Adults season 2 has grown into the coming-of-age comedy Gen Z deserves

This review originally appeared on Them and contains spoilers for the first four episodes of Adults season 2.

I’ve been waiting since Community sputtered to a close 11 years ago on Yahoo Screen — which, yes, was a real streaming service — for a sitcom to figure out how to flesh out its own internal lore and experiment with reshuffling its core relationships in surprising ways. And let’s just say it’s been a long decade.

It has often felt to me like one of television’s most reliable formats either retreated back into comfortable formats or aimed for high-concept abstraction instead of just trying to refine the sitcom formula. Even Community toward the end of its life got a little too heady for its own good. This isn’t rocket science, but it is hard: you need to thrust a group of funny people together through shared circumstances, and then just… write them really well. Move the chess pieces around in new ways. Think laterally.

Enter season two of Adults, which takes a perfectly fine sitcom about a group of Zoomers getting into misadventures at their shared house in Queens and turns it into, well, a great sitcom about a group of Zoomers getting into misadventures at their shared house in Queens.

If you’ll recall, Community started out in much the same way — a passable addition to NBC’s lineup that later figured out how to get creative with its existing elements, in much the same way that Taco Bell somehow combines tortillas, cheese, and meat to maintain an ever-evolving menu, lest we forget the chain’s innovative Mexican Pizza. It’s rare, these days, for shows to receive the runway they need to become the best, “quesarito” version of themselves before getting yanked off the air, but Adults has accomplished it in just 17 episodes. And that recombinative creativity is on full display in the series high, “Racoon,” which culminates in perhaps one of the funniest threesomes put to the small screen.

In the fourth episode of season two, the titular mammal finds its way into the house just as the group is preparing to take acid together, triggering a race against the clock to evict the creature before they all start tripping. Adding to the urgency is Paul Baker’s desire to have a “define the relationship” talk with Issa meant to address the couple’s dry spell — Paul Baker wants to get more serious, but doesn’t know how to express that he wants more than just sex.

Fortunately, Samir has the bright idea for Paul Baker to Love Actually (used as a verb) Issa, showing up at the front door with cue cards to perform a “grand gesture” that can’t possibly be misconstrued. Except, of course, the sentence “I don’t just want to have sex with you” can mean very different things depending on where the emphasis lands.

Issa is convinced that it means Paul Baker doesn’t want to have sex with her anymore, and then she realizes, no, that can’t be — it must mean he wants to open the relationship (“I don’t just want to have sex with you.”) Cue her trying to convince Anton (!) and Paul Baker to have an MMF threesome with her, all while the raccoon is still at large. And that’s as much as I’ll say here, even in this review that assumes you’ve seen the first four episodes by now.

The newly refined strength of Adults is on full display here: The Paul Baker-Issa relationship is a seeming B-plot in the episode that becomes an A-plot by the end, and then becomes a defining moment for the rest of the season. Every character is involved in the threesome somehow, in ways that feel uniquely them, but that also push some of them outside their comfort zone. Most promising, the show seems unafraid to make some bold moves because it has the confidence to know the core pieces will still work. In the same way that Community reshuffled relationships but always revolved around the study group table, so long as Adults has Samir’s parents’ house, it’s going to be fine.

I started Adults season two expecting the show to stay in maintenance mode, with some light Gen Z antics that go down easy. By the end, I felt genuinely invested in where the whole gang will go from here, in ways I haven’t felt in a while. But I also wanted to know what happened to that damn raccoon, who swallowed a tab of acid before stumbling out into the night. Somehow, Adults has become one of the best sitcoms of the 2020s — not by doing anything new, but by doing everything right.

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