Tina Fey Revives Four Seasons Show After Nick Dies in Season 2
The four seasons show returns for season two with Nick dead, and Tina Fey’s series uses that loss to reshuffle its three couples across four fancy holidays. The follow-up is sharper, sadder and funnier than the first season, while keeping the same gag-heavy structure: two episodes for each holiday.
Tina Fey and Steve Carell
Tina Fey co-created and wrote the series with Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher, and she stars as Kate. Steve Carell played Nick, whose death at the end of season one drives the new season’s emotional setup. That is the pivot point: the show does not reset after the loss, it builds its next round of arguments and loyalties around it.
The first-season ending leaves Anne as Nick’s ex-wife and Ginny as the much younger woman he left her for, now heavily pregnant with his baby. By summer, the two are living together with the baby, and Anne even tests Ginny’s breast pump on her own nipple. The arrangement is awkward by design, but it gives the series a cleaner dramatic engine than a simple breakup story.
Spring hike, ashes, failure
In spring, the grief-stricken sextet goes on an upstate hike to scatter Nick’s ashes from his favourite mountain. The first attempt is stopped by a Brownies group, the second falls apart because everyone hates each other and Danny forgot the ashes, and the third is interrupted by an active manhunt in the area. They end up in a retro motel in a town so depressing “Tracy Chapman sped away from it”.
That stretch gives the season its clearest tension: the group is not only mourning Nick, it is also trapped by the damage left behind among the living. Anne says, “Ladies aren’t supposed to be friends with the woman their dead husband left them for,” and Kate answers, “There is no Beyoncé song about that.”
Summer and Thanksgiving changes
By summer, Ginny has given birth, Danny and Claude want a baby, and Jack has found a man friend for beach play dates. Kate and Jack are “freeballing,” which is the show’s blunt way of describing a couple that has decided to grow apart on purpose. Kate also delivers one of the season’s cleanest lines when she says, “I didn’t think middle-aged straight men could make new friends!”
For Thanksgiving, the season splits into Big Thanksgiving and Little Thanksgiving. Big Thanksgiving ends with Jack kicking the turkey down the stairs and twisting his ankle, while Little Thanksgiving travels back to the Covid pandemic when Steve was alive. That choice keeps the series tied to Nick even as it pushes the ensemble into a new shape, and it makes this season feel less like a sequel than a recalibration.
