If you think of a show about young people trying and struggling to find their feet in a big city—like "Friends," "Girls," "New Girl," "Broad City," "Insecure," and "Happy Endings"—then "Adults" needs no introduction. In fact, the FX comedy, executive produced by comedian Nick Kroll, doesn't bother making it too special. From the moment we see a group of twentysomethings on the New York City subway lamenting their "group smell," we know exactly what we're in for. Why would creators Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold invent a provocative incident with higher stakes than "a new roommate moves in" when the intended atmosphere is already so obvious? A hangout comedy just requires people to, well, stay.
But if "Adults" doesn't need much to establish its premise, the show could certainly do more to distinguish itself within a crowded genre or define its own characters. In the six episodes presented to critics and press, there’s a clear attempt to position “Grown Ups” as a Gen Z answer to millennials’ “Girls” or Gen X’s “Friends”: an iconic piece of pop culture that older generations will see as a translator of youth and that the protagonists’ peers will remember as a time capsule. Naturally, there’s a reference to Lena Dunham’s classic “voice of a generation” line in the pilot. But evoking the spirit of that quote, which captures the zeitgeist, only emphasizes how “Grown Ups” doesn’t offer a similarly potent distillation of overwhelmed, arrogant, and hapless youth.
Creators: Ben Kronengold, Rebecca Shaw
Stars: Malik Elassal, Lucy Freyer, Jack Innanen
I finished my screenings skeptical that the next show aspiring to that status would even reference “Grown Ups.” At the start of the series, roommates Samir (Malik Ellasal), Billie (Lucy Freyer), Issa (Amita Rao), and Anton (Owen Thiele) live together in Samir's childhood home, a single-family home in the heart of Queens. That place, so far removed from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, is interesting enough in itself, except that "Grown Ups" gives almost no attention to its immediate surroundings, an incredibly diverse neighborhood rarely depicted on screen, save for the visual gag of 23-year-olds surrounded by outdated furniture and children's beds. Even the awkwardness of moving to the city or to more modern neighborhoods goes practically unnoticed. The absence of Samir's parents is glossed over by their world travels, and while it's been the prerogative of every teen series since "Peanuts" to leave out the adults, the detail is one of the many missed opportunities to delve deeper into who these people are, in addition to being generally clueless.
Samir and Billie went to high school together, then gradually expanded their social circle through higher education, friendships, and—in the case of Issa's boyfriend, Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), who is referred to only by his full name—romantic relationships. By the time "Grown Ups" begins, however, this group is an undifferentiated mass of post-college confusion. Internal dynamics are mostly undefined; individual personalities are, at best, barely sketched out.
Paul Baker is a pansexual himbo. Issa is openly horny, with a cadence and bearing that owe much to "Broad City's" Ilana Glazer. (If this were another art form, she'd be accused of imitating Glazer's flow.) Billie wants to be a journalist. Yet they all act with the same level of ineptitude: They flash their butts at their interviewers, refer to emptying the mailbox as a “weekend project,” and vainly insist that they’re now “in the roast chicken phase.”
These anxieties are undoubtedly hallmarks of twentysomethings, but “Grown Ups” never makes a convincing case for what makes this generation unique. In an interview with the New York Times, Kronenberg—who spent most of her twenties, along with Shaw, as a writer for Jimmy Fallon’s “The Tonight Show” after the couple’s Yale commencement speech went viral in 2018—calls Gen Z the “was it that bad?” generation: “So much of our experience is going to our friends and asking, ‘Shouldn’t I have done that?’” Compared to more structural defining features, like the shared experience of the Great Recession or, more recently, the pandemic, it’s not a compelling enough diagnosis to base an entire series on.
If "Grown Ups" manages to capture its moment, it's in form rather than content. Like so many new comedies in the streaming era, the first season simply doesn't have enough episodes to find a comfortable rhythm.
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