Growing up is supposed to mean becoming more responsible, making better decisions and gradually figuring out what you want from life.
Nobody appears to have told the five friends at the center of Adults.
Season 2 returns to the Queens house where bad ideas spread faster than useful advice, boundaries exist mostly to be ignored and every minor crisis has the potential to become a group project. But something has changed since the show’s first season. The characters may not have figured out adulthood, but Adults has figured out exactly what kind of comedy it wants to be.
The result is a sharper, funnier and more confident second season that stops trying quite so hard to announce itself as a comedy about Gen Z and simply lets its characters be funny.
That makes all the difference.
Adults Has Found Its Rhythm
The premise remains wonderfully simple.
Five twenty-something friends live together in Samir’s childhood home in Queens, collectively stumbling through jobs, relationships, family problems and whatever new disaster somebody has accidentally introduced into the house.
Season 1 established the personalities and the show’s deliberately heightened comic universe. Season 2 benefits from no longer having to explain any of it.
We know these people now.
More importantly, they know each other.
That familiarity allows creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw to build jokes around the specific ways these friends interact rather than simply around whatever bizarre situation happens to be unfolding.
A conversation can spiral because everybody knows exactly which insecurity to poke. A seemingly harmless problem can become catastrophic because the group has collectively decided on the worst possible solution. And when somebody genuinely needs help, all the sarcasm and selfishness usually disappear.
That’s the secret to Adults.
Underneath all the chaos, these people really do love each other.
The Ensemble Becomes the Show’s Biggest Strength
There isn’t a weak link in the central group, but Season 2 does a much better job of allowing each character to exist outside the confines of the house.
Issa remains capable of turning virtually any conversation into an event, but the season gives her questions about relationships, work and her future that reveal something underneath all that confidence.
Anton is still the friend who appears capable of charming practically anyone, yet some of the season’s best material comes when that confidence disappears. Bringing his family into the picture provides a particularly effective reminder that adulthood has an unusual way of evaporating the second you’re around the people who knew you as a child.
Billie’s uncertainty also becomes more meaningful this season. Watching someone younger inherit her old fake ID becomes funny precisely because the joke hides a much less funny realization: at some point, being young stops feeling like an identity you can simply take for granted.
Samir continues to provide an essential sincerity that helps ground the show’s stranger impulses, while Paul Baker remains such an unusual comic presence that even the way everyone insists on calling him Paul Baker feels like part of the joke.
And then there is the unresolved emotional mess involving Paul Baker, Anton and Issa.
Season 2 wisely doesn’t treat that situation like a traditional sitcom love triangle. These people care too much about one another for anything to be simple, which makes every awkward glance and unspoken feeling potentially more dangerous than the show’s biggest comic disasters.
Malik Elassal, Lucy Freyer, Jack Innanen, Amita Rao and Owen Thiele have also become noticeably more comfortable together. Their chemistry increasingly creates the illusion that someone simply pointed cameras at five longtime friends and waited for them to make terrible choices.
For a hangout comedy, that’s invaluable.
“Raccoon” Shows Exactly Why Adults Works
If one episode captures the improved confidence of Season 2, it’s “Raccoon.”
The setup is beautifully stupid.
The friends have taken acid.
There is a raccoon in the house.
And they have roughly half an hour to solve the second problem before the first one becomes significantly more complicated.
That’s enough.
The episode doesn’t need an elaborate premise or some enormous narrative development. It puts these characters in a confined space, gives them an immediate problem and lets their personalities collide.
The escalating panic becomes physical comedy, relationship comedy and character comedy at the same time. Better still, the consequences aren’t simply forgotten when the episode ends. What happens during the group’s increasingly disastrous Acid Night continues to ripple through the back half of the season.
That’s the kind of storytelling Adults is getting much better at.
The ridiculous stuff matters because the characters matter.
Season 2 Looks Beyond the House
One of the smartest improvements is that the show begins filling in portions of these characters’ lives that felt sketchier during Season 1.
