by Gill Pringle in LA
If there’s plenty of film and TV shows about falling in love and dating, rarely do we delve into the mundanity of what long relationships looks like. Well, it worked for Alan Alda’s 1981 classic couples movie, The Four Seasons, and Tina Fey believed it was ripe for a new audience.
While the original starred actor-writer-director Alda alongside Rita Moreno and Carol Burnett, Fey today reimagines it as an eight-episode series, featuring a cast of her own mid-life contemporaries.
“I was a huge fan, even though I was only 10 when the movie came out,” says Fey, who received Alda’s blessing, reuniting with her 30 Rock writer-producers Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield to put a modern-day spin on the dramedy.
“It was a movie that played a lot in the early days of cable TV, and that’s how I would see it so frequently. It just felt very cozy and aspirational,” she says about re-envisioning these three sets of long-time couples who enjoy sharing annual vacations and family milestones together.
With Fey partnering with her former SNL colleague Will Forte to play one couple, and Steve Carell and Kerri Kenney-Silver portraying another, Colman Domingo pairs with Italian actor Marco Calvani in a thoroughly modern open marriage.
Arguably, all three couples can be accused of having become a little complacent, when suddenly they are forced to re-assess their relationships.
“When an inciting event happens with one of the couples, it changes that dynamic,” says Domingo. “And you’re, like, trying to rethink who you are, especially as you go into this next chapter of your life, and what your values are and what’s gonna change and shift,” says the Oscar-nominated Sing Sing actor describing any couple who suddenly questions the strength of their relationship.
“But I think that is the joy of this. And that was done with a beautiful sleight of hand, because it’s really funny, but it also has deep, heartfelt emotions to it,” adds the Philadelphia-born playwright, director and actor.
If many of Domingo’s award-winning roles have been intense, The Four Seasons offers a chance to show his lighter side. “I ran to it. It was an opportunity that I don’t receive often. You know, usually I’m sort of like supposed to mine something, some deep soul searching or, organising the March on Washington or something,” he jests in reference to his role as civil rights activist Bayard Rustin in the biopic Rustin.
“So, this was an opportunity to join an ensemble. I just wanted to go and do something really sweet with some people who are gonna love each other and talk about relationships. And I was like, ‘Wait! I get to actually wear a cute sweater and sit at a table and have some witty banter?!’
“It’s chops that I haven’t been able to flex in a long time. Most people don’t know that I did sketch comedy years ago while I was working on stage,” he says in reference to his time on Rosie O’Donnell’s The Big Gay Sketch Show in the mid-2000s.
The Four Seasons isn’t all light-hearted. “Underneath it all, you see that there’s levels of pain, of hurt, and all those complexities.
“It’s all these complex emotions underneath that you don’t want to reveal. And you’re using your armour of being witty and humorous, but you’re actually hurt because you really love that person,” says Domingo, 55, who also directs an episode.
If these three couples are roughly ten years older than Alda’s original married pairings, then Fey, 54, declares, “I will say that I think 55 is like the new 45!”
And she’s only half joking.
“Cut to everyone’s like, ‘No it’s not!’,” laughs the actress/writer who has built an extraordinary career around making us laugh, today hoping to do the same by casting her keen focus on long-term relationships and married life.
For herself, married to Jeff Richmond for 24 years, she understands the joys and frustrations of married life, now mining it for comedy gold.
“We talked about the show being a love letter to long-term relationships, both platonic and romantic,” she says.
“Because your life is ideally more than just the person you’re married to. Sometimes when you are struggling with something with just your spouse, you need a group of friends to bring humour to it.
“Those friendships really help marriages, I think. Having a person who just fulfils a part of you that your spouse can’t quite [fulfil] is very important,” adds Fey who nevertheless does enjoy spending a lot of time with her husband, frequently enlisting him to compose music, produce and direct episodes on her projects.
Together, they executive produced The Four Seasons which sees these six old friends reuniting for a relaxing weekend away only to learn that one couple in the group is about to split up, completely upending their cozy status quo.
Over the course of a year, we follow them on four vacations, observing how this shake-up affects their dynamics, sending old issues – and new – bubbling to the surface.
If the series is a complete reboot of the original script, then Fey felt strongly about keeping in a line where her character Kate says to her husband, Jack ‘can’t they just fight it out?’, regarding the couple who are splitting up.
“I always thought that was a really interesting way that Alan [Alda] wrote Jack and Kate originally – that they’re a couple that know they are gonna fight, they know they’re gonna argue, but they know that they are stable at their core,” she says.
“And over the course of this series, we get a little rocky at our core and we have to really push through it. But I always thought Alan writes women so well and writes everyone so three-dimensional that we were trying to emulate that in the way we wrote Jack and Kate in this.”
Through the eight-episode arc, the journey of this group of friends unfolds with its fair share of passionate bickering, and surprising realisations as they traipse around on group trips from sandy beaches to snowy mountains.
“It’s two episodes for each season. And you only ever see people on vacation, which I also like. You don’t see them at home; you don’t see them at work. It’s just these friends on vacation,” says Fey.
As Kate and Jack, Fey and Forte serve as a kind of anchor among the couples, the actors building on their 20 year friendship forged on Saturday Night Live where Fey was both head writer and cast member. “Tina has always been like the senior when I was a freshman. She was pretty much always my boss, even though we’re the same age. There was a part of this coming in, going like, ‘Oh, now we gotta kiss each other and stuff like that’,” jokes Forte.
Fey knew Forte would bring a sense of everyman relatability to the role. “We wanted someone that had real warmth and intelligence but also could be funny. We have a scene with Will coming back into the room being like, ‘someone just saw my penis’. He really nails earnest concern and panic, and then the sort of weird, physical demonstration of those feelings,” she says.
“Kate and Jack are sort of the template. They are the Alan Alda and Carol Burnett characters in the original movie in some ways. In the beginning, they might think that they’re just this much better than everybody else at being married. They need to be taken down a peg,” she adds.
Ultimately, Fey hopes that the series offers as much comfort and comedy for a new generation of viewers as the original film did for her younger self. “I hope audiences feel like they are inside a big sweater with us, and also having a dinner party with us.
“And I hope that the joy and warmth that we all feel for each other transfers to them, that we are a comfort and provide some laughs for them in their homes,” she promises.
The Four Seasons is streaming now on Netflix
