Welcome back to shows about messy twenty-something groups of friends! It’s been a while, and FX’s new comedy “Adults” is a strong addition to a sub-genre that has been experiencing a major shortage since shows like “Girls,” “Good Trouble” and “Search Party” went off the air. Created by writing duo Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw in their first television creation since writing for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” the show follows five codependent housemates as they navigate various early adulthood misadventures amid student loans, precarious jobs and a lack of health insurance in Queens, New York.
The recently post-college quintet is made up of Samir (Malik Elassal), whose parents own the house his friends are crashing at, rent-free; Anton (Owen Thiele, who also appears in Prime Video’s “Overcompensating”), a gay remote worker whose superpower of befriending literally anyone gets him into trouble later in the season; Billie (Lucy Freyer), a journalism major who’s struggling to find her purpose; and the house’s only couple, “the funny friend” Issa (Amita Rao), who tries to convince the household to accept her boyfriend Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) as their new roommate, a Canadian known by his full name only. It’s easy to grow fond of this rag-tag group over the season, who have great chemistry for effortless laughs.
That said, be warned: The pilot may not grab you instantaneously. The show’s brief twenty-minute episode length becomes a strength of its later episodes, but here, there were a lot of ambitious ideas happening at once. The group finds out their mutual friend Kyle is speaking out against being sexually harassed at work. Naturally, they get overly invested in supporting him and for some, reflecting on their own behaviors. This leads to a wonky joke about Brendan Fraser and Samir awkwardly meeting with his ex to make sure he hadn’t crossed any consent lines in his previous relationship. Meanwhile, Billie tries to use Kyle’s case to her advantage at her journalism job, and Issa gets overly invested in centering herself at the protests in his support.
Opening a season with how a sexual assault whistleblower reverberates through a friend group is a bold start. It’s a lot to throw at a viewer who’s just getting to know these characters. Are we supposed to assume Samir is actually a good person, just because his friends reassure him he’s not a rapist after his girlfriend tells him, through a laugh and a smile, that he sexually assaulted her? Is this a show where we’re supposed to just accept that these are terrible people and lean on the schadenfreude of it all?
Thankfully, six of the eight episodes available for review solidify the show as a comedy worth your time. The second episode is when things really get going, with Billie sent to the hospital after a bout of anal bleeding while waiting to find out if she’s gotten fired from her precarious journalism job.
Samir takes up the healthcare advocate role in trying to get her as many medical tests as possible, Issa takes to the non-denominational prayer room to convince herself she’s not just the funny friend, while Anton and Paul Baker rehearse medical scenes and wheelchair race down the hallway, helping Anton realize he should advocate for Paul Baker to finally move into the house.
It’s here, in a relatable random medical thing you get in your 20s that you freak out about kind of way — give or take a few raunchy jokes about being spit roasted by medical devices — when the ensemble gelled in a way it didn’t in the pilot. It also sets up stakes to the following episodes, particularly around Samir and Billie’s friendship.
Some of the comedy’s best moments overall are simply the roommate shenanigans, like their use of Airplay on the living room television to analyze text messages or locate someone on Find My Friends. In one entertaining episode, Issa and Paul Baker slip an AirTag in the tote of a handsome Elena Ferrante-reading gay man they’re sitting behind at a coffee shop, with the hopes of stalking him as a potential suitor for Anton, who has been struggling to move on from his ex. Misadventures are a staple of the twenty-something comedy and the writers never take things to the point of surrealism, but are not too obsessed with realism to be boring — a delicate tone to strike. This offers a more grounded alternative to “Overcompensating,” perhaps.
“Adults” also thankfully steers clear from housemate cliches that involve incestuousness or cheating (well, so far). Instead, as we get deeper into the season, the show begins to unravel some of its characters to deeper levels, potentially inching itself closer to something like “You’re the Worst” rather than keeping its characters static. Hints of this emerge while the crew establish their house rules, which are less about a cleaning schedule (which they could probably use) and more what they think each other should be focusing on for their personal growth (i.e., Billie should stop visiting her high school to relive highlights from her youth in the boredom of her unemployment).
The back half of the season adds nuance to these characters by digging into some of the quarter-life crisis existentialism that comes with being in your 20s. These are often subtle: A character choosing to secretly stay home and scroll Instagram instead of facing the vulnerability of a date, another character coming to terms with what dating an older man might reveal about themselves.
“Adults” is lots of fun and the shenanigans are entertaining to watch (like Paul Baker inviting Julia Fox to his household’s first dinner party), but it’s the subtle emergence of deeper character development that could eventually let it compete with the greats over hopefully what will be many more seasons.
“Adults” premieres on Wednesday, May 28, on FX and Hulu.
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