REVIEW: ‘The Four Seasons’ Is As Relatable As It Is Messy

The Four Seasons (2025) is the latest Netflix Original Series, based on the 1981 feature film of the same name. Co-created by Tina Fey, Lang Fisher, and Tracey Wigfield, The Four Seasons has as much humor as it has heart and offers audiences a love letter to long marriages, deep friendships, and how each person we love leaves a lasting impact on our lives.

In the series, six old friends head for a relaxing weekend away, only to learn that one couple in the group is about to get a divorce. The three couples, Kate (Tina Fey) and Jack (Will Forte), Nick (Steve Carell) and Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), and Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani), are completely upended by the news. The couple that they all looked to for guidance wasn’t perfect. So, where does that leave them?

Taking place over the year, with each of the 30-minute episodes encompassing one season, we follow the friends on four vacations and watch how one divorce affects everyone’s dynamic, bringing old and new issues to the surface.

As I’ve gotten older, having a core group of friends who are couples has become essential for me and my husband. We vacation together, celebrate each other, and have ultimately formed our own independent friendships within the larger circle that have helped us each get through the worst that life has to offer. But the closeness and care don’t mean we aren’t emotional, irrational, and messy humans at the end of the day.

A Netflix Original Series, The Four Seasons, is a love letter to our longest relationships.

The Four Seasons is an eight-episode limited series that doesn’t sand down any rough edges that the couples at its center have. Instead, each person in this friend group stands tall in their relatable messiness. They love, they make mistakes, but ultimately they’re all in it together, even when they splinter and times get hard. While much of this is due to the stellar narrative, The Four Seasons is also a Netflix Original Series that excels at exceeding expectations because of its actors.

Tina Fey, Will Forte, Steve Carell, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Colman Domingo, and Marco Calvani are phenomenal independently, but hit unique highs when they’re all together. Having been friends for nearly 30 years, the four couples know everything about each other, for better and worse. Individually, though, each couple reflects on specific archetypes and confronts their impacts head-on.

Sure, the melodrama is constant, but this is an instance where hyperbole captures a slice of reality. Most importantly, relationships ending or having problems aren’t the result of one person being all bad or all good; instead, mistakes happen, and people either get through them or fall apart.

It’s too easy to look at a relationship struggling to move forward and blame it on one indiscretion, one pet peeve, and one person. But the reality that The Four Seasons lays bare in its humor and banality is that the longer you love someone, the less innocent both parties become in damaging their relationship. At the same time, no single partner is the sole one keeping it afloat.

The Four Seasons (2025) is an adult look at love we rarely see.

Central to the story are Nick and Anne. As a whole, the group has been with their respective partners for at least 20 to 25 years. Their dedication to their other halves becomes even more important when they decide to celebrate Nick and Anne’s 25th anniversary, only for Nick to pull the plug and replace his wife with a 30-year-old.

To put it simply, Nick is having a mid-life crisis. To make it more complicated, the reality is that Nick just isn’t happy. He wants to adventure, take on new challenges, and be spontaneous. Anne, on the other hand, just wants to play her farm management mobile game. As the rest of the friend group looks in on Nick and Anne, and ultimately who the start to become now that they’re choosing to live life apart, we learn more about their approaches to love and life. And that includes friendship.

First there are Katherine and Jack. A comedic duo that matches each other’s energy in just about every way, Tina Fey and Will Forte create a couple  that understands each other. However, as Nick starts to get happier with 30-year-old Ginny (Erika Henningsen), and their bed grows cold, they have to confront their issues. Kate is too mean, Jack is too nice, and their marriage finds them both making too many compromises.

But the best couple of the entire bunch are Danny and Claude, the two husbands who thrive on their brand of messiness. Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani have immense chemistry. As one of the very few gay Afro-Latino actors who has the spotlight, it’s refreshing to see Domingo finally play a gay man.

Colman Domingo and Tina Fey capture the very best and worst of a close decades-long friendship.

As Danny, Domingo is just trying to live and thrive, even if his fragile health has come to block his way. While Danny is in love with his husband, he is central to understanding how The Four Seasons tackles non-romantic ideas of love, primarily where Danny and Kate are concerned.

Cut from the same cloth, Danny and Kate would rather fight with their husbands and win arguments than deal with their other halves’ Pollyanna and gullible attitudes. Their thorniness is their armor, but they can only bury their dissatisfaction for so long until it shows up.

For Danny, Claude’s love is overbearing. Loud, Italian, and very worried about Danny’s heart condition, Claude is terrified that his husband will die. So, he throws himself into keeping Danny alive. Claude puts on Danny’s sunscreen, takes him to a resort instead of letting him suffer at a yurt resort, and ultimately won’t let his husband even leave for work.

Still, when their marriage is the freest of the group, the sudden restraint starts to eat at Danny, and all he can do is run away. It’s flight or fight, and where Danny isn’t afraid of hurting other people’s feelings, he’d rather bottle it all up than ruin Claude’s annoying optimism. Ultimately, though, their love for each other and their relationship are the most compelling of the group and the most charismatic.

This Netflix Original Series is at its strongest with Danny and Claude’s marriage. 

But where Danny runs, Kate fights. Having always been the strong one, the mean one, the person who gets things solved and always has to be a bad guy, Jack is the kind of man who always sees the best in any situation. While the couple hold it together for most of The Four Seasons, even two people who seem to be on the exact same page can wind up at odds.

The Four Seasons isn’t so much about love ending as it is about the complexity of the choices we make every time we choose to love someone. Not just when we start dating them, but when we choose to love them every day we’re married. There is romance to calling each other soulmates, but the messiness of working through rough patches makes this series so relatable. More than that, though, The Four Seasons is undeniably funny.

With jokes about marriage, age, and everything in between, The Four Seasons is one of the best comedies Netflix has released. It makes you smile and tear up, but more importantly, it shows romance how it actually exists. Love isn’t guaranteed; it’s earned and worked at, and that means choosing to work through the hardest of moments together instead of apart.

The Four Seasons is a romantic comedy, a dramedy, and the perfect love story for those of us who have been with our partners for a decade or more. It’s about what happens after ever after, and the work romance actively takes to stay alive. This Netflix Original Series loves love, but that also means that it can capture all of its rough edges, too.

The Four Seasons is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix.