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.
