Some of Netflix’s recent content has precipitated a prolonged season of discontent. The Four Seasons doesn’t diminish the din of mediocrity that threatens to drown the ones that make a difference.
This one most assuredly doesn’t amount to much except a mound of flat jokes melted to the ground by their own vacuousness, about relationships with some solid acting but no plotting-heft to back up the actors. In the absence of a clear gameplan The Four Seasons moves ahead ostensibly on its own volition.
The relationship of the friends among a stack of smug humour feels like a stand-up joke which only the comedian on stage is into. The audience laughs out of politeness. Or maybe complacency.
When we first meet the six lifelong friends now in their 50s (hence the mid-life crisis) we can see the pastiche of camaraderie coming apart at the seams, when Nick (the wonderful Steve Carrell) announces he is leaving his wife of many years, and not for another woman, at least not now. The Other Woman comes in Season 2, and she is no spouse-snatcher but a woman eager to find a place among the lifelong friends.
These are some of the better moments in a series hellbent on hara-kiri. The tonal shifts from humour to pensiveness don’t work. Portraying Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) as a gullible do-gooder was not the brightest of ideas, as it stomps out all drama from the marital breakup. Instead, we get simulated irony when Anne just happens to land up on the same vacationing spot as her former husband Nick and his new partner, not once but repeatedly.
Frankly, I would have liked to see Anne as a more strongly constructed, pivotal character struggling to get over a marriage she never thought would break, like Shabana Azmi in Arth. Instead, the tragedy is dwindled to a series of giggles, not quite as funny as the series’ creators would like them to be.
The flawed writing is further floored by the freaky formatting; each episode captures a holiday with the friends re-uniting at some exotic spot. This kind of touristic mood cuts into the graver ramifications of the relationship among friends.
In the way, for example, Kate (Tina Fey) begins to question her own marriage with the hyper-emotional Jack (Will Forte)….or take the gay couple, very convincingly played by the super-talented Coman Domingo and Marco Calvani…in the way that one of the two begins to feel suffocated by the ceaseless attention of the other… the series brings up the issue of giving space in relationships but doesn’t know how to negotiate those spaces.
Sometimes, too much can be damaging. This issue doesn’t govern the series itself as much as the lives of the characters. The series never gets animated enough to cross limits.
