Tina Fey and Steve Carell in Netflix Dramedy

Among the guests of the third season of the HBO The white lotus are a trio of childhood friends who, it is immediately obvious, cannot hold each other. From the moment they get out of the boat, these 40 years make passive-aggressive scales and speak behind the back of the other. However, at the end of the week, it is sincerely reflected in the way time has given their liaison sense. “We started this life together. I mean, we cross it. But we are still together, ”she says. “And I look at you guys, and it’s significant.”

I thought about this speech watching another unhappy clique in the new show by Tina Fey Netflix The four seasonsBased on the film by Alan Alda in 1981. This inherent value of shared history could be the only explanation to explain why its members continue to gravitate with each other up to four (!) Group vacations per year, despite the limited evidence they enjoy from the business of the other. But if time gives weight to their Relations, I cannot say that it does the same for the series. His eight half-hours do not feel well spent as well as just spent, too harmlessly for hatred but too tedious to cherish.

In all justice for the three couples in the center of The four seasonsFriendships between them seem to be in good condition, if they are strangely lacking in the kind of easy and idiosyncratic chemistry that you expect from people who claim to know each other for decades. These are the marriages that go to the rocks. What nobody other than Nick (Steve Carell) only knows the group is gathering for a weekend of the lake house to celebrate its 25th anniversary in Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) is that he has already decided to leave her.

The newspaper blinds friends perhaps more than Anne, throwing their whole life in disarray. More than three other trips – summer holidays in an unpleasant lodge, a weekend by the parents of Vassar College in the fall and a new year ski retreat – we look at the two remaining pairs are forced to examine the cracks in their own relationships, by literal and metaphorical storms.

The four seasons Delivered with a pedigree attracting attention. Besides Carell and Kenney-Silver, her casting includes Fey as a tender Kate, Will Strong as her anxious husband Jack, Colman Domingo as a best friend Cool Danny and Marco Calvani as husband of her husband Claude. Fey is also co-creator, with Tracey Wigfield (NBC’s Good newsPeacock Bell Restart) and Lang Fisher (Netflix I never have). This list of names alone may be sufficient to maintain high expectations, even after the first two chapters (led by candidates for Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini).

Alas. Each episode opens with generic seasonal images of flowers in flowers or trees dripping with frost on the corresponding Vivaldi concerto, and they rarely become much more memorable from there. The four seasons is not going for the same kind of densely joke delivery in layers as Fey 30 rock And his spiritual successors, which is good. But I found myself wishing that at least have preserved some of these catchy humor emissions, tense or specifically original rhythm of world construction.

Instead, we get a lot of things that are simply … there. There are a few clear lines (one of my favorites was the evocative description of Nick of her wedding as “as colleagues in a nuclear installation – we sit in the same room all night, watching different screens”) and the occasional solid comic gain, but not enough to give The four seasons Any sense of particular humor. There are pleasantly soft moments and poignant moments, but few of them land with great weight because the characters are so thin.

Danny and Kate are sour-dimensional, thick than thieves in their shared skepticism of feeling and their contempt for their spouses. As for said husbands, they are exhausting differently but still similar: Jack is subject to Spinlessness, Claude au melodrame, and both need their partners than their partners need it. Nick embodies a stereotypical crisis in the forties, to the new sexy car and the new sexy girlfriend, and the show is barely trying to claim that it is deeper than that. These are not as much the characters as these are the results of a personality quiz.

The exceptions are the two women of Nick’s orbit. Kenney-Silver offers a naturally nuanced performance while Anne, balanced on the fine line between sad that in devast and sad that in pathetic. You see in his wide eyes the internal show between his despair and his fury at the end of his old life, and her trembling hope for the start of her new. And Erika Henningsen successfully evolves the adventurous girlfriend of Nick, Ginny, a joke to a note (as a nasty character says, “(his) personality is squats”) to an incredibly conflictual woman, doing the best of her best to meet her boyfriend where he is.

Anne and Ginny’s is the kind of dynamic of shredded and fluid to build a series around – but not This The series, which, at its detriment, seems much more interested in watching Kate and Jack and Danny and Claude rejected the same old arguments with each other. The four seasons positions itself as an honest examination of marriage, and it is true that in any long and narrow relationship, some disagreements will be repeated enough to form grooves in the indiscreet manner. But this makes visualization boring when these resentments are essentially all We are allowed to see these people, to the point that even happier moments are starting to feel like an instruction for explosions.

The four seasons Ends with a non -convincing note, with a character going so far as to make a subject on the very concept of the “sister souls” they had shot derision earlier. But his heart, I think, lies in the cynics which consider marriage more as a source of work than comfort. I suppose that if you have a quarter of a century of memories, a child you both like and a house that you both have for that, you might find it anyway to keep things anyway – if only because everything that seems to be a real pain.

Fortunately for me, everything I have with The four seasons is four hours of history. I feel perfectly happy to qualify them as a forgetable blip and move on with the rest of my life.