Following Nick’s (Steve Carell) death in the Season 1 finale, The Four Seasons gang opens Season 2 in a collective existential crisis. “Going into Season 2, the group is kind of trying to figure out who we are without this person,” says star Tina Fey, who is also a co-creator of the series with Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher.
Kate (Fey) and Jack (Will Forte) navigate how to support each other when they’re both grieving. Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani) debate whether having a child would solve their search for meaning. Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) and Ginny (Erika Henningsen) initially chafe over his estate, but soon become united in taking care of baby Gino — until it becomes healthier for both women to set out on their own. “There’s a scene at the end of Episode 4 where Danny’s talking to Anne and says, ‘With every choice I make right now, I feel like I have to stick the landing on my whole life.’ The stakes have ratcheted up,” says Fisher.
The star-studded cast weather the ups and downs of Season 2 as hilariously and relatably as they did in Season 1, resulting in another poignant love letter to all types of long-term relationships. “These relationships — both your boring marriage and your friend you’ve known forever — can be something you take for granted,” says Wigfield. “These relationships are your life, and they are profound. Slow down and think about how long you’ve been friends. Appreciate those relationships for how meaningful they are.”
Do Claude and Danny have a baby? Does Anne escape her midlife slump? Who is that mysterious Italian neighbor introduced in the finale’s last minutes? Keep reading to debrief the end of The Four Seasons Season 2.
At first, Ginny proposes a name for her baby with Nick that makes his friends all roll their eyes: Cove. “What’s beautiful about how this friend group acts towards Ginny is they immediately are like, you cannot fucking do that,” says Henningsen. “Cut, veto.”
Anne tells Ginny that Nick had always wanted to name a son after his grandfather, Eugene, but it becomes even more of a collective naming process when Danny and Claude weigh in. “Because of the guncles, who really don’t love the name Eugene, the baby becomes Gino,” Henningsen says.
Yes, Nick returns! Episode 6 flashes back to a COVID-era Thanksgiving, where Nick and Anne host their friends after quarantine kept them apart.
In Episode 3, Mark Brett (Steven Pasquale) stumbles upon the friends vacationing on the Jersey Shore, and soon he and Jack become fast friends. Jack’s preoccupation with Mark Brett (a true firsty lasty) frees up Kate to drink rosé with Anne, Danny, and Claude and gossip. In reality, Jack has found someone with whom to boogie-board and dig holes, but also to fill the void of the specific male friendship he lost when Nick died. Even though Danny mocks their hetero silliness in the series, Domingo concedes, “It was nice to see Jack have a friendship like that. It brought out something in Jack.”
When Kate learns that Mark Brett is single, a light bulb goes off in her head. She can offload another person she’s worried about on this new addition by setting him up with Anne. “If you are the only single person in your friend group, everyone is desperate for you to find someone,” says Fisher, while Kenney-Silver adds, “God bless Kate. I’m like, do you just want me to sleep with this guy because you can’t? She’s like, ‘Yeah.’” Kate and Danny are worried about Anne, who uses caretaking for Gino as a stalling tactic to avoid living her own life. When Anne opts to stay home to watch Three’s Company and fix Ginny’s breast pump, the friends step in, reminding her who she is. “‘You’re that hot chick from the East Village. You used to play in a rock band, you’re still that girl,’” says Kenney-Silver.
At first, Anne rejects their idea, but then changes her mind, swiping on some red lipstick, and winding up spending the night on Mark Brett’s blow-up mattress. He gives her his number, but he doesn’t hear from her until months later when Anne’s in Italy. She’s hoping to rekindle things, but she’s too late: He has a new girlfriend. While trying to prove to him just how fun her life is, Anne accidentally texts him a picture in which the wind has lifted her skirt, revealing her underwear, which promptly ends communication between them. “There’s nothing I love more on this planet than playing a completely humiliating moment,” says Kenney-Silver.
When Season 2 opens, Danny is reckoning with his friend’s death and his own health scare in Season 1. “They’re having an existential crisis, and want to know, ‘What’s next for us? Are we just going to keep redoing our home? Or are we going to evolve in some way?’” says Domingo. “It’s the time when people start thinking, ‘Do we want to have children or not?’” Calvani adds. “It’s such a capitalistic, patriarchal thing to have in your mind, but you ask yourself, ‘What is my legacy? What am I going to leave behind?’”
Claude has decided that their window for having a baby has already closed. But Danny claims to really want a child, and is frustrated by Claude’s unwillingness. It becomes increasingly clear, however, that a baby is maybe just a Band-Aid for the growing-up that Danny needs to do. “It’s a crossroads for a couple,” says Domingo. “This will break them up, or it can make them stronger.”
If you, too, had a big question you needed easy guidance on, you’re out of luck. In the series, The Three Magic Questions by Suzanne Zolner helps Kate decide whether to get Invisalign a third time, and Danny and Claude choose whether to have a baby. But the book and author do not exist: They’re merely fictionalized for The Four Seasons.
In Episode 4, after they decide not to have a baby, Danny and Claude announce that they’re moving to Claude’s hometown: Trento, Italy. Seeing Claude in a more comfortable context sheds light on the character. “I like Italian Claude,” says Fisher. “There’s more to him when he’s comfortable and speaking his own language. Letting Marco have those moments as an actor was really nice.”