We see more of their jobs.
We meet family members.
We discover what happens when members of this intensely codependent group enter spaces where the other four aren’t automatically beside them.
Raven-Symoné’s appearance as Anton’s older sister is particularly useful because it exposes a completely different version of someone who usually seems socially bulletproof.
Issa gets opportunities to discover that the conventional adult world she might instinctively mock isn’t necessarily as terrible as expected.
Other characters confront career decisions, changing relationships and the increasingly uncomfortable realization that eventually “figuring things out later” becomes figuring things out now.
The guest stars—including Susie Essman, Gaten Matarazzo and Zosia Mamet—add texture without hijacking the series.
The house remains the show’s emotional center, but it no longer feels like its entire universe.
The Gen Z Jokes Work Better When They’re Just Jokes
Adults arrived with an unavoidable label: the Gen Z Friends.
There are obvious similarities, and Season 2 occasionally seems happy to play with that lineage. Five close friends share their lives in New York while jobs, dating and adulthood provide an endless supply of problems.
But the comparison becomes less useful the better Adults gets.
This isn’t Friends with smartphones.
The economic anxiety is different. The language is different. Relationships are different. Social media means everyone’s embarrassing adolescence potentially remains searchable forever. Even the idea of what constitutes a stable adult life feels considerably less certain.
Season 2 understands that none of this needs to be explained.
The funniest generational observations emerge naturally from how the characters behave. A social-media scrub intended to prevent old posts from destroying future employment is funny because it is simultaneously absurd and completely reasonable.
That’s considerably stronger than constructing jokes that simply announce, “Young people do this.”
The show is becoming specific enough that the characters matter more than the demographic they’re supposed to represent.
That’s when a generational comedy starts becoming something more durable.
Eight Episodes Aren’t Enough
The biggest problem with Adults Season 2 isn’t something happening onscreen.
It’s how quickly the season ends.
Eight half-hour episodes simply aren’t enough for a comedy built around this kind of ensemble.
Hangout sitcoms traditionally become richer through accumulation. Strange character combinations get their own episodes. Minor jokes become running jokes. Supporting characters unexpectedly become important. Relationships develop because audiences have spent dozens of hours watching people simply exist together.
Adults is finally reaching the point where you want the weird episode pairing two characters who don’t normally spend time alone together. You want seemingly meaningless adventures. You want the installment where almost nothing consequential happens except everyone ends up arguing in the kitchen.
Streaming-era episode counts rarely provide that luxury.
The special “Marathon Day” prequel helps by showing how Paul Baker entered the group’s orbit, but it also demonstrates why more time with these characters would be welcome.
This is a show that would benefit from having room to waste.
Give them 15 episodes.
Give them 20.
Let them hang out.
Final Verdict
Adults doesn’t suddenly become mature in Season 2.
Thankfully.
Its characters remain selfish, impulsive, confused and capable of transforming relatively ordinary problems into spectacularly unnecessary disasters.
What has matured is the show around them.
Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw have developed a much clearer understanding of these five characters, and the cast now has the chemistry required to make even the smallest interactions entertaining. The jokes are sharper, the friendships feel deeper and the emotional moments work because the series no longer seems embarrassed to care about the people underneath all the absurdity.
Season 1 introduced a promising Gen Z hangout comedy.
Season 2 makes the generational label increasingly unnecessary.
Adults is becoming a genuinely great hangout comedy, period.
Now it just needs more episodes.
Seat42F Rating: 8.8/10
Adults Season 2 premieres Thursday, August 27 on FXX and Hulu. Watch Adults Season 2 on Hulu.
Keep up with Adults reviews, news, photos and more from Seat42F.
See all Adults coverage →
Thomas Miller is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Seat42F, covering television, movies and streaming entertainment. He launched Seat42F in 2007 and has spent nearly two decades covering the entertainment industry.
