Tina Fey Lifts The Four Seasons Season 2 Beyond Its First Run
The four seasons season 2 gets a strong verdict: said Tina Fey’s follow-up is even more fantastic than the first season. That matters because the show is not just returning to the same setup; it is reworking its midlife ensemble after Nick’s death and pushing the story through four holiday stretches.
Tina Fey and Tracey Wigfield
Fey co-created and wrote the series with Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher, and the review places the second outing alongside the first as a step up rather than a repeat. The show itself is Fey’s 2020s update of the 1980s film, but season two leans harder into the friction inside the group, which is what gives the new run its shape.
Season two is split across four fancy holidays, with each holiday given two gag-packed episodes. That structure gives the ensemble room to keep shifting after Nick, played by Steve Carell, died at the end of season one, and it lets the story keep moving instead of turning the loss into a single-note memorial exercise.
Nick, Anne, and Ginny
Three couples are reconfigured after Nick’s death, and the review makes that rearrangement central to the season’s appeal. Kate, played by Fey, is still with Jack, the uptight softie in the couple, while Danny and Claude remain gay, unbearably chic, and forever bickering. Anne is Nick’s ex-wife, and Ginny is the much younger woman for whom he left her, now heavily pregnant with Nick’s baby.
Kate’s line, “There is no Beyoncé song about that,” lands because the show keeps finding jokes inside a setup that is already awkward on paper. By summer, Anne and Ginny and a baby have moved in together, which turns a clean break into shared domestic chaos.
Spring, Summer, Thanksgiving
In spring, the grief-stricken sextet go on an upstate hike to scatter Nick’s ashes from his favourite mountain. The first attempt is interrupted by a Brownies group, the second goes bad because everyone hates each other and Danny forgot the ashes, and the third strands them in a retro motel overnight when an active manhunt closes in. The town is so depressing that, in the review’s words, “Tracy Chapman sped away from it.”
Summer shifts the group again: Ginny has given birth, Danny and Claude want a baby, Jack has found a man friend for beach play dates, and Kate says, “I didn’t think middle-aged straight men could make new friends!” The season also gives Kate and Jack a label for their split emotional path — “grow apart on purpose,” or, as the review puts it, “freeballing.”
Big Thanksgiving ends with Jack kicking the turkey down the stairs and twisting his ankle, while Little Thanksgiving jumps back to the Covid pandemic, when Steve was alive. That split is the season’s sharpest twist: the show keeps its holiday gimmick, but the review suggests the writing is strongest when the structure is used to show how grief, desire, and avoidance keep colliding inside the same group.