Calvani, who is from Pratto, a town near Florence, was excited about this idea long before the show was renewed for Season 2. “We were shooting in Puerto Rico last year, we were a little tipsy having dinner all together, and I was like, ‘Tina, wouldn’t it be amazing if we went to Italy if we get Season 2? You wrote Italian characters — it’s served on a silver plate, as we say in Italy.’” In Episode 7, Anne, Jack, and Kate go to visit Claude and Danny in their new home.
Yes! In the first few minutes of The Four Seasons Season 2, we learn that Jack has turned into one of those people who won’t shut up about how he’s running a marathon. Initially, Kate halfheartedly agrees to run with him in an effort to buoy him in his grief. But after she’s outed for not knowing the first song of their shared training playlist, it becomes clear he’s on his own.
The race becomes the focal point for Jack’s anger over losing Nick and his anxiety about the group changing. But his emotions take control at Thanksgiving in Episode 5, pushing Jack to punt the turkey off the porch — and roll his ankle as a result. Now too injured to run from his problems, Jack has to deal with everything he’s feeling head-on, instead of offloading it on an athletic challenge.
However, in Episode 7, there happens to be a marathon taking place in Italy during the weekend that Kate, Jack, and Anne are visiting Claude and Danny. At the last minute, Kate encourages Jack to run it — and he does begrudingly. But in the last stretch, just as Jack is showing signs of giving up, she jumps in to run next to him: She, too, has pinned her hopes of Jack’s recovery on the race. But as Jack tells her through gasps for air, he’s in a different place now. “He doesn’t want her to push him to be better. He wants to be able to go through whatever he’s going through,” explains Fey. “We learn why she wants him to be happy all the time and never upset. We end up running the last two miles of a marathon together. That’s what marriage is, right? Kate’s able to open up in a way that’s very hard for her by the end of the season.”
Jack’s buried anger was directly inspired by Alan Alda’s character in the 1981 film. “In the movie, he has a lot of trouble expressing anger, and it ends with Alan’s character smashing up this ski inn. With Alan’s blessing, that was a jumping-off point for us to explore with Jack this season,” says Fey.
While down the shore in Episodes 3 and 4, Kate and Danny stumble into a creaky home with a for-sale sign. Kate gets the idea to turn the place into a B & B — not an Airbnb, as she constantly has to correct Jack — with her best friend. Just as she’s about to propose the idea to Danny, who is an architect, he announces he and Claude are moving to Italy, which prompts a fight between him and Kate.
The two friends work through their tension while roaming the streets of Italy in search of a bathroom, cutting through their typical acerbic wit in a moment of tender friendship. For both Domingo and Fey, it was important to portray the gravity of a relationship between a gay man and a straight woman, something that’s not spotlit the way a romantic bond is, but that holds similar intimacy. “I told Tina, ‘It is as if you read my journal,’” Domingo says. “It’s a complex relationship that I don’t think is explored. It's very intimate. Their choices affect each other. You’re watching that bond be challenged throughout the season. When they’re pissed, they’re really pissed at each other because they love each other so much. In an alternate universe, they would be married.”
In Episode 8, Danny’s mother, Beverly (Vernée Watson Johnson), goes to the hospital, and the doctors tell Danny she’ll require long-term care. A die-hard Philly native, Bev stakes her claim: “If there’s no Wawa in Italy, there’s no Beverly in Italy,” which leaves Danny between a rock and a hard place.
After overhearing Danny telling Beverly how important Claude is to him as he desperately tries to convince her to move to Trento with them, Claude makes the decision that they’ll move back to Philadelphia and take care of Beverly themselves.
When Danny and Claude move to Philadelphia, they leave an open house in Trento. Anne decides to stay and house-sit for them indefinitely. When the group asks whether this is Anne 2.0, she tells them no, it’s Anne Classic.
When Anne calls up Mark Brett and finds out he has a girlfriend, she fibs and says she, too, is dating someone — and that his name is Gianpiero.
Moments after Kate and Jack bid Anne farewell, a mysterious stranger — portrayed by beloved Scottish actor David Tennant (Broadchurch, Doctor Who) — comes by looking for Anne. He’s Danny and Claude’s neighbor, and he’s been getting Anne’s packages by accident. Mistaking one for his own, he tries on a pair of pants (and they fit). As the two laugh, he sticks out his hand to introduce himself. “I’m Gianpiero,” he says. Anne looks as though she’s seen a ghost; the coincidence is uncanny.
Fey had always had Tennant in mind for Gianpiero. “The way we pitched it to David was, ‘What would happen if Anne chose someone who was similar to her?’” Fey says. “Anne has been with someone who’s very much her opposite. Nick took care of the money, and she was the creative one. When you have a relationship later in life, you’re not choosing a father for a baby. You’re just having a relationship.”
Will Anne find a new love interest in Gianpiero, or just someone with whom to share pants? “If we’re lucky,” says Fey, “we’ll get to see what happens.”
Season 2 of The Four Seasons is now streaming on Netflix. Read more on Tudum.
