4 seasons season 2 — better than first
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Anonymous
Hmm, maybe it was because my mom also got too sad and I see a lot of myself in tiny fey's character but I dont know that they had to dive more into it. To me this is why she tries to put on a positive face so often. Why she struggled with her husband being sad and she always wanted to protect his joy/feelings to guard against him feeling sad. |
Anonymous
| What is we haven’t watched season 1? |
Anonymous
Omg I love the Patrizia thing. In part because everyone kept talking about her like she was a crazy housekeeper or something and then we find out she’s a dog. And it was so emblematic of the one character always doing these impetuous things and letting his Italian husband contort himself to live with the results. That’s why it was an important part of their character arc (also relevant to their whole convo about whether they can/should have a baby….we all know who would be getting up for night feedings with that baby.). I loved the passive aggressive convo where they both knew the dog has been given away but neither will say it. I also liked the gentle ribbing of the upstate middle aged lesbian stereotype. I want to be an upstate middle aged lesbian with a yard full of dogs! The one liners were also really good — “there’s a fine line between quaint and meth”. |
Anonymous
It’s fine. Someone can give you the two sentence summary: the main characters are all college friends who vacation together 4x per year. Last season, th blonde’s husband Nick (steve carrell) asked for a divorce, started dating a young woman, got her pregnant, and then was killed in a car accident. That’s all you need to know. |
Anonymous
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My husband and I both struggled in season 2 with how incredibly unlikeable Jack (Will Forte) was. They kind of redeemed him by the end but it was hard to get to that point.
I get that the idea was that he was grieving his friend, but they all lost a friend. His pushiness in wanting everyone to grieve the same way reminded me of people in my real life and it was so irritating -- the narcissism of deciding your feelings are everyone's feelings and if they can't get on board with how you are expressing your feelings, it must be because their feelings are wrong. Also it was extremely on point that he was the most insane about Covid precautions but then his insanity resulted in them all getting Covid. Tracks, that happened in our friend bubble too! |
Anonymous
| I enjoyed it even though Will Forte and Tina Fey do not have any chemistry. |
Anonymous
+1 and it felt like we needed more backstory on their personalities |
Anonymous
There was some subtext to the relationship between Claude and Danny though, revealed in the Covid flashback. In the present storyline, we see Claude express an interest in having a kid, and then actually accuse Danny of preventing them from having one. But in the flashback, we see Danny suggesting becoming parents to Claude during the Thanksgiving weekend, and Claude reacts with actual disgust to the suggestion. Of course, this is in the context of Danny adopting Patricia and refusing to see how badly it was going, so you can understand why Claude is a hard no on a baby in that context -- he can see exactly how it will go. I think the subtext is that Claude actually would have liked to have a kid but he recognizes that Danny probably isn't the right partner for raising kids with. They love each other and have a great life, but having a kid is going to create a very specific dynamic that is going to be hard on both of them because it will trigger both of their worst qualities and some of the cracks in their relationship. Later Claude expresses regret about not having a kid and blames Danny for getting in the way, and you assume it's because Danny said no to a kid. But he didn't -- he actually suggested a baby. It's that Danny's personality and tendencies aren't right for parenthood, even though Claude's are. But Claude also has a toxic trait -- he's a people pleasing nurturer who allows resentment over that role to build up, even when no one has explicitly asked him to fix it (takes one to know one, Claude). And that's why they flip flop on who wants a kid -- on some level, they both know it's not a good idea, so even when one of them starts to warm to it, the other slams on the breaks. I thought it was actually a very realistic portrayal of how the best couples often understand their own limitations even when they don't say them out loud. That's why they also kind of agree silently never to actually acknowledge what happened with Patricia -- it would expose some things about each of them they don't really want to acknowledge, so it's easier to just live in the fiction that Patricia ran away. |
Anonymous
I think Jack was just sort of a doormat in season 1 so they needed to give him some texture. I found his need to have peolel grieve in a specific way to be realistic and fitting his character but what was irritating was everyone else’s inability to validate that feeling and then say “that’s not right for me though.” But I guess it made sense in the context of Tina fey’s character having a pathological need to avoid upsetting or emotional conversations. He has basically accommodated that their whole lives by being the easy going one, emotionally, so then when he hits a rough spot, that dynamic doesn’t work. And I think nicks death hit him harder because it was clear that was his only friend and Nick was sort of his “cool guy North Star” friend. The other couple have all their fabulous gay friends that they keep mentioning. The whole show was basically about how the habits you’ve developed over decades can fall apart in middle age, for various reasons. Each one of the couples had a dynamic that was shown to be dysfunctional in season 1 and in season 2 they had to basically rearrange that dynamic. (With anne, it was her utter dependency on Nick —when Nick died, she replaced him with his gf/baby and became their caretaker … then realized this is f—ed up and I don’t even really remember who I was before I started down that path.). |
Anonymous
Yeah I enjoyed the nuance in that storyline and how the flashback to that earlier conversation is shown later in the season. But I stumbled over both of them making assumptions off these short conversations rather than bringing it up again and talking it through. Having a baby, if someone really wants one, is a big deal! But maybe the point is they were both ambivalent in different ways for different reasons and that's why neither pushed that convo in the intervening years. |
