Adults, the latest twentysomething hangout comedy offered by FX/Hulu, might just be the television equivalent of TikTok brainrot: chaotic, nearly cringe, and specifically tailored for a Gen Z audience. But it’s a series that functions beyond matching Gen Z’s freak.
Executive produced by comedian Nick Kroll and co-written by Tonight Show alums Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, the half-hour series follows a group of broke, codependent friends navigating young adulthood in the big city. These post-grad twentysomethings, who impose targeted house rules they eventually break, share Samir’s (Malik Elassal) Queens family home to the extent of having a “group smell.” Still living off the wealth of his parents, who are constantly touring the world, Samir is on a job hunt, just like his childhood best friend Billie (Lucy Freyer), who goes unemployed after an inappropriate behavior at a local news company where she’s a freelancer. Samir spent college with Anton (Owen Thiele, of the Amazon Prime hit show Overcompensating), the group’s unabashed “friend slut” who’s trying to break his sexual dry spell, as well as with the incredibly loud and lewd Issa (Amita Rao), who forges a personality out of referencing movies she hasn’t seen. Finally, Issa’s Canadian golden retriever boyfriend Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) is the gang’s newest recruit, who’s exclusively referred to by his full name and always happens to read paywalled articles.
In nearly every review of Adults, there seems to be a full-throated commitment to measure the show by the metrics set by its hangout sitcom predecessors, specifically Friends, eager to single out the parallels and differences between the characters and in both shows’ premises, as though it is the only way to engage with the series. The logic is crystal clear: For the show to succeed, at least according to these critics, it must either function as a full-tilt reversal of Friends or respond to its nostalgia. There’s nothing wrong with it, and I understand the compulsion to do so. But I digress.
Though Adults plots its narrative via a Gen Z lens, the anxiety and precarity at its center isn’t something that is unique to a single generation. The hefty medical debt that Billie incurs due to a lack of health insurance, Paul Baker’s need to enter a visa marriage, and Anton’s refusal to entertain romantic intimacy, just to name a few, are experiences that could speak to various demographics, in the same way that recent college sitcoms The Sex Lives of College Girls and Overcompensating appeal beyond their target audiences. Here, the protagonists are just as unlikeable—they’re funny, annoying, impulsive, and borderline delusional—and I think the show exists past just convincing the audience to like these characters. If anything, that’s a boring anchor for a genre that has so much to offer.
At the same time, Adults explores thornier subject matters, such as sexual harassment, the cost of accessing proper healthcare, abortion, and the impossibility of living in your own place, sans the preachiness. In fact, the series has this decadent and absurd way of wrestling with ridiculous situations that it places its protagonists in, which to some extent gives it a cult appeal. In “House Rules,” the fourth episode, Billie’s former English teacher, Andrew (played by the incredibly hot Charlie Cox, of Daredevil fame), finds a way to reduce her medical bill down to about two grand. In return, Billie pleasures him, which Andrew accepts with open arms. In the season’s opening salvo, the group comes across a subway creep who enjoys masturbating in public, an uncomfortable encounter that Issa deals with by gratifying herself in a strange effort to shame and out-masturbate the sexual offender, even as train commuters film them.
But as far as the Gen Z experience is concerned, Adults also intimates how today’s technology hacks through the lives of its protagonists, be it tracking a possible lover at a coffee shop with AirTags or probing an iMessage inbox bombarded by thousands of unread texts from total strangers, including a local stabber—plotlines that chiefly involve Anton, who can’t help but befriend and “soul-bond” with every person he meets before swiftly ghosting them, which is sort of a defense mechanism against any real intimacy due to the trauma caused by his past relationship. Interestingly, Anton seems to be the only real adult among the group. He might be silly and often in on the joke, but he’s also incredibly self-aware of his actions. Should the series be renewed for another installment, it’s a character aspect that Adults could mine further, just as the focus on Gen Z tech provides the series a particularly distinct feature that separates it from previous hangout comedies that have come before it.
Episodic in nature and propelled by forward momentum and editing, what really towers above the show is the brilliant dynamic among its cast of young comedians and screen actors. In fact, the writers instantly thrust us into the lived-in connection between its leads, as though every inside joke is self-explanatory. Together, they host dinner parties to terrible results, cram into a bathroom without any sense of privacy, figure out how to fix a dysfunctional boiler, and make bad, dumb decisions. These are the types of people who occasionally get annoyed with each other and who you gossip about other people’s lives with, but also the types of people who will be there every step of the way.The quintet coin the term “mind wipe” for instances when they reveal uncomfortable truths about themselves that the rest of the group should instantly forget. Confident and chronically unhinged, Adults is the kind of show that viewers, Gen Z or otherwise, won’t mind wipe so easily.
Adults is now streaming on FX.
Learn more about the show at the official website for the title.
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