The Four Seasons

A new Netflix comedy series called The Four Seasons arrives on May 1, 2025, produced by Universal Television and Little Stranger. The show spans two seasons across sixteen episodes and centers on a premise that is, at its core, a study in how long friendships absorb — or fail to absorb — disruption.

The setup is compact and legible: three married couples have sustained a decades-long bond organized around a reliable ritual, quarterly weekend getaways that mark the passage of time together. When one of the three couples divorces, the tradition doesn't simply pause. It continues, awkwardly, with the geometry of the group now thrown off. A trio of pairs becomes something harder to categorize — two couples, two individuals, and the residual social obligations that no one has quite figured out how to renegotiate. The seasonal structure of those getaways, implicit in the title, gives the show a natural scaffold. Four seasons in a year, four chances per cycle to either paper over the fracture or let it widen.

The premise has obvious antecedents in a certain strand of American ensemble comedy that treats middle-aged friendship with more anthropological interest than sentimentality. The dynamics of long-term relationships — the ones where everyone has seen everyone else at their worst and best over so many years that honesty and cruelty become difficult to distinguish — have been territory for both prestige drama and comedy for decades. What makes this particular configuration notable is the choice to treat divorce not as the end of a story but as a forcing function within a continuing one. The divorcing couple doesn't exit. They remain in the group, presumably at the insistence of friendship obligations that predate the marriage and will outlast it, making every subsequent gathering an exercise in managed discomfort.

Produced by Universal Television alongside Little Stranger, the series lands on Netflix and Netflix Standard with Ads, which positions it squarely in the streamer's broad-audience comedy programming. Sixteen episodes across two seasons suggests the show was either greenlit with a degree of confidence or structured with enough room to develop its characters past the initial comic friction of the premise. That's a meaningful distinction: a short-order series about a single rupture in a friend group could resolve cleanly in six or eight episodes; sixteen implies the writers have mapped out a longer arc for these relationships, which raises the question of whether the comedy eventually migrates into something with more dramatic weight, or whether it sustains its register across that full run.

Several things about the show remain genuinely unclear from what's been made public. The six central characters — three couples, now two-and-two — haven't been described in any detail beyond their structural roles in the premise. What the divorce means for each individual, what the friendships looked like before the split, and which of the remaining four coupled characters take sides, pull away, or find themselves unexpectedly liberated by the new configuration are all unknowns. Whether the series is an ensemble piece with equal weight distributed across all six or whether it gravitates toward one or two central perspectives is similarly unresolved. The title's seasonal framing suggests a kind of formal symmetry — four getaways, perhaps tracked in something close to real time — but whether that structure holds rigidly or loosens as the series progresses is an open question.

The comedy genre designation is also worth sitting with for a moment. A story about divorce straining a friend group across multiple years doesn't automatically read as comedic, and the shows that have worked best in adjacent territory — long friendships, marriages under pressure, the specific social economics of couples who socialize together — have generally found their tone somewhere on the spectrum between broad situational comedy and something more uncomfortable. The description doesn't indicate whether The Four Seasons plays the premise primarily for laughs, primarily for the cringe of recognition, or for some more unresolved mixture of the two. Sixteen episodes is enough time to drift.

There's also the question of the quarterly getaways themselves as a setting. The tradition implies travel, shared physical spaces, and the enforced intimacy of a long weekend where there's nowhere to retreat when a conversation goes badly. That constraint is a useful one dramatically and comedically — it removes the social exit ramps that normally allow people to defer difficult moments indefinitely. What kinds of locations, what kinds of situations those getaways generate, and whether the show exploits the formal possibilities of seasonal change as metaphor or simply uses the structure as a calendar marker is something viewers won't know until the episodes arrive.

The audience most likely to seek this out will be viewers who have aged into the particular anxieties the premise describes — people in their thirties, forties, and beyond who have watched friendships from earlier in their lives survive or fail the pressures of marriage, children, geography, and the gradual divergence of people who once seemed to be on identical trajectories. For that audience, the comedy in the premise isn't abstract. The question the show implicitly poses — what do you owe a friend group when the couple at its center no longer exists — is one that tends to arrive in real life without a clean answer, which is presumably what makes it worth sixteen episodes.