When the film The Four Seasons was released in 1981, I had stopped playing with dolls only a few years before. And yet, yes, I saw the original (which I will talk about in a separate post so as not to make this one too long), but I was too young to understand everything that Alan Alda captured so accurately in a production that was a critical success and featured, in addition to himself, the giants Carol Burnett and Rita Moreno in the cast. It’s a familiar tale: friends reaching middle age and beginning to question what happiness, marriage, and new beginnings mean.

Dividing the story into four parts, in line with Antonio Vivaldi’s symphony The Four Seasons, Alda was inspired by a personal episode in which he judged a friend harshly and later realized that not only was he wrong, but that friendships go through their own “seasons.” From there, he wrote the script with this notion of affective and emotional cycles in mind.

In 1984, there was an attempt to turn the film into a series, but those were the early days of cable TV and long before streaming — and the type of theme proposed by The Four Seasons had not yet found space on television. Even so, 44 ​​years after the original, the story remains current and relevant. That’s why Tina Fey, a self-confessed fan of the film, led a new adaptation, which became one of the highlights of Netflix’s May programming.

Fey was clever in maintaining the series format, with eight episodes (two per season), covering almost two years in the lives of six friends. The three couples — Nick (Steve Carell) and Anne (Keri Kenney-Silver), Kate (Fey) and Jack (Will Forte), and Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani) — have maintained the tradition of traveling together every season for over 25 years. Everything starts to go wrong when Nick announces that he is going to separate from Anne, shocking his friends, who considered them the happiest and most in love couple. The breakup shakes not only the group, but the balance within each relationship.

The theme of marriage, divorce, and generational conflicts is timeless. But the series updates the dilemmas, humor, and tensions to reflect current times, preserving the balance that Alan Alda achieved between comedy and drama, and maintaining that affectionate look at all the characters, without judgment. It may seem simple, but it is not. None of the six is idealized; they all have flaws, but they are coherent flaws and treated with empathy.

If it is already difficult to create chemistry between couples on screen, imagine between an entire group. Still, The Four Seasons succeeds — and it quickly engages us. Just like the 1981 film, each episode takes place in a specific season, reinforcing the idea that human relationships also go through their own cycles: of flourishing, crisis, decline and reinvention.

The brief appearance by Alan Alda — who retired after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s, but also served as a producer here — is moving and reverent. He appears as Don, Anne’s father, offering melancholic advice about time and coexistence. His presence works almost as a symbolic blessing to the new generation, connecting the two versions. In fact, if we want to imagine it poetically, Anne could well be the daughter of Jack, Alda’s character in the original. The seasons pass for each generation.

For all these reasons, the new The Four Seasons is not only a tribute, but an expansion of the original film. It reflects a cultural moment of reconstruction — in a post-pandemic world, with friendships mended and relationships reevaluated —, resuming a narrative about emotional bonds that try, with more or less success, to resist the inevitable changes of time. And without giving away any spoilers: when we think the story is going one way, it surprises us and goes another way.

The series is definitely worth watching — whether in a single marathon or little by little, savoring each season.