Time flies when you’re having midlife crises! After just over a year (which is a blip in this streaming era), Tina Fey and Co. are back for Season 2 of The Four Seasons, a charmer based on the 1981 Alan Alda–Carol Burnett classic film.

Once again, Fey’s Kate and husband Jack (Will Forte) are embarking on seasonal hangs with married pals Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani) and the recently divorced Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver). Only this time, Ginny (Erika Henningsen), the younger girlfriend of Anne’s late ex (Steve Carell, whose unfaithful Nick died in Season 1’s penultimate episode), is now part of the gang and very pregnant. Talk about traveling with a lot of baggage!

“There’s a new dynamic now because Nick is gone,” says Lang Fisher, who cocreated the adaptation with 30 Rock pals Fey and Tracey Wigfield. “How does this group function? What’s its center now that the person kind of keeping everybody together is gone?”
 

Emily V. Aragones / Netflix

“We wanted to show the different ways people deal with [loss] and the way that friends can come together and support each other through that kind of tragedy,” she continues.

One of those ways is clearly with laughter. Over the course of four different trips — a spring mountain hike, a summer beach stay, a woodsy Thanksgiving and Italy at Christmas — this crew continues to mine everyday issues for a steady stream of comedy and camaraderie, spiked with lovely shots of emotional growth — even when the accommodations aren’t exactly five-star.

“I’m a Jersey Shore girl and so is Tracey,” offers Fey, a longtime fan of Cape May, New Jersey. Accordingly, part of the season was filmed in the Jersey Shore town of Ocean Grove.

“The show isn’t White Lotus,” Wigfield notes of keeping things grounded. “It’s not about skewering the rich and all the luxurious vacations they take. So we try to think about [locations] practically from a character standpoint. If someone rents a Shore house or if there’s a reason we have to go somewhere — in the premiere, [they] have to spread Nick’s ashes — we try to make sure these are real, relatable people.”

 
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Not to mention flawed. Once a concerning example of marital drift, Fey and Forte’s couple is definitely doing better, especially once the usually prickly Kate steps out of her closed-off comfort zone to help Jack process his best friend’s death.

“Yeah, Kate’s a bitch,” jokes Fey. “[But] hopefully we’re seeing the layers underneath that with them and understanding why they’re a good pair,” she continues. “Hopefully [you’re] still rooting for them.”

The Four Seasons, Streaming now, Netflix