'The Four Seasons': Colman Domingo talks directing on the show, Kerri Kenney reveals what she wants for future Anne
If the dialogue of 30 Rock is still included in your day-to-day life and you can rhyme off lines from Mean Girls with ease, you'll be particularly excited about The Four Seasons on Netflix, co-created by Fey, Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield. With Fey among the ensemble cast, which includes Will Forte, Colman Domingo, Steve Carell, Kerri Kenney, Marco Calvani and Erika Henningsen, it's an emotional, comforting and funny series about friendship.
Inspired by the Alan Alda film of the same name, Kate (Fey) and her husband Jack (Forte), Danny (Domingo) and his husband Claude (Calvani), and Anne (Kenney) and her husband Nick (Carell) have all been friends for a long time, frequently vacationing together. The Four Seasons, as the title suggests, takes us to one vacation per season of the year, as we see how these friendships, and romantic relationships, evolve.
But the first trip for the group starts going very wrong when Nick tells his friends he plans to tell Anne that he wants a divorce, leaving Kate, Jack and Danny to try to navigate how to not tell Anne about Nick's plans.
That leads to a great moment in the series between Claude and Danny. Anne had been planning a secret vow renewal ceremony for Nick, which puts her friends in a particularly uncomfortable position knowing that Nick is not on the same page.
During the ceremony Claude sings Shania Twain's "You're Still The One," after saying that he wanted it to be his wedding song with Danny, but they couldn't use it because was Anne and Nick's wedding song. That's when Claude finds out Danny's been lying to him, and Claude gives his husband a hysterically intense stare.
"It was the first scene that we shot with so many other extras, ... in front of a lot of people I've never seen before," Calvani told Yahoo Canada. "I don't sing normally, I mean, besides in the shower when I'm extremely happy."
"It's such a beautiful moment for the character, because that is the confirmation that my husband is keeping things away from me. ... It's the beginning when you start seeing the crack, and when I accept that there is one. ... I'm the only one also that doesn't know that this couple is not going to last long, and so I had to balance that joy with the revelation while I was singing. ... In a way, it was funnier and easier than I thought. The song itself helped me navigate all those emotions."
As the story progresses, we really go through the ups and downs of married life and friendships for everyone. Including Kate, Jack, Claude and Danny trying to get used to Nick's new, younger girlfriend Ginny (Henningsen).
But a particular highlight of the Season is Episode 6, where Domingo went behind the camera, in addition to acting, to direct the episode. Taking place in the Fall season, the group reunites at their alma mater, where Kate and Jack's daughter Beth (Ashlyn Maddox) and Nick and Anne's daughter Lila (Julia Lester) go to school. And it's clear that Lila is not particularly happy that her dad divorced her mom, and is now dating Ginny.
Meanwhile, Kate and Jack try to manage having different interests, and Danny and Claude are coming off a fight when Claude finds out Danny's been smoking cigarettes, after he got a coronary artery stent.
"I was very blessed to get that episode, because I felt like it had even more depth for the characters," Domingo said. "People are unpacking deeper emotions, things that they didn't know was there in that episode."
"I knew that I just wanted to attack it ... like a sleight of hand, and really letting the comedy happen. But also let people slide into these deeply emotional moments. And so for me, it was really about the character study, because it was written that way. So I wanted to lean into that and not sort of like impress upon a directorial style, but just really frame the work to make sure that the character and story was paramount. ... And I was really happy that they were able to embrace me to help guide performance and the aesthetics of it."
But Kenney was quick to praise her costar for his direction, calling it "perfection."
"It was a blessing to be directed by him," Kenney said. "You think he's an amazing actor, his directing is just perfection."
"Especially feeling like, 'Oh do I deserve to be in this space?' And then having him right there, trusting him, because I know the kind of acting work he would be doing in this scene. And him just going, 'Come on. Just try this, try this.' And just, I just melted in his arms like, I'll do whatever you want me to do, because I know you're going to take me in the right direction."
The Four Seasons leaves us with quite a cliffhanger of an ending. Now that Nick has died, in the final moments of the season we find out that Ginny is pregnant.
But that also means the one character we'd really love to see grow and expand is Anne. Will she keep a connection to Ginny? And now that Nick is dead, how will she move on?
When asked what she would love to see in the future for Anne, Kenney highlight she could be on the road to finding her next partner.
"It's a really beautiful connection that she ends up making at the end, and it's not an obvious one," Kenney said. "But I think Anne, at her core, wants to be needed, and I think once she wasn't needed by her daughter anymore, because she's an empty nester, then she turns to her husband and realizes he's not there either. So all of these decades spent caretaking and helping to build the scaffolding for everyone else's life, when they're not there anymore. What does that mean?"
"Now I look in the mirror and I have this body, and I'm looked at this way by society, and I have these skills that don't equal the skills I have going in, I think it's terrifying. So I think, for me in that moment, when she's told like, oh no you're still in in the family, and it can look all different ways. And I think once she realized that Ginny is not a threat, that Ginny really, truly did love him too, and that did not negate your 25 years of marriage. Also, maybe I'll be needed there, and maybe I can be be part of just intrinsically by the nature of it's all in the family. I think that's what she's thinking. And maybe now that her 25 year marriage has been given some validity, she has more confidence to go on and find her next partner."
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