Anonymous
The most unlikeable Jack episode was the Covid flashback episode though, before Nick died. It shows that he was actually not chill at all before Nick died -- he had extreme anxiety and could make weird and unsupportable choices in service to his anxiety. There's actually this great parallel between his behavior in that episode and his story arc for the season. In the Covid episode, he is the one suffering from extreme Covid anxiety, even considering sleeping in the car because he's so afraid to be inside around other people. He's obsessive about their Covid rituals like reading the poem every night, and while Tina Fey's character is supportive of this because she can see he needs it, you can also see that it's not what she needs and he doesn't really seem interested in what she needs. Then when they all start getting Covid his first instinct is to blame everyone else for breaking quarantine, until his daughter points out that he was the one who broke quarantine to get all those Covid tests, and he went to a clinic full of sick people to get them. This is similar to what happens in the aftermath of Nick's death, with his grief making it impossible for him to see that others are also grieving but in their own way. He's once again being ruled by his emotions (this time grief and anger instead of anxiety) and Tina Fey is again focused on trying to give him what he needs. Her own needs get pushed to the back burner and when she does start to assert herself a bit during the summer episodes, it leads to him suggesting the "free balling" approach where they basically live separate lives. He is then a complete jerk at Thanksgiving (he doesn't even shower after his run or change out of his sweaty clothes???) has a huge meltdown and throws the turkey (ostensibly because he's mad at Danny for something Danny didn't even do, but actually because he just has unprocessed grief that is coming out as rage), and then becomes obsessed with everyone being mad at him for it even though they are all very forgiving. And even then, Tina Fey focuses on what he needs, pushing him to do the marathon and recognizing that he uses physicality to work through emotions. Yes, it's nice when he pushes her to really express her own fears to him and he is very receptive and they come together at the end. But by the time that happens, he's spent he entire season focused pretty much entirely on his own emotions, behaving like a selfish child, and just generally being hard to deal with. |
Anonymous
I agree it was frustrating to watch them make this big assumptions about what the other person wants based on short conversations. But it's also not that unrealistic. My spouse and I generally communicate well about big stuff but we have some miscommunication like this in our past, too. In fact, this entire plot line reminded me of how it was that we wound up not having a second child. Our first (now only) was about a year and a half old and I started talking about wanting to have another and how great it would be to have a whole other person we loved as much as our first. His knee jerk reaction was anti, because of money and time and just a general sense of overwhelm. I should have explored it further because I know he has a pattern of doing this -- he can be very resistant to change sometimes and gets very negative about certain ideas and it's not reflective of his true feelings. It's just fear takes over for him. Anyway, I dropped it and then life happened and then when it came up again, I felt I was too old and didn't want to put my body through it again at that point, so that was that. But now sometimes he will express sadness we never had another kid and I feel a little exasperated because I was the one who wanted one and he put the brakes on. But he just wasn't ready when I was ready, and then by the time he was ready I felt the window had closed. It's exaggerated in their situation because they didn't already have a kid and because as gay men, their path to parenthood requires total intentionality. But I very much relate to the way these conversations that are really just a snapshot of how someone feels one day can become a final decision without anyone really meaning that to happen. Time stops for no one, even when you really wish it would. |
Anonymous
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I'm in my late 40s so young Gen X and I have elementary school kids. I can't imagine having the kind of time on my hands that these characters do. Their lifestyles definitely seem closer to my Boomer parents. Anne as a punk chick turned homemaker married to a (late) cheating finance bro was a particular stretch.
That said, I found Tina Fey and Colman Domingo's friendship very relatable and touching, and I loved the sweet subplot involving Will Forte's character meeting a new straight male friend. |
Anonymous
But they are all supposed to be 10 years older than you. Tina Fey, Colman Domingo, and Kerri Kenney-Silver (Anne) are all 56. Will Forte is 55. Steve Carrell is the oldest at 63 (and I think his character reads as older). Marco Calvani (Claude) is your age, and he reads as younger. But that's why they have so much more time than you do -- they are 10 years later and empty nesting (or in the case of Danny and Claude, DINKs). That is where you will be in a decade when your kids are in college. You, too, will have a bunch of time to hang out with your friends, pursue hobbies, and start thinking about what your life looks like now that the parenting marathon is coming to an end (or shifting into a different gear). And Anne as a punk chick turned homemaker makes perfect sense. She would have been in NY in her 20s in the 90s, partied all decade, met her finance bro husband (who is 6-7 years older than she was, which tracks) when they were both partying, then married and had a kid in her mid-30s, threw herself into that while her husband made the money and was never around, and then in her mid-to-late 50s when she's done raising their daughter, he finally feels free to dump her for the younger version of her (late 20s/early 30s free spirit), which in his mind is him being a good dad because he kept the family "intact" until his daughter was in college. And then Anne is lost because she changed her whole life and personality for her husband and kid and now they are both gone. It's not a stretch at all, it's just that people are unused to seeing an actress in her 50s who actually looks her age, and therefore think Anne is older than she is, but it's one of the most realistic things about the show. |
Anonymous
| I liked season 1 better. |