In “Adults,” Gen Z Gets the Hangout Sitcom It Deserves
The twentysomething protagonists of the Gen Z hangout comedy “Adults” understand that growing up sometimes requires an intervention. In the first episode of the new season, which premières this week, five housemates gather in their living room to conduct what they’ve dubbed the Scrub: the act of identifying and erasing their most employment-endangering social-media posts, under the credo that you must “bury your past before it buries you.” A clip of Samir (Malik Elassal) as a teen-ager, comforting a female celebrity through the power of dance after Trump’s first election? Delete. A YouTube video of Issa (Amita Rao) counting down the “top ten worst accents”? Definite delete. “It’s not our fault we got the internet when we were our most horny and stupid,” Samir protests. Yes, it’s an exercise in humiliation—but it’s the kind of lesson you’d rather get from your nearest and dearest than from an H.R. department. And it fits right into the time-honored sitcom tradition of needing a little help from your friends.
Television’s great crowd-pleasers used to hinge on such chemistry and warmth. In the early nineties, the writers David Crane and Marta Kauffman pitched NBC on the then relatively novel insight that “when you’re single and in the city, your friends are your family.” The result of this epiphany was “Friends,” a ratings juggernaut that remains improbably popular three decades later. The formula that show cemented—of idealistic urbanites, often with more education than experience, getting mired in low-stakes high jinks—led to such notable successors as “How I Met Your Mother,” which débuted in 2005, and “New Girl,” in 2011. Eventually, the young-people-doing-nothing format got the prestige treatment, with 2012’s “Girls” (which admittedly owes as much to “Sex and the City”) and 2014’s “Broad City.” These edgier entries reflected the dominant cultural forces of their era: cringe comedy and exuberant feminism, respectively.
Since then, the hangout sitcom has suffered a precipitous decline. Its native structure, the twenty-two-episode season, has become a rarity in the industry, as has its default lightness. But the genre is mounting a comeback. “Adults” is part of this Zoomer revamp, along with Rachel Sennott’s pricklier “I Love LA”—the “Seinfeld” to “Adults” ’s “Friends”—and Mindy Kaling’s creakier “Not Suitable for Work.” Whereas Rachel and Monica’s misadventures in “Friends” ultimately spanned a decade or so in the city, “Adults” seems hyper-focussed on that fabled sliver of one’s twenties before ambition or even romance sets in—when life is composed almost entirely of side quests, and deciding on a main quest is still a few years away. The show’s central quintet reside in the childhood home of Samir, whose semi-retired parents are on an apparently indefinite tour of the national parks. Samir allows his friends to live with him for free while he works as a food-delivery driver—a gig that he’s happy to put on pause when the opportunity arises to play video games with some teen-age boys who’ve used the app to order beer. Guests—defined loosely as anyone from a random hookup to Julia Fox to a surprisingly chill raccoon—drop by the house with regularity, creating a zippy blend of the mundane and the serendipitous.
The married creators of “Adults,” Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, seem well aware of the lineage of their series. (At one point, a character played by the “Girls” star Zosia Mamet asks one of the protagonists, “You think you’re the first people to be young and adorable in New York?”) Perhaps that’s why the pair has striven to create fresh archetypes. The most fully realized personalities are Anton (Owen Thiele), a compulsive charmer who needs to make every passing acquaintance feel as though they’ve forged a lasting connection, and Billie (Lucy Freyer), a former overachiever who’s lost without the structure of school. (Offscreen, Billie may be singlehandedly keeping the gifted-child-meme industry alive by liking every post about smart kids who never live up to their potential.) But other characters verge on parody. Issa, an overconfident blusterer whom Samir and Anton met in college, seems to be stuck doing a one-note Ilana Glazer impression; her boyfriend, Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), who’s always referred to by his full name, is distinguished only by being Canadian, sexually fluid, and nice.
“Adults” won’t be the hangout show that restores the genre to its normcore, network-friendly roots—if such a return is even viable in the current comedy landscape. Happily, it’s not trying to be. Its politics lean unapologetically left; like “Girls” and “Broad City” before it, “Adults” features an irreverent abortion subplot. It also eschews the heteronormativity of its predecessors: Anton is gay, Billie sleeps with both men and women, and the show’s primary will-they-won’t-they couple is queer. One half of that would-be pairing is Paul Baker, whose softboi credentials come into question when it emerges that he has a second, markedly straighter friend group—a pack of testicle-slapping bros promptly labelled the Shame Friends.
The divide sets up the kind of ethnography at which “Adults” excels. In the Season 2 première, a riotous piece of generational social taxonomy, this other crew tries haplessly to cater to the tastes and mores of the main group, with one dude donning a “directed by Greta Gerwig” T-shirt and later declaring, “I have mental health!” But there’s also a subtle rejection of the earnest wokeness of years past. The diversity of the core ensemble—a far cry from Hannah Horvath’s all-white friend group—is rarely remarked upon by the characters, except as part of a bit. The show itself acknowledges their identities only obliquely, as in an episode where an exhausted Anton forgets to code switch at his corporate job and praises a colleague’s presentation by chirping, “Cunt alert!” Naturally, the rest of the plot focusses on his elaborate scheme to get out of hot water by normalizing the word in his office.
Each successive generation since “Friends” has seen its sitcom youths diminished in their circumstances. Rachel and Monica’s West Village sublet gave way to Hannah and Marnie’s Greenpoint apartment—an address that might be considered laughably unattainable by the broke twentysomethings of today. The most original element of “Adults” is its setting: a cozy single-family house in outer Queens, filled with the décor choices of a middle-aged mom, all floral patterns and ornately carved furniture. Though the home is a haven for Samir and his friends, it is pointedly not theirs. “Adults” doesn’t dwell on the contingency of the characters’ housing situation, but economic struggle is the show’s unmistakable backdrop. It’s evident in the sheer number of scenes that take place in the living room or the kitchen. While earlier sitcom crews met up at a coffee shop or a bar, young people like Billie—who spends her days submitting dozens of job applications without a single reply—are scarcely in a position to treat the city as their playground.
Such worries are more prominent in the superior second season, which finds some of the friends engaging in that perpetual hobbyhorse of the young: fretting about no longer being as young as they used to be. Billie’s anxieties about her lack of accomplishments at twenty-five are exacerbated by meeting the infinitely cooler girl who now uses her old fake I.D., and the typically even-keeled Anton can’t help regressing into a shrieking brat in the presence of his older sister (Raven-Symoné). These story lines add a sense of urgency and progress to a series that was a little too comfortable being amiably aimless. The shift feels like the show finding its footing in a more traditional sitcom register.
Kronengold and Shaw rarely falter in coming up with unique plotlines and sharply observed jokes. But, compared with its forebears, which gradually accrued emotional power as their characters matured together, “Adults” seems strangely reluctant to delve into the inner lives of young people whose hearts may never again be so open or vulnerable. In the first season, for instance, Billie’s fear that she peaked in high school leads to an ill-advised fling with her middle-aged journalism teacher. The relationship ends in calamity, of course, but the series spends little time wondering what she gleaned from the experience. When the friends do divulge deeper secrets to one another, they often instruct the hearer to “mind wipe”: to listen to the revelation, then pretend as if they never did. Like the Scrub, it’s a self-protective gesture, designed to mitigate risk. But we can get to know the characters only so well when they’re doing their best not to know themselves. ♦