Poignant, hilarious, loaded with a super-sharp script \u2026 the second outing for this midlife comedy is even more fantastic than the first<\/p>\n
Middle age is a brutal time of life. As those of us mired in it know, it\u2019s perfectly suited to being mined for laughs (the unhinged type of laughs that are bound up with tears, crisis, and, inevitably, death.) But still too few comedy series take this pressured segment of time and squeeze it for all its acidic worth. Enter middle-aged joke machine Tina Fey, who with The Four Seasons \u2013 her zippy 2020s update of the 1980s film of the same name, co-created and written with Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher \u2013 has triumphed once again. The second season of her midlife comedy drama is even more perspicacious, poignant and hilarious than the first.<\/p>\n
Again there are four fancy holidays split across the seasons, each one given two gag-packed episodes \u2013 a rigid but neat structural device that allows the big moments to happen off-screen. Meanwhile we get the aftermath soundtracked by an avalanche of Vivaldi and bracing jokes about sad lonely donkeys, secret vapes mistaken for thumb drives, and the tragicomedy of being an angry, unravelling fiftysomething man in a T-shirt printed with \u201cKeep Calm and Fuhgeddaboutit\u201d.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/cbeac8c9abc77ca05d770adcb109fb135f788dd0\/287_0_3000_2400\/master\/3000.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=c9f60b6b15de43b9f3a5cb6a4889e99b\" "\\"The")
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