Tina Fey On ‘The Four Seasons’ Season 2 Interview

With Netflix comedy series The Four Seasons, co-creator and star Tina Fey skewers the intricate dynamics of romantic partnership, taking us on a series of vacations with four couples in a longtime friendship group. Based on Alan Alda’s 1981 film in which he starred with Carol Burnett, Fey and co-creators Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher’s reimagining tracks the fallout among the friends when Steve Carell’s character Nick leaves his wife Anne (Kerri Kenney) and finds love with the much younger Ginny (Erika Henningson). Fey’s character Kate and her husband Jack (Will Forte) absorb the seismic impact, along with Colman Domingo’s Danny and husband Claude (Marco Calvani). With Season 2 on the way, Fey discusses the hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking reality explored by the show, if Steve Carell could appear in a flashback, and how she sees comedy evolving in the industry.

DEADLINE: I have to tell you that this resonated with me deeply. I think that at the end of Season 1 when Kate finally says to Jack, “You are like a child. You’re always feeling ill or you’re hungry.” That really hit home for me and for a lot of people I know.

TINA FEY: Anecdotally, I do think that resonated in some couples, yes.

DEADLINE: I’ve come up against those men that have arrested development situations a lot.

FEY: It must be absolutely harrowing to date in 2025. It must be horrible.

I don’t think I’ve ever been a part of anything — except maybe moments on Saturday Night Live — that was watched by so many people, so quickly. And so it was thrilling to have that feedback.

DEADLINE: That’s why I really also like the Anne character so much because I feel like there’s so much scope there to watch her date in Season 2. What she’s going to go through coming up?

FEY: Yeah, I hope so. It’s one of our favorite things about getting to do the show as eight episodes, as opposed to the movie. In the [original] movie, Anne kind of disappears. And Sandy Dennis is so incredible, and I understand absolutely why Alan Alda wrote it that way for the movie, because it is kind of beautifully painful and it sometimes it’s what happens when you’re friends with a couple and then just one of them just drifts. But especially with the three women showrunners, we definitely were like, “Well, we want to get into a little more, how will she bounce back? To what degree at what pace?” And Kerri is so gifted. I knew Kerri was a really funny actress. I didn’t know her personally, but I was a fan of hers. And then just to see the amount of kind of vulnerability she’s able to layer underneath while still being really precise. There’s that scene where she’s just trying to unwrap that thing she bought at the gift shop and it’s taking too long. She’s kind of laughing, but you also want to cry because it’s so embarrassing.

DEADLINE: Also, something I love about her is that you don’t make her this person obsessing crying over her ex. She’s just in shock. She’s trying to figure out who she is without him, and you don’t make her obsessed with getting him back. She’s not doing that. She’s not lying around drinking Chardonnay with her girls, talking about “that b*stard.” It’s much more grown up.

FEY: Oh, I’m glad you felt that. That was the hope. I don’t think it ever crossed any of our minds that she would want him back. But yeah, she doesn’t, and it’s not an immediate fling with a young man. We try to reflect how we think that might realistically go for Anne. And we’re talking about Season 2 now, and then realistically what degree of change might happen that way? She has this scene — spoiler alert — at the Funeral Home with Jack, and Jack is saying, “Hey, I f*cked up. And I just thought maybe Ginny could speak.” And Anne’s like, “No, let me have one boundary.” And it’s very realistically delivered. And for her character, it’s kind of like the completion of her arc in a way that she’s holding this boundary. I think it’s just is a really beautiful acting moment on Kerri’s part.

DEADLINE: I loved it because frankly I wanted to smack Jack across the face at that point. He’s a person who needs to be liked by everybody, and that’s a selfish act when it’s that sort of performative niceness.

FEY: Yes, exactly.

DEADLINE: I know you started your writers’ room for Season 2. How’s it going? How are you feeling about it?

FEY: It’s good. We have the full staff back from Season 1. We’ve been in for about a month, and everyone continues to be very generous with sharing their own experiences. We talked a lot about Season 1, how we felt about it, how we felt it was perceived. I don’t think I’ve ever been a part of anything — except maybe moments on Saturday Night Live — that was watched by so many people, so quickly. And so it was thrilling to have that feedback. All of us had friends who were like you said, “I wanted to smack Jack; I wanted to throttle Nick.” I love that people have visceral reactions. And so now we’re figuring out, OK, without the template of the original movie, what can happen that still feels in scale and realistic, but also entertaining. So it’s coming along.

DEADLINE: I was very invested when Jack and Kate decide at the end of Season 1 they need to go to therapy because I have this horrible feeling that Kate might not be able to take it.

FEY: That we might come apart? I feel like they pushed through the worst of it. That’s another one of my favorite moments: that scene with me and Will in the car when we admit we need to go to therapy. And then we both are just equally furious, but acknowledging it, but screaming.

DEADLINE: When did it first click that you wanted to do this as a series based on the film?

