Fey has depicted teenhood (“Mean Girls”), budding adulthood (“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”), established-and-working adulthood (“30 Rock”) and now the empty-nest era. Some of Fey’s signatures, like social neurosis and a respect for sandwiches, are present here, though deployed less for jokes than for realism. Another common theme in her work is the confinement of her lead characters, how much they bristle against the constraints of their station and yearn for more agency. There’s a through line of that in “Seasons,” too, but with less meaning.
High school is high school, and if you want the perks of being one of the Plastics, you have to play their game. Kimmy endures years in a literal bunker. Liz Lemon has to work with Jack and Tracy because that’s the only way she can make her show. Women have to follow all kinds of terrible rules at work, at home, at school, at large.
While Kate feels boxed in, too — “You are the one who wishes you could blow up your life and start over,” Jack says during a fight — it’s less clear why. She has money, looks, a good sex life, a child at Vassar, a gigantic S.U.V. and enough free time to take four vacations in nine months. The worst thing she says about herself is that she has dry skin. If there’s more to Kate — more tension, more anguish, more self-loathing, more fear, more ambition, more curiosity, more anything — we don’t see it. Her dissatisfaction, however legitimate and probably common, is diffuse and nonspecific.
That’s how most of the show is: legible but vague, relatable to many people but maybe not as many as it thinks. It’s a show about spouses and best friends, the closest bonds and deepest relationships, but the show itself doesn’t have any of that intimacy or intensity. It’s a casual acquaintance — perfectly fine for an afternoon, but shallower and more disposable than the real deal.
