Adults Season 1, Episodes 1-6 Review

Adults premieres Wednesday, May 28 on FX, with all episodes streaming next day on Hulu.

Generation X had Living Single and Friends; millennials had New Girl, Broad City, and Insecure. And with the arrival of FX’s Adults, zoomers get a chance to see the trials and tribulations of their 20s reflected in a TV comedy. Like those other shows, Adults tries to balance recognizable stories of life in the big city with the inherent absurdity of being young, relatively unattached, and sharing a home with big personalities who could be your best bud one day and your worst enemy the next. And boy, does it try. is From what I’ve seen of Adults, it’s a comedy of forced errors: Six episodes straining to pull off an edginess that overcomplicates its portrait of adulthood. When the show is funny, it’s because its premise, humanity, and jokes aren’t nearly so contrived.

The adults in question are a group of five codependent Gen Z roommates: Samir (Malik Elassal), Billie (Lucy Freyer), Anton (Owen Thiele), Issa (Amita Rao), and Paul Baker (Jack Innanen, playing a character who’s addressed by his first and last name at all times). They’re each a stock type – Samir the jobless worrywart, Billie the ambitious upstart, etc. – but when those traits are exaggerated for comedic effect, the results feel more like science fiction than relatable sitcom hijinks. Take the pilot’s opening scene: We’re introduced to the group on a New York City subway at the end of a night out. When they’re confronted with a creep publicly masturbating just a few feet away, unflappably chill Paul Baker tries to connect with the man by reading a script about mental health off his phone – most of which is hidden behind a paywall. Free-spirited Issa, meanwhile, decides to fight back, which means angrily pleasuring herself just as publicly, prompting a chorus of objections from her friends. It’s 30 seconds of wall-to-wall chaos that substitutes horrified shouting and quips for actual jokes, with no one intervening to stop Issa’s “protest” until far too late. It’s loud, it’s nonsensical, but it’s not exactly funny enough to support the wackiness of it all.

The problem isn’t Adults’ deeply flawed protagonists or its attempt to make light of such a heavy subject. Remember: It shares a network with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which has built a 20-year legacy off of celebrated dirtbags and golden bits rooted in their abhorrent behavior. Nor is Rao – who proved herself a comedic star in the making on Hulu’s Deli Boys – to blame. It’s just hard to get past the idea of even a fractionally reasonable person responding in this way, regardless of age or intoxication level; the circumstances seem desperately orchestrated rather than uniquely insightful, fresh, or provocative. Perhaps it would have been 10 or 15 years ago, when women weren’t often given raunchy, daring material to work with. (This is absolutely something Ilana Glazer might’ve pulled early on in Broad City’s run.) Without a real understanding of Issa’s motivation to be equally creepy and unhinged, it just seems like a stretch.

It’s chaos for chaos’ sake. There are far too many examples of Adults feeling like this, whether the group is collectively, inexplicably using their shared bathroom all at once (which includes a system that somehow allows two people to use the toilet simultaneously) or Samir is, for reasons that totally escape basic common sense, mooning job recruiters on Zoom after he was rewarded a cushy position (of course, they yank the offer back). It’d be completely forgivable if it uncovered some interesting observations or human truths (or, you know, if it made you laugh). Otherwise, it’s just crass and confusing, and not in a fun way.

There are signs that creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw are willing to pull back some of the layers of their characters, though. In the second episode, Issa laments that her friends only see her as the resident wild child instead of taking her seriously as a responsible adult – a suggestion of deeper levels of characterization to come. But Adults does little to counter her friends’ assertions until the sixth episode, where a very random but highly amusing cameo from Julia Fox brings some real insecurities to the surface. We’ll have to wait and see if Issa is allowed to continue down this path to full personhood; For now, she, like most of her roommates, is here for the vibes.

That doesn’t mean Adults is totally devoid of potential. Its third episode is easily its funniest, centering on friendly-to-a-fault Anton and his chronic socializing. When the group’s neighborhood is rocked by a stabbing incident, it’s revealed that Anton, through a chance encounter that turned into one of his infamously intense here-today-gone-tomorrow connections, actually knows the prime suspect. The zany plot is merely an excuse to take a closer look at someone who, as Billie puts it, habitually “soul bonds” with every person he meets – a form of people-pleasing that actually feels grounded in reality. Thiele radiates an effortless charm and sharp timing that really make the premise sing, achieving some wonderful build-up that leads to the series’ first truly gut-busting moments.

To be clear, Adults doesn’t necessarily need to grow up. A room full of well-adjusted grown-ups with pristine problem-solving skills wouldn’t be good TV, either. But right now, all it’s giving us is an occasionally amusing first-season show featuring arrested adolescents who can’t navigate the most basic of social situations. Being the only adult in the room is always exhausting, even when everyone else in the room is on your TV screen.