The new streaming show Four Seasons follows the plot of the 1981 film of the same name that Alan Alda wrote and starred in, casting his childhood friend Carol Burnett as his wife, with Sandy Dennis and Rita Moreno as the wives of the other two couples in this group of middle to upper-middle class friends. In real life, Alda has been married to his wife since 1957 (they’re still living), and in the movie he explored the effect of divorce on friends and families.
In the original the husbands are a dentist, a lawyer, and an estate planner (whose wife, a photographer, insists he’s really just an insurance salesman). The story follows them through vacations during the four seasons of the year—an upstate lake house for spring (they’re New Yorkers), tropical islands for summer, a visit to their alma mater when a child enrolls for fall, and then a ski trip for winter (with a funeral in the new series—in the film only a Mercedes is dispatched). Antonio Vivaldi provides background music. It’s not Four Weddings and a Funeral, but a divorce, an emptying of the nests, and a funeral.
The vacation locales aren’t as exotic or costly as those of the upper- and upper-middle class characters skewered in White Lotus, though the Four Seasons characters manage to go on a vacation as a group every three months. Tina Fey is a co-writer of the new show, an eight-episode Netflix product, which promises a second season that will be charting new territory beyond what Alda’s original movie covered. Perhaps Alda will help with storylines; he has a cameo in the Netflix version. Fey casts herself as Kate Burroughs (Carol Burnett’s role), and the three couples are somewhat similar, or rather two of them are.
Rita Moreno’s character, Italian-American Claudia, has become gay Italian immigrant Claude (played by Italian actor Mario Calvani) and Moreno’s chubby white dentist husband has become an African-American interior architect who spruces up hotels around the world. Fey says she introduced more gay characters for realism, because in the contemporary world, so many of her friends are homosexuals. It happens that the activist group GLAAD is currently complaining that 36% of current gay TV characters will not return to the screen next season, and is also demanding that 50 percent of all gay TV characters be gays of color, the latter demand exactly satisfied by Fey’s interracial gay couple.
Like the original, the plot centers on one husband leaving his wife and cohabiting with a younger woman, with the other couples having to manage which half of the divorced couple will be invited to go on which vacations. The gay couple, in an open relationship, adds a new wrinkle, as the two straight couples remain non-judgmental as their gay friends do something they “can’t” do, picking up strangers online at vacation spots for threesomes (though not in practice with what seem like enviable results).
Watching the 1981 movie and the current series back-to-back shows up the weaknesses in Fey’s series. Fey isn’t the actress that Burnett was, and Will Forte makes Alan Alda look macho. Fey’s re-do of a fight scene where the couple argues is insipid, not because it’s badly written, but because the 2025 couple are unequal partners where the wife dominates the low-t husband and they communicate with cardboard phrases supplied to them by a couples therapist.
It’s all amusing, watching these kookie establishment liberals, but not as biting as White Lotus (or Curb Your Enthusiasm), though there’s a very unpleasant chunky, angry, college student daughter who writes an atrocious play attacking her divorced mom and dad and the new, younger girlfriend, somewhat akin to Sydney Sweeney’s turn as the obnoxious, Ivy-programmed, woke daughter in Season 1 of White Lotus.
There’s another option if you’re missing your lotus—turn to psychedelic mushrooms. Mad doctor Nicole Kidman is still micro-dosing patients in season two of Nine Perfect Strangers, currently on Hulu. These strangers are richer than the Four Seasons couples, more in the financial stratosphere occupied by White Lotus characters. And psilocybin use, if you follow Scott Adams or reason magazine libertarians or science journals, is now a more fashionable topic than either divorce or gays. (Last week, during the MAGA bromance spat, I was waiting for Trump to say people shouldn’t tweet while using magic mushrooms, but he showed off his newfound restraint.)
If you really miss White Lotus read Henry James, particularly The Bostonians. The novel centers around a somewhat low-born oratorical prodigy who’s a gorgeous redhead, Verena Tarrant, and how everyone wants to marry her, including two cousins, a bluestocking Boston Brahmin, Olive Chancellor, and her recently destitute Mississippi cousin, impoverished by the Civil War, Basil Ransom. Olive’s an extreme feminist who thinks men shouldn’t exist, a precursor to Boston College theologian Mary Daly, albeit with a trust fund. Basil’s a "conservative" who thinks women should marry and remain in the home and not have the vote. Basil’s also one of the few characters in the book who’s open, honest, friendly and easy-going.
I was surprised at the extent of James’ critique of the progressives of his day. Describing a Miss Birdseye, an abolitionist turned suffragette after Emancipation, James writes: “Since the Civil War much of her occupation was gone; for before that her best hours had been spent in fancying that she was helping some Southern slave to escape. It would have been a nice question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this excitement, she did not sometimes wish the blacks back in bondage.”
James was a part of the East Coast liberal establishment of his time, homosexual (as was his sister), Harvard-educated (as was his brother), and non-nationalistic enough that he eventually moved to London and became a British citizen. And yet he produced this satire of upper-middle class progressivism, a la White Lotus. (You can also watch the Merchant-Ivory film of The Bostonians, but almost all of the political satire is missing, and only the romantic rivalry of the three young people, the beautiful orator pursued by both an immigrant Mississippian and his lesbian cousin, remains as a period piece and melodrama.)