There was a version of Tina Fey's career that was always going to be measured in jokes per minute. 30 Rock set the pace in 2006 and never really let up — seven seasons of layered references, callbacks, and a writer's room operating at a kind of comic velocity that felt almost anxious in retrospect. Even Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the Netflix follow-up, kept its foot on the gas. So when a new Fey project arrives and the first thing anyone notices is how quiet it is, that registers as news.
The Four Seasons, now streaming on Netflix, follows couples cycling through seasonal retreats while contending with grief, shifting friendships, and the particular discomfort of people who love each other but have stopped understanding each other. Will Forte co-stars. The tone, by most accounts, lands somewhere between a Sunday-afternoon movie and a glass of wine you didn't expect to finish.
In a profile published by The Hollywood Reporter in 2025, Fey spoke to the deliberate gear-change. The laughs-per-minute standard, she suggested, was not the only standard. Characters, she noted, actually change in this one — a detail that reads almost like a gentle self-correction from someone who spent two decades building ensemble casts that were brilliant precisely because they didn't.
The show has found an audience that streaming metrics don't always predict: the kind that recommends something to a sibling rather than posting about it. Netflix has not confirmed a second season as of this filing, but the early numbers put The Four Seasons in the conversation. Fey, for her part, appears to have found the room temperature she was looking for. The calendar already has four slots. There is space to fill them.