In ‘Adults’ Season Two, a Hang-Out Sitcom Comes of Age

This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free.The hang-out sitcom is one of TV’s most sacred genres, and every generation gets the gang they deserve. The success of Friends, a blander yuppie carbon copy of the much-cooler Black cast of Living Single, says everything about the ‘90s. The narcissistic maniacs on Happy Endings, with their submachine-gun delivery of pop culture references, were just a few years too ahead of their time to match the distance of the en vogue peak 2010s earnestness of the quirky oddballs on New Girl. I could go on. How fitting then, that as we cross the mid-point of the 2020s, the emerging hang-out sitcom du jour follows Zillennial angst with jokes that scan for kids who don’t remember 9/11 as well as those of us who were already in grade school.That divide is the basis of one great joke early in the second season of the FX series Adults, which puts a contemporary spin on age-old concepts of post-20s chaos and confusion. It’s levied at Billie (Lucy Freyer), who is around the same age as Rachel Green was in season 1 of Friends—but three decades later being a 25-year-old in New York is a vastly different experience. Friends’ main sets were two Manhattan apartments big enough to do cartwheels in—unbelievable even then, a fairytale now. Adults, embracing the hilarious stark reality of New York real estate in 2026, features the entire cast crashing in an outer-borough Queens home that they don’t have to actually pay rent in.That’s a rich enough situation to mine some good comedy out of, but for most of its eight-episode first season, Adults was cringe in all the wrong ways. There were bright spots for sure, namely Amita Rao’s fatally horny chaos agent Issa and Jack Innannen as her golden retriever boyfriend, who’s always referred to by his full government name, “Paul Baker,” and the occasionally successful dry line reading from Owen Thiele’s eternally over-it Anton. But with forced post-Happy Endings banter, thin scenarios and some very lukewarm will-they-or-won’t-they/love triangling, Adults was an easy, harmless watch, but hardly TV to write home about.So I was a little dubious when my co-worker Gaby tore through screeners for season 2 and did report back glowingly, but I shouldn’t have been, not just because Gaby and I typically line up taste-wise but because most great sitcoms took a while to get in their bag, and 20 or 30 years ago, most of them actually got the chance to. So in a way, Adults returning with a sophomore season that feels much more assured—and, most important, funnier—is right on track. The cast feels synchronized, and the writers’ have a better sense of the actors’ strengths, which is how you get a series peak like the uproarious bottle episode “Raccoon,” or Malik Elassal’s Samir evolving from dull straight man (both in comedic terms and archetypally) to a character whose dullness is a metatextual inside joke. (The Dave of the group, for all my Happy Endings faithful.)The best thing about this show is that for all its branding as a “Gen Z sitcom,” it’s not so hyper-specific to its demographic as to alienate anyone who remembers life before iMessage. If anything, the running joke throughout the series is that existential angst is ageless. Code-switching between friend groups, agonizing over when to have kids, pulling up to a club you’re a couple years too old for to prove you still got it—these are eternal sitcom sits, updated here with zippier dialog and the kind of contemporary awareness that treats a reference to pegging with a shrug.Great cast chemistry goes a long way, but the other lever that helps a half-hour rise above the crop is great concepts—fresh delivery devices to package the same core stories we’ve seen a thousand times. A storyline about Billie (Lucy Freyer, who at one point drunkenly slurs the show’s thesis statement: “When did we become mature?”) feeling insecure about aging out of clubs is anything but novel, but what is fresh is that she gets to that point after tracing the Fake ID family tree and discovering the latest owner of her legendary ersatz drivers license which has been passed down from generation to generation of hard-partying blonde white girls, an idea that also leads to great gags once Samir starts playing wizened OG to his own lineage of curly-haired awkward dorks.So if you’re looking for a late-summer laugh, fire up Adults season two, which probably would’ve hit even harder if it hadn't dropped right as summer speedruns to the end. (Sadly, the whole season became available at once, the victim of another misguided binge release. The whole point of a hang-out sitcom is to hang, not rush through eight episodes that you can house before lunchtime!) It’s hardly Hall of Fame-level just yet, but it’s maturing quite nicely.