The Four Seasons: Tina Fey tackles the mid-life crisis in remake of Alan Alda movie

Tina Fey knows how to keep her friends close.

The multi-hyphenate talent has built up a repertory of writers and actors that she has worked with time and again with many stretching back to her Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock days.

There are lots of familiar names and faces in Fey’s latest venture, an eight-part miniseries called The Four Seasons, adapted from Alan Alda’s 1981 movie, which he wrote, directed and starred in. Alda even makes a cameo appearance, and he, of course, had done three episodes of 30 Rock back in the day as Jack’s biological father.

You’ll also recognise Will Forte from Fey’s SNL runand Steve Carell, with whom she worked on Date Night. Behind the scenes, Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield, both 30 Rock alums, co-created the show with Fey. All but one writer is a graduate of the Fey oeuvre. Husband Jeff Richmond is a producer, composer, and director of one of the episodes.

She’s hardly the only one who sticks with a team but Fey makes it work for her and her fans. Her projects are tight and slick, all tapping into that signature droll but not too snarky humour with an added dash of absurdity. Her track record has few blemishes.

There are certain filmmakers and writers whose work is like a favourite blanket. You generally know what you’re going to get, that’s why you get excited every time they bring out something new. It’s the perfect mix of familiar and fresh, and working with many of the same people is part of that.

That’s why The Four Seasons was always going to rate at least a sample. While not as off-kilter as the likes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or Girls5Eva, it feels unmistakably Fey-esque, even though it’s the first adaptation she has done for TV (Mean Girls was drawn from a non-fiction book).

The series follows three couples who have long been friends – Kate (Fey) and Jack (Forte), Nick (Carell) and Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), and Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani) – and take holidays or getaways together four times a year.

The dynamic is well-established. Kate is a bit bossy, Danny is bougie, Claude is dramatic, and Jack is sweet and lets Kate do the hard stuff.

During that first trip in spring, a weekend at Nick and Anne’s lakeside home, Nick tells Danny and Jack that he is going to leave Anne. Nick feels his wife of 25 years no longer has a zest for life and would prefer to spend all her time playing her iPad.

By the next season in summer, Nick brings his much younger girlfriend, Ginny (Erika Henningsen), on holidays with them. Ginny is lovely but the holiday she has planned for all six of them (an eco-resort with tents and no air-conditioning) is not the “grown-up” luxury they’re accustomed to. The generational gap is real.

The drastic change in their friendship circle triggers the other two couples, over the course of the year, to consider their own relationships.

Anthropologically, The Four Seasons is a specific slice of American middle-class and middle-age life. No one here is worried about money (in the 1981 film version, Danny is a penny-pincher, but Domingo’s iteration is quite fond of designer brands).

It’s the middle-age part that The Four Seasons is most interested in exploring. All three couples have differences so that they can be stand-ins for the questions that might plague its audiences. What happens if you trade in “for a newer model”, can you keep up?

Danny and Claude are 10 years apart and the younger man frets over his older husband who is also facing some not-insignificant health issues. That brings up a different aspect to their match.

Kate and Jack are more your typical heteronormative marrieds, and they’re each frustrated by their partner’s quirks and the roles they feel they fell into over decades in their relationship. How much active maintenance do you need to do when you think you’re content?

Are they all as happy as they claim? Do they secretly envy Nick? What have they been thinking but are too afraid to say out loud? Can you reconcile how you see yourself and how your adult kids see you?

The series stretches out to four hours, compared to the film’s two, so the characters are shaded in and the story expanded. The ending even differs to Alda’s original.

Middle-age in 2025 is not the same as it was in 1981 but there is still a universality to the questions you ask when you realise that there’s not an endless stretch of road ahead of you and do you want to spend what’s left as you always have?

The Four Seasons is not mind-blowingly incisive or raw about relationships in the way something like Scenes From a Marriage or Marriage Story are. It’s still mostly a gentle comedy that sometimes bares teeth.

But it definitely has that Fey vibe, which means it’s a pleasure just to spend time in that world.

The Four Seasons is streaming on Netflix