let him go and found its best self on the other side.