The Four Seasons Co-Creators Talk Season 2’s Big Surprise and Cliffhanger Ending | Interview

(Photo Credit: Netflix)

The Four Seasons co-creators Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield spoke with ComingSoon’s Tyler Treese about the second season of the hit Netflix show. The duo discussed the show’s surprising flashback episode, its cliffhanger ending, and more. The Netflix show’s second season is now streaming.

“Coming off a hard year, our group of friends carries on their tradition of vacationing together — now with a baby in tow. The Four Seasons picks back up with the core group — Kate (Tina Fey), Jack (Will Forte), Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), Danny (Colman Domingo), Claude (Marco Calvani), and Ginny (Erika Henningsen) — as they journey from the familiar comforts of the Jersey shore and upstate New York to the stunning landscapes of Italy. With warmth and wit, personal blind spots surface for the group as they each grieve their late friend and embark on new adventures. Co-created by Tina Fey, Lang Fisher, and Tracey Wigfield, The Four Seasons remains a heartfelt and hilarious tribute to long-term relationships, while continuing to explore the highs, lows, and humor of enduring friendships and love,” says the official description.

Tyler Treese: Lang, I was curious if you could talk to me about just the loss of Steve Carell and Nick’s role. He really drove the plot in the first season, and his death kind of drives the plot of the second season. So, how was it just filling that hole with different scenarios, and how did that impact the creative?

Lang Fisher: Yeah, Steve Carell is an icon. I mean, and he’s a wonderful human being. Not having him for the second season, I think we were worried because his character was kind of like the glue that held the group together. But also as an actor, he was just like a lovely person to have.

But it helped us, I think, to have the group bonded together over this shared grief, and what does that mean for the group now? If the person who’s the main connector of people is gone, how does the group function? Do they stay together? Can they keep moving forward the way they always have? And how does that shift? So, it was helpful for us to have that as a catalyst for story areas in the most recent season.

Tracey, it’s subverted a bit later on as the season continues, but you mostly stuck to this format of two episodes per “season,” and sticking to one location. What do you like most about this format of us seeing these different times in each person’s life? It’s not too much and it’s not too short.

Tracey Wigfield: Well, the container play, like we call it, is sort of what attracted Tina, Lang, and I to doing this show in the first place. There was something creatively satisfying about writing a story that really has guardrails on it, where you only see these people on vacation basically, and you only see them four times during the year.

It just creatively gave us a lot of opportunities to see what happened between the seasons, and have the audience kind of fill in the gaps of what these characters have been going through. Also, there’s something that’s just really cool narratively about being able to tell stories at such a speedy pace. People think about doing something in this season, Danny and Claude think about having a baby, then your next episode can jump so far in the future where there’s so many conversations that have happened already. I find it just really kind of fun and exciting to be telling stories at that pace.

Yeah, I love that. You really trust the audience to be able to connect the dots as well, which I really appreciate.

Lang, I won’t spoil it, but there’s a big surprise at the very end of the season with a new character getting introduced. Is that a hint at what Season 3 could feature?

Lang Fisher: That’s what we’re hoping for. Yeah. We just started Season 3, the writer’s room, a few weeks ago, and that surprise new friend is in the group now. So we were very excited to have him appear, yeah, that’s kind of our big cliffhanger in it. It’s another way that, like this group that’s been together forever, is now changing up with a little bit of new blood.

I love it. That’s a dream addition to the cast.

Tracey, there’s this incredible flashback episode that pays off the whole season’s storyline. How was it making sure it wasn’t a gimmick and it really just had that narrative purpose? I thought it was just brilliant how it tied into the modern day.

Tracey Wigfield: Yeah, I mean, that episode and Tina wrote it, which I think is why it came out so well. But that episode was pretty challenging, mostly because from the beginning we wanted to do a flashback episode for obvious reasons [laughs]. I think audiences are smart enough to know that other shows have done flashbacks, and I don’t think it’s so satisfying if it’s just a flashback for a flashback’s sake. You really want to be using it to understand things you couldn’t just understand about the story if we stayed in the present day.

So, it was something that we knew we wanted to do, but took a couple rounds, I think, of really seeing, “Well, what do we want this to say about Anne’s story? What does this fill in about Danny and Claude and the journey they’re on this year?” So, it was tricky, but I was really happy with how it came out, too.

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Thanks to Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield for taking the time to talk about The Four Seasons Season 2.

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