Streaming: A snappy sixsome revisited

I watched Alda’s The Four Seasons before and after watching a new Netflix adaptation from Tina Fey, Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield, which updates Alda’s romcom for a new generation of warring couples. The central couple, Kate and Jack, are played by Fey and comedian Will Forte, who now have their own relationship baggage to contend with.

Steve Carrell’s Nick still upends the group by leaving his wife, Anne, for a younger model, but this time it’s because she plays FarmVille on her iPad in bed, not because of her mundane passion for photographing vegetables. Ginny is now his dental hygienist, who takes Nick to Burning Man and gets him into running as the new markers of the male midlife crisis – though there’s still a shiny new car for the avoidance of doubt.

The third couple – once Danny and Claudia (Rita Moreno and Jack Weston), now Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani) – cruise Grindr together, have impeccable wardrobes and clink glasses to the good fortune of not having children.

Other acts of translation have been elegantly done. What was a cramped summer sailing trip is now glamping (a lot like camping, it turns out) among human waste-composted mangroves. Who among us has not ventured in hope of an intrepid adventure and been met by the reality of thin walls and a lack of air conditioning?

But one element that needs no updating is the hang movie that was at the core of the original, a film where the plot feels secondary to the sense of sitting back and listening to friends yapping and snapping at each other.

Both versions of The Four Seasons serve to remind us that hell is other people on holiday, and that the disappointments of relationships are eternal. It’s heartening to remember all the couples before us who railed against stingy friends keeping tabs on what is owed, and the weird noises your partner makes when they eat. After all, what is the unbroken line of history, if not your mother and grandmother before her shouting at their husband for not picking up his pants off the floor?

The 1981 Four Seasons was met by yawning reviews, with the New York Times calling it “a gentle, likable, frequently funny glimpse of everyday types doing their everyday best to get by”.

The Netflix reboot may be met with a similar shrug, especially given that its attempt to conjure a new dramatic ending is where it goes off-piste. But its gentleness is its strength. Here, friends don’t fight over politics and can afford nice holidays four times a year. A “hymn to ordinariness” it might be, but ordinariness is comforting – exotic even – in these relentlessly extraordinary times.

Though more than 40 years and light years of changes in relations between the sexes apart, both versions of The Four Seasons show that sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In each there’s a sense that all of us are longing for our friends to accept us with all of our flaws.

That need is met, in the 1981 version anyway. After the group have a dramatic, drunken fallout and a near-death experience, they remember the value of friendship, or at least of peace and quiet. As Claudia says to her wallowing husband: “You have us and we love you, so shut up.”

The Four Seasons is on Netflix now