What Happened
Netflix is back in the friendship-comedy business on May 28, when all eight episodes of The Four Seasons season two arrive in a single drop. The streamer brought Tina Fey, Will Forte, Colman Domingo, Marco Calvani, Erika Henningsen and Kerri Kenney-Silver back for another vacation cycle — only this time the most reliable member of the original group is missing, and a baby is on the way.
The first season ended with Nick, played by Steve Carell, struck and killed by a car — a beat that doubled as the show’s structural pivot and as a sudden vacancy in its central friend group. Carell does not return for season two. Showrunners Fey, Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield instead build the new chapter around the surviving five, plus Henningsen’s Ginny, who is pregnant with Nick’s child and inherited into the group as a kind of reluctant heir.
The vacations shift accordingly. Season one bounced between upstate New York, Puerto Rico and Vassar College for parents’ weekend, all built around the Stephen Sondheim-by-way-of-Alan Alda framework of seasonal getaways. Season two trades those exteriors for the Jersey shore and Italy, with on-location photography that producers were spotted shooting around Italian piazzas, Vespa rides and shoreline towns.
Why It Matters
For Netflix the show is a rare adult, middle-aged ensemble comedy with no high-concept hook — no murder, no powers, no apocalypse. Season one finished its run with a 78% Certified Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes and quietly held its own against louder, glossier originals through the spring of 2025, giving the streamer a low-noise hit it has been trying to replicate.
That makes the season-two creative reset something of a stress test. Killing off Carell, the show’s most marketable lead, is the kind of move a network drama might attempt; a streaming comedy doing it in episode eight of season one is rarer. Fey and her co-writers have argued that the loss is the engine of the second chapter rather than a problem to be patched, with the surviving friends learning to travel and squabble and grieve without their de facto group glue.
The Italy pivot also points at where Netflix wants its midlife comedies to live. International settings let the company recycle production-credit incentives, frame its content slate around recognizable travel imagery, and showcase the global library it spends so heavily to translate. The Four Seasons sits alongside other Italy-set Netflix titles in the May 2026 slate, suggesting a broader programming push around grown-up travel comedies that sit in a different lane from the streamer’s glossier romance fare.
Reaction
Anticipation among critics and fans cooled when Carell’s exit was confirmed and warmed back up once Netflix released the first season-two trailer earlier in May, which leaned into Vespa rides, Italian terraces and Henningsen’s character carrying her pregnancy on the road. Tudum, Netflix’s in-house editorial arm, primed the audience with a release-day clip from episode one and a refresher recap of the season-one finale.
Cast interviews have done much of the public-facing work. Fey has told reporters that the writers kept a group chat with the cast through the production hiatus, partly to keep Carell looped in even after his character left, and that she viewed the second season as a chance to give Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani more centerpiece material. Domingo, whose character Danny is the most level-headed in the ensemble, was a focal point of pre-release press coverage on the back of his recent awards-circuit profile.
Social reaction has split predictably. Some Carell fans have flagged that they will sit the season out; others have welcomed the show’s willingness to follow through on the season-one twist instead of soft-launching a return. Early audience interest from Netflix’s own engagement signals, including its release-day clip and a heavily-watched trailer, suggests the show is holding its core audience even without its biggest name on the call sheet.
What’s Next
Season two is a finite eight-episode binge, but Netflix has not yet confirmed a third installment. Industry reporting points at the company’s typical renewal pattern: a multi-week look at completion rates, repeat opens, and how well the Italy-set episodes perform internationally before any pickup is announced.
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The setting itself is a clue to the show’s longer-term ambition. Italy positions the series for future seasons set across other European hubs — Tudum has reported that the writers’ room has discussed Spain and a return loop through New York as candidate destinations if a third season is greenlit. Henningsen’s baby plotline also opens a multi-year runway, since the character’s pregnancy and early motherhood arc can carry the group through several seasonal milestones without requiring a new high-concept hook.
Outside the show, the cast schedule will compete with the renewal math. Fey is juggling her ongoing producing slate, Domingo is in the middle of a feature-film year, and Forte is attached to other comedy projects. A clean and binge-friendly eight-episode model — mirroring season one — gives the show flexibility to reconvene for a shorter shoot if Netflix decides to keep the franchise alive.
Closing Thoughts
The Four Seasons is a quiet test of whether a streaming friendship comedy can survive losing its loudest member. The Alan Alda 1981 original had the luxury of an ensemble whose members never bowed out mid-arc, but the Netflix version inherits a more modern set of constraints, where stars rotate in and out of projects and a season-one death is just as likely to be a contract conclusion as a creative choice.
The show’s bet is that the vacations themselves are the format. As long as the surviving cast keeps booking trips together — to Italy, to the Jersey shore, eventually wherever — the camera has a structure to return to. Grief, in this read, is just another season; a chapter that the rest of the friend group has to live through, the same way it lives through a snowed-in cabin or a clammy beach rental.
That gentle premise is what made the first season land. Whether it can support a baby, an absence, and an entirely different continent is the question Netflix is asking subscribers to spend a long weekend answering.
한글 요약
티나 페이가 주연하고 공동 제작에 참여한 넷플릭스 시리즈 '포 시즌즈(The Four Seasons)' 시즌 2가 5월 28일 전 8회 일괄 공개됐다. 시즌 1 막바지 차 사고로 세상을 떠난 닉(스티브 카렐) 이후의 이야기를 다루며, 카렐은 시즌 2에 등장하지 않는다. 남은 다섯 친구와 닉의 아이를 임신한 지니(에리카 헤닝슨)가 뉴저지 해변과 이탈리아로 휴가를 떠나는 구성이다.
배경 전환은 단순한 무대 이동 이상의 의미를 가진다. 넷플릭스는 그동안 해외 로케이션을 적극 활용해 글로벌 시청층을 확장해 왔고, 이번 시즌의 이탈리아 무대도 같은 전략의 연장선상에 놓여 있다. 시즌 1이 로튼토마토 평론가 점수 78%로 시작된 잔잔한 히트작이었던 만큼, 주연 한 명이 빠진 채 진행되는 이번 시즌이 시즌 3 갱신 여부의 분수령이 될 것으로 보인다.
티나 페이, 콜먼 도밍고, 윌 포르테 등 출연진은 사전 인터뷰에서 "그룹 채팅을 유지하며 카렐과도 계속 교류한다"고 말했다. 시청자 반응은 카렐의 부재에 대한 아쉬움과, 시즌 1 결말을 끝까지 밀어붙인 작가진에 대한 호감으로 갈리고 있다. 시즌 3 갱신 여부는 시즌 2 완주율과 국제 시청 데이터에 따라 결정될 가능성이 크다.