When Your Best Years Feel Like They're Already Behind You

Death has a way of clarifying things. In the second season of Tina Fey’s Netflix show The Four Seasons, now streaming, that clarity arrives early and stays put—a sobering reminder that the window for reinvention doesn’t stay open forever.

The setup is brutal in its simplicity: Nick, played by Steve Carell, spent the first season doing what middle-aged men in crisis do—he left his wife Anne for Ginny, a woman half his age. It felt like a clean escape, a rejection of the slow compromises that settle into long marriages like dust. But the second season opens with the rest of the friend group mourning him. He’s dead. His dramatic third act ended before it really began.

That grim pivot becomes the emotional skeleton holding up everything that follows. Kate and Jack (Tina Fey and Will Forte), along with Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani), find themselves asking the questions they’d been avoiding: Where do we actually want to live? Should we be thinking about kids? Does any of this still make sense? The show’s structure remains elegant—two episodes for each season, vacations in different places—but the emotional center has shifted. Where the first season orbited around Kate and Jack’s marriage, the second finds its heart in the friendship between Kate and Danny, and the“prickly camaraderie”between Fey and Domingo crackles with genuine warmth.

What makes The Four Seasons genuinely smart is that it refuses to let its characters off easy. There’s a famous screenwriting axiom that third-act problems are first-act problems, and these characters are living proof. They can’t go back and unmake their earlier choices. They’re stuck in the present, watching the windows of possibility narrow.“Every decision feels like I’m trying to stick the landing on my entire fucking life,”Danny says at one point, and you can feel that urgency rippling through the whole group. These aren’t people having a midlife crisis—they’re people realizing the crisis is over and they’re still standing in the wreckage of their own compromises.

The show doesn’t shy away from the darker implications either. Kate asks at one turning point:“You know, when you hit your 50s, you just sort of never feel joy again?”It’s written as a joke, and Fey swoops in with a zinger to defang it, but the barb sticks. Joy is still possible for these characters, but it’s more complicated now, shadowed by the awareness that certain doors are closing permanently. Meanwhile, Anne and Ginny—Nick’s ex-wife and pregnant girlfriend—find unexpected common ground, bonding over the surreal experience of raising his child without him. Even Danny and Claude, who’ve spent their freedom avoiding the kid trap, start wondering if an endless series of kitchen renovations is really all that’s left.

What saves The Four Seasons from becoming a funeral dirge is that it understands something crucial about getting older: the smaller stuff—the friendships, the conversations, the willingness to sit with uncomfortable truths instead of running from them—matters more than whatever grand adventure you thought you were still going to have. Fall and winter can be just as beautiful as spring, the show argues, but only if you’re actually paying attention.