Those loveable kookie establishment liberals
Shows running now that skewer upper-middle class progressives
The new streaming show Four Seasons follows the plot of the 1981 film of the same name that Alan Alda wrote and starred in, casting his childhood friend Carol Burnett as his wife, with Sandy Dennis and Rita Moreno as the wives of the other two couples in this group of middle to upper-middle class friends. In real life, Alda has been married to his wife since 1957 (they are both still living), and in the movie he explored the effect of divorce on friends and families.
In the original the husbands are a dentist, a lawyer, and an estate planner (whose wife, a photographer, insists he is really just an insurance salesman). The story follows them through vacations during the four seasons of the year - an upstate lake house for spring (they’re New Yorkers), tropical islands for summer, a visit to their alma mater when a child enrolls for fall, and then a ski trip for winter (with a funeral in the new series - in the film only a Mercedes is dispatched). Antonio Vivaldi provides background music. It’s not Four Weddings and a Funeral, but a divorce, an emptying of the nests, and a funeral.
The vacation locales are not as exotic or costly as those of the upper and upper-middle class characters skewered in White Lotus, from which many of us are suffering withdrawals now, though the Four Seasons characters do manage to go on a vacation as a group every three months. Tina Fey is a co-writer of the new show, an 8 episode Netflix product, which promises a second season that will be charting new territory beyond what Alda’s original movie covered. Perhaps Alda will help with storylines; he has a cameo in the new version. Fey casts herself as Kate Burroughs (Carol Burnett’s role), and the three couples are somewhat similar, or rather two of them are. Rita Moreno’s character, Italian American Claudia, has become gay Italian immigrant Claude (played by Italian actor Mario Calvani) and Moreno’s chubby white dentist husband has become an African American interior architect who spruces up hotels around the world. Ms. Fey says she introduced more fay characters for realism, because in the contemporary world, so many of her friends are homosexuals. It does also so happen that the activist group GLAAD is currently complaining that 36% of current gay TV characters will not return to the screen next season, and is also demanding that 50% of all gay TV characters be gays of color, the latter demand exactly satisifed by Fey’s interracial gay couple. (Breitbart News and the Gutfeld show on FOX both misreported this as a 36% reduction in gay TV characters, which is false, since the 36% of characters not returning does not take into account new gay characters and new TV shows.)
Like the original, the plot centers on one husband leaving his wife and cohabiting with a younger woman, with the other couples having to manage which half of the divorced couple will be invited to go on which vacations and so forth.
The gay couple, in an open relationship, add a new wrinkle, as the two straight couples remain non-judgmental as their gay friends do something they “can’t” do, picking up strangers online at vacation spots for threesomes (though not in practice with what seem like enviable results).
Watching both the 1981 movie and the current series back to back shows up the weaknesses in Fey’s series. Fey is not the actress that Burnett was, and poor Will Forte makes Alan Alda look macho. Fey’s redo of a fight scene where the couple argues is insipid, not because it is badly written in itself, but because the 2025 couple are unequal partners where the wife totally dominates the low T husband and they communicate with cardboard phrases supplied to them by a couples therapist.
It’s all amusing, watching these loveable kookie establishment liberals, but not as biting as White Lotus (or Curb Your Enthusiasm), though there is a very unpleasant chunky, angry, college student daughter who writes an atrocious play attacking her divorced mom and dad and the new, younger girlfriend, somewhat akin to Sydney Sweeney’s turn as the obnoxious, Ivy programmed, woke daughter in Season 1 of White Lotus.
There is another option if you are missing your lotus - you could turn to psychedelic mushrooms. Mad doctor Nicole Kidman is still micro-dosing patients in season two of Nine Perfect Strangers, currently being rolled out on Hulu. These strangers are richer than the Four Seasons couples, more in the financial stratosphere occupied by White Lotus characters. And psilocybin use, if you follow Scott Adams or reason magazine libertarians or science journals, is now a more fashionable topic than either divorce or gays. (Last week, during the love spat, I was waiting for Trump to say people should not tweet while using magic mushrooms, but he showed off his new found restraint.)
But if you really miss White Lotus (and Curb Your Enthusiasm) what you should do is read Henry James, particularly The Bostonians.
I'm in a group reading The Bostonians.
Every week another group member comes out as gay. The first week I think two guys told us they were gay, and just from the way they speak I'm guessing at least one or two more are. Last week a not very lesbian seeming gal (I ran around with a pod of wimmin4wimmin for several years, so I think I can tell) mentioned her wife. (I’m remaining undeclared because I cannot imagine anything more goddamn boring to add to the discussion of this sometimes hilarious and intricately written intrigue.)
The novel centers around a somewhat lowborn oratorical prodigy who is a gorgeous redhead, Verena Tarant, and how everyone wants to marry her, including two cousins, an anhedonic bluestocking Boston Brahmin, Olive Chancellor, and her recently destitute Mississippi cousin, impoverished by the Civil War, Basil Ransom. Olive is an extreme feminist who really thinks men should not exist, a precursor to theologian Mary Daly, albeit with a trust fund. Basil is a "conservative" who thinks women should marry and remain in the home and not have the vote. Basil is also one of the few characters in the book who is open, honest, unhypocritical, friendly, unmanipulative, and easy going.
I was surprised at the extent of James’ critique of the progressives of his day. Describing a Miss Birdseye, an abolitionist turned suffragette after Emancipation, James writes: “Since the Civil War much of her occupation was gone; for before that her best hours had been spent in fancying that she was helping some Southern slave to escape. It would have been a nice question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this excitement, she did not sometimes wish the blacks back in bondage.” A satire of upper middle class progressivism, a la White Lotus. (You can also watch the Merchant-Ivory film of The Bostonians, but I’m afraid that almost all of the biting political satire is missing, and only the romantic rivalry of the three young people, the beautiful orator being pursued by both an immigrant Mississipian and his lesbian cousin, remains as period piece and melodrama.)
The other readers are somewhat conventional. (When I pointed out that Olive has an empty life, having no career, disliking her pre-teen nephew, and having lopped off the whole prospect of having children and family, one of my online symposiasts, a woman who I believe hails from India, was shocked and asked if I thought women must have children to have a life. I just replied that I didn’t know if women AND men didn’t need children and family to have a whole life, but that in any case the drab and humorless feminist Olive Chancellor has nothing - other than a trust fund and a house - since she has no career either. The next week another female symposiasts tried to plead for Olive that she had clearly had some trauma before the story began. This seems plausible, but doesn’t save her from the charge of representing a barren existence.) They think we should think badly of Basil because he's a “reactionary,” and after all Henry James was a closeted homosexual. There is no textual evidence for thinking badly of Basil. Other than that he had the very common opinion of his day - shared by novelist George Eliot - that women should not vote.
Last week someone went off into how boys now are conservative because they are full of resentment and jealousy because they can no longer buy a house or support a family, and Basil is just like these MAGA voter boys today. Except there is no textual evidence that Basil feels resentment or jealousy. His family lost a plantation but it is pretty clear from the text he wishes he had gone to Harvard rather than read his law in the South, and he prefers to be a lawyer in New York than to manage a plantation. But these readers read their cultural and political concerns into the book. I assume in the same way many viewers don’t get the skewering of progressives that is going on in many small screen shows today, from Murderbot to 9 Perfect Strangers.