Tina Fey’s The Four Seasons is a delight, and filled with some of the best comedic talent on TV

When Vivaldi composed his famous Four Seasons concerti, he accompanied them with sonnets to guide his audience through the year. Led from “spring’s beautiful canopy” to the “hard season, fired up by the sun”, through the “songs and dances” of autumn, to, finally, “tremble from cold in the icy snow”. It is no surprise, then, that Vivaldi and the seasons have become so synonymous with the passage through life itself, a universal thread picked up, again, by Netflix’s new comedy-drama miniseries, The Four Seasons.

Three couples operate in social tandem: unglamorous middle-class lovebirds Kate and Jack (Tina Fey, who co-created the series, and Will Forte), extravagant couple Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani), and increasingly miserable spouses Nick and Anne (Steve Carell and Kerri Kenney-Silver). Over the course of four holidays (pegged to each of the changing seasons), the group evolves. Nick leaves Anne (“All she wants to do is play this farm game on her iPad,” he laments, “she’s really high on the leaderboard”) and shacks up with the vivacious, young Ginny (Erika Henningsen). Just as the flowers bloom and the leaves change from green to gold, so too do the dynamics within the septet evolve as the year progresses. Relationships – both platonic and romantic – will be pushed to breaking point.

Alan Alda’s 1981 movie, from which this series is loosely adapted, was a surprise hit, the ninth-highest-grossing film in the US that year (last year, that slot was held by Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, if that tells you anything about how cinema has changed). Fey and co-writers Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield take Alda’s gentle, humane portrait of middle age as a jumping-off point and inject it with Netflix’s signature oversaturated aesthetic and a dollop of broader comedy. A surprise vow renewal, a sea urchin foot injury, an out-of-the-blue tragedy: new plot points add jeopardy to the ambling stakes of the 1980s. Yet Fey and co retain a love of the mundane bickering and piercing side-eye of couples and friends. “I left Anne,” Nick laments. “Now you think I’m a piece of s***.”

Fey’s Kate is a likeable everywoman (the sort of person who glorifies the “ample wine pour” on the Acela), functioning more in the Alda role than Forte’s Jack, who is a nebbish hypochondriac (“you’re supposed to give sunscreen half an hour to absorb,” he informs his posse). Carell is given more to do as the mercurial Nick. At times he’s likeable and self-aware, at other moments his selfishness threatens the cohesion of the group. He is also given the show’s best lines. When his relationship with Anne is compared to that of roommates, he laments that assumed proximity, given there’s “porn about roommates”. “We’re like co-workers at a nuclear facility,” he offers instead. But his replacement paramour (a May-December, or spring-winter, relationship) Ginny is a slightly misplayed role. Her characterisation, as it would be read in the script, is that of a 21-year-old ingenue, yet the character is 32 (perhaps an adjustment to temper audiences’ judgement of Nick). She’s also treated far less sympathetically than her equivalent in the 1981 film, which managed to straddle the line of shaming Nick without blaming Ginny.

The fact that she is a sexually fluid vegan who drinks mushroom coffee is indicative of the slightly heightened pitch here. She is also far less cool – by millennial standards – than Domingo’s fantastically glamorous Danny. In fact, as groups of midlife professionals go, this ensemble is terrifically entertaining. Netflix has taken the unvarnished joy of the film and added a slick coat of gloss. The structure (each season takes place over the course of two episodes) is well suited to television, building from the promise of spring to the dark nights of winter. If all farce is fundamentally about miscommunication, then The Four Seasons is high farce: some of the best comedic talent on TV assembled to talk past, and through, one another.

Just about staying the right side of low-key, and propelled along by Vivaldi’s violins, The Four Seasons is something of a delight. Life – and its relationships – might eschew easy metaphors, but Fey, like Alda and Vivaldi before her, has captured the subtle changes in temperature that moderate the climate of human existence.