FEY: It really was pre-pandemic. I had always loved the movie since I was a kid, weirdly, and I realized it was a universal movie. So I had been inquiring about the rights, since I work for Universal. They were like, “Yes, we have them.” Then they were like, “Wait, actually, we almost have them, give us three more years to sort it out.” And so there was this window of time where I was like, I hope I can get these rights. And somewhere in that time I was talking to Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher about it. I had produced a show with Tracey before, a really funny show called Great News and had worked at 30 Rock and Lang had done such beautiful work on Never Have I Ever, and we all, being under the universal umbrella, were saying, “Could we do something together?” And it was time for me to maybe be on something again, which made me much pickier about, well, what would it be? And then we just kept coming back to this, The Four Seasons, as the kind of thing I would want to be in, the kind of thing I would want to watch. There are creative, tonal things about it that I loved. And it’s not my first rodeo, there were practical things about it: I would love to work with this ensemble of actors in comfortable locations wearing sweaters with almost no day players and no guest stars, and sitting down and eating on camera. So there was a lot of the practical parts of it that appealed to me. And at some point, the three of us agreed, OK, that’ll be the idea that we take out.

DEADLINE: Will you continue the format of the vacation rotation in Season 2?

FEY: Well, one of the things we like about it is what we kept calling the container plate of it. The game of, we only see them on vacation. We only see them throughout the year. And again, I will say, to address the internet directly, these are not all lavish vacations. The writers were like, “Some people say, ‘Who takes four vacations a year?’ I was like, “Well, they go to their friend’s house, visit their kid at college, they go away on a vacation and then they go away to, I guess what is a local ski weekend. I don’t ski, so I don’t know if people do that more than once a year, but we definitely want to keep the format of only seeing them when they’re together, only seeing them over four occasions.

DEADLINE: I’m so glad you’re saying that. I love that format and I love that it feels like a play in that way. It was an inspired bit of casting with Colman Domingo too, I have to say.

FEY: He’s just one of the most talented actors of our generation. He is incredibly handsome and chic and funny. And he was a real get for us. I remember the day that I went back into the writers’ room and got to deliver the news that Colman had said yes. And we were all beside ourselves. We never thought of anyone but Colman for the role from the moment we all started. And then we were like, “If he doesn’t want to do this, I don’t know what we’re going to do.” But I think luckily, we caught him at a time when I think he had just finished The Madness maybe, and he had been doing Rustin and beautiful work, but heavy topics. The Madness I think was fun, but it was constant running and getting shot at and stuff. And he also was like, “So wait, maybe we’d sit and wear cute outfits at the beach? I think I’m in.”

DEADLINE: We had an interview with him in our magazine where he said one of the things he loved about the show was that it avoids old tropes of representing a gay couple. I do want to know what Steve Carrell said when you told him he was being killed in another car accident after that happened to him on The Morning Show.

FEY: It keeps happening to him.

DEADLINE: I know it was really sad and shocking, but I also did laugh.

FEY: I think we had all that pitched out and ready to pitch to him before he even signed on. And so we pitched out the whole season to him, and he was like, “Oh, why does this keep happening to me?” And so, I was like, “Oh no. But I was like, but I think I still want it to happen to you. Sorry.” And of course, he had such a good time. I think we all had such a great time together. And we had a really funny group text chain that when we got picked up for Season 2, everyone was like, “Yay, hooray, blah, blah.” And then five minutes after everything, Steve just wrote, “I’m dead.”

DEADLINE: Is there any world in which you could do flashbacks with him? So he gets to live a little longer on the show?

FEY: I couldn’t possibly say. We have our format. I mean, of the many mistakes I’ve made in my career, killing him will hopefully go down as the biggest.

DEADLINE: How do you feel about the way that television comedy is evolving?

FEY: Well, I think you’re seeing many different tones. I mean, our show is a very different tone, obviously than 30 Rock or Kimmy Schmidt was. It is a comedy. The shows that I like to watch vary in tone. I like watching Abbott Elementary. I like watching Somebody Somewhere, which is much closer to a dramedy. So I think there’s room for all these tones. I feel like people love library shows. What people wish they had was 140 episodes of something like Friends, but they haven’t seen it. But it’s really hard to get 240 episodes if you don’t program comedy. Someone’s just got to commit to program.

DEADLINE: Do you think that era is gone in a way?

FEY: Well, people want to watch them. People watch The Office and Parks and Rec in a Loop.

DEADLINE: I watch those shows on repeat like comfort blankets.

FEY: I think people do want that comfort. And Abbott is a hit, and it is well-made. So, this is why I’m not an executive because I don’t know.

DEADLINE: I know you’ve said in the past that you don’t really think about camera work or directing specifically. Is that still the case?

FEY: Yeah. I love with shows like this, I love the showrunner position and TV is such a great job because you still get to weigh in on everything, every prop, every location. And you can, a lot of times, especially with directors that we know and are comfortable with, I’ll jump in and with the director’s permission, talk directly to the actors about what we were thinking or what the thought behind certain scenes were. And so to me, it’s all the good parts of directing without having to make a shot list. So, for me in this moment, I’m very content.