What ‘The Four Seasons’ Gets Right—and Wrong—About Midlife Marriage Â
Mild spoilers ahead.
Healthy, romantic, even still passionate midlife marriages and long-term relationships outside of marriage may be hard to find on television—where’s the drama in happiness after all? That’s part of why the new Netflix series The Four Seasons is fueling conversations: it portrays partnerships that appear stable on the surface but are slowly developing icy cracks underneath.
Early on in The Four Seasons (inspired by the 1981 film), Will Forte’s character Jack shares an anecdote about how he and his wife Kate (played by series co-creator Tina Fey) survived a rough patch by finding an activity they could share. (In this case, yoga—something of which Kate claims to have no memory.)
It’s little moments in the show—like Kate anticipating Jack’s hunger for a favorite snack—that tell us the most about this couple.
They’ve been together since college, and they share qualities with the best TV couples of the past. Think Rob and Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, with the kind of easy banter and inside jokes they have with each other. Kate doesn’t believe in soulmates (well, not at first), but she does believe in dedication to one another.
Because of this, they’re the healthiest couple in the series—not a high bar—although that’s, in part, because The Four Seasons isn’t very optimistic about relationships, let alone midlife marriage. You never quite know who deserves your support.
Is Honestly Really the Best Policy?
Viewers of this show are presented with a range of levels of communication.
Jack and Kate, as mentioned, are open with each other and discuss everything. Except, that is, when they experience a hiccup in their marriage. They start seeing a couples counselor who… seems to have given them some bad advice. When they start including “weird therapy-speak” in their regular communication with each other, it creates a weird antagonistic relationship between them, instead of intimacy.
Still, they are better off than their friends Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani), who seem more loving, but are actually withholding secrets. Danny worries that Claude will overreact to certain things; so, he sometimes doesn’t even give him the chance to react at all—even when it regards crucial health questions.
The show’s worst couple scenario involves Nick (Steve Carell) and Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), who begin the series celebrating their 25th anniversary together. But Nick is the least honest and open of all these characters—he’s been cheating on Anne for years. And she knows it, which unsurprisingly muddies their relationship. He blames her.
“We’re like coworkers at a nuclear facility,” he says. “We sit in the same room all night monitoring different screens.”
Did Nick ever try to talk to his wife about his dissatisfaction with their marriage? A comparatively small cheating incident sends Kate and Jack to therapy, but Nick doesn’t seem to think his larger infidelities even bear a mention. Nor does he seem to recognize that the couple’s habit of parallel play (doing solo activities together) doesn’t have to be distancing.
From Anne’s perspective, they have (or had) stability. From Nick’s, they have inertia and lead separate lives. But rather than address this with her, or help her understand what’s at risk, he plans to blindside her at their 25th anniversary by asking for a divorce. Soon following this, he introduces his new-ish girlfriend, who may have been having an affair with him well before he decided on divorce.
It’s clear he’s taken Anne for granted, as well as the comfortable life they have built together—operative word being “they.” He fails to recognize that this was something she was led to believe that he wanted, too. He avoids having tough conversations with her—the kind his friends attempt to have with their spouses, to varying degrees of success—until he has to have the toughest one of all, once he’s decided it’s too late.
Kate asks Jack if Nick and Anne could just “fight it out,” but that would require them to actually speak to each other, to be emotionally engaged or, barring that, to try some form of triadic intervention, where they try to listen to the each other’s viewpoints through a third party. Seeing them only at the dissolution of their marriage, we never get a sense of why these two were together in the first place, but it would have helped us—if not them—to get a glimpse of that.
What The Four Seasons gets right is that it can be easier to keep quiet, even for decades, in a long-term relationship, but eventually, the truth will come out. What the series gets wrong is that it could be healthier to complain—as Kate and Jack do, pre-therapy—so that resentments don’t build and then blow up.
Isn’t It Romantic?
Is the key to marriage working at it? Better communication? Perhaps.
But Alan Alda—who wrote and directed the original film on which the series is based and makes a cameo as Anne’s father—offers a notable reminder of an important ingredient when his character recalls something his late wife used to do. She’d wake him up and tell him congratulations: “Today is a sex day.”
For some, that might be a way to keep the marriage alive. Passionate. Even romantic. It just depends on your definition of romance. If you’re looking for the traditional Hollywood or Hallmark varieties, then The Four Seasons is devoid of romance, suggesting romantic love might be impossible after a certain point.
Sex, however…
Danny and Claude are in an open marriage and invite a third to join them during one scene. Nick’s new girlfriend mentions that her previous relationship had been open, as well. This is bewildering to Nick, who has questions about openness, fluidity and relationship labels. Unfortunately for him, no one actually explains ethical non-monogamy, which could have provided a way forward in his marriage to Anne.
But that would have required a tough conversation, and, as we know, Nick isn’t up for that. Nor was he big on the kind of consideration and collaboration it would have required to gain Anne’s consent.
Despite an interim of a few months where Kate and Jack start therapy (and stop having sex), they have the healthiest of the romantic/sex lives of their group of friends. They seem to have the real deal, where they truly know each other and what would make the other happy. And if, at first an attempt doesn’t succeed, they’re game for “sexy do-overs.”
It might not carry the same weight as grand and fantastic romantic gestures—traveling across centuries to reunite with your lost love, as on Outlander—but Kate’s little, considerate gifts to Jack (donuts, special sandwiches) are romantic to them.
She didn’t think there was such a thing as soulmates, but she later sees him as hers. And saying that—when she knows that such a definition matters to him—is probably the most romantic thing she is capable of doing in that moment.
