In the final season of Hacks, Ava (Hannah Einbinder), one of the two main characters, is pitching a reboot of the (in-universe) classic TV show Who’s Making Dinner? Her pitch is essentially “what if a bunch of Gen Z kids lived in a house together,” and while everyone agrees the script is funny, it’s rejected because it’s not specific to Ava’s experience. There’s nothing she is bringing to the project that makes it unique. While Ava does go on to figure out a way to reboot the show with her own voice and experience, in the real world we have a glimpse at what that Who’s Making Dinner reboot would have looked like in the form of Adults on FX and Hulu. And though Season 2 makes a marked improvement over Season 1 of the series, while often very funny, it still feels like it’s missing that essential “why” in terms of the show existing.
Created by Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, the premise is almost exactly what I described above… After Samir’s (Malik Elassal) parents leave on an extended forever-vacation, his friends all move in with him to live rent free in New York City. As a character describes during the second season, they’ve got “one of each”… Samir is a straight Muslim nerd, always messing up his relationships and nervous about wrecking his parent’s house. Billie (Lucy Freyer) is white, straight, and uptight, though after an ill-advised affair in Season 1 is now sleeping around town in Season 2. Issa (Amita Rao) is sexually promiscuous, aggressively gregarious, and oddly occasionally aware she’s on a TV show. She’s also dating the sexually fluid Canadian Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), who is married to the gay Anton (Owen Thiele).
In the push to have a more inclusive Friends, one of the issues with the first season was that every character felt like a messy melange of incongruous types, rather than a person… It’s all checking boxes versus figuring out what’s funny about each character and performer (if they are, indeed, funny). That’s not a problem that’s specific to Adults, even; many comedies have an issue with figuring themselves out in the first season, and it isn’t until the writers and actors become more comfortable over time, ditching bits that don’t work and embracing ones that do (as well as pairings that do) that a show finds its voice. When it does work, you’ll often find that happens during a second season; or ideally halfway through the first season, if we’re talking about broadcast length.
It’s even trickier with streaming where all the episodes are dropped at once. With broadcast comedies, you can see what’s working week to week in almost real time. Here, any adjustments need to be made on the fly, and any of those adjustments might not work with the short episode length. Perhaps in an effort to address this, Adults dropped a one-off episode focusing on how the group met Paul Baker which reset the characters and situation, though oddly attached the episode on streaming to the first season. So unless you know it’s there, or are watching the show for the first time… You won’t know it’s there.
The reset sort of works… There’s a clear effort to calm down the “hey, it’s Gen Z! Isn’t that crazy?” tone of the first season, and let the adults of the title grow up a bit… One Season 2 episode finds Samir and Billie bonding with the slightly younger kids who have inherited their high school fake IDs, which is a little scattered in execution but works nicely thanks to the odd visual of a group of curly haired nerds (including Gaten Matarazzo) who all get psyched about bag hooks under a club’s table. Another has Anton and Issa discovering that office work is nice, while wrestling with the evolving nature of slang. There’s also explorations of alternate friend groups, as well as the usual relationship struggles that rotate couples on these sorts of shows.
As with the first season, which had a standout episode where guest star Charlie Cox’s high school teacher ended up at a dinner party high on ketamine, Season 2 has a standout episode where everyone takes acid only to find a raccoon (and later a possum) has wandered into the house. It works not just because the situation has been heightened to absurdity, but the show dials in very specifically on the character relationships – this time around it’s hooked on Issa and Paul Baker’s crumbling relationship, and how these sorts of breakups can impact every member of a friend group – giving the episode emotional stakes as well as comedic ones. It also suggests that perhaps this show might work better if everyone was on drugs all the time?
But other episodes lack that specificity, banking on the viewing audience finding the characters to be precociously adorable and hilarious. Perhaps if we lived in the house with them and they were our friends… Maybe. Or if this was Friends and was on TV weekly, for 24 episodes, we’d feel more like we were welcoming the Adults into our house. But bingeing these episodes (FX will also be broadcasting two a week for four weeks) feels like a shrug. Nothing against the performers, who are all trying their best, but the scattershot material and lack of deep comedy or deep characters means there’s just not much there, there. Two seasons in, Adults often feels as lost in why it exists as the characters do with their own life paths. Perhaps the show, per the title, has more growing up to do.
Adults premieres in full on Hulu today, and rolls out two episodes weekly on FX.
Comic Book Club Live Info:
Share this:
Discover more from Comic Book Club
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.