Adults Needs More Room to Grow

In the seventh episode of Adults, FX’s new sitcom about a group of roommates navigating early-20s adulthood in Queens, there’s a withering joke about one of the show’s main characters that doubles as an inadvertent roast of the show itself. Annabelle, a persnickety teenager visiting New York for an out-of-state abortion, is underwhelmed by the company of the two roommates who, through a convoluted series of events, find themselves tasked with ushering her through the procedure, and she lashes out. “You are the least interesting gays I have ever met!” she screams at the duo, Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) and Anton (Owen Thiele), before turning her sights on the former specifically: “You think ‘nice’ is a personality, when really it’s the absence of one.” The joke lands for the same reason the character doesn’t. Paul Baker is nice; he is beloved by everyone, sexually fluid, and exclusively referred to by his full name. But at this point in the series, that’s all he is. Just seven episodes into a sitcom with five main characters to flesh out, that’s not inexcusable. The problem is the entire first season is just eight episodes total.

Like New Girl or Friends before it, Adults belongs to the genre of low-stakes hangout sitcoms in which the characters are pathologically involved in one another’s lives. When successful, these shows become comforting rewatches canonized by generations who view them ambiently during meals and reference them in Hinge profiles. Adults, created by former Tonight Show writers Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, has a lot going for it in this regard. There are standout performances from the likes of Malik Elassal (Samir) and Amita Rao (Issa), playfully irreverent jokes and story lines that land with regularity, and whimsical coinages like “house rules” seemingly designed to be referenced and replicated by real housemates everywhere. But where its genre predecessors were given 20-plus-episode first seasons to calibrate their characters’ quirks, nail down a consistent comedic tone, and get fans invested in the journey, Adults has no such luxury. New Girl, perhaps Adults’s clearest reference point, took nearly a full network season to tone down Jess’s tweeness and two seasons to heighten Winston as a delightfully weird fan favorite, yet Adults has to try to nail it out of the gate.

The result is a core ensemble full of characters who are fleshed out just enough to be vessels for jokes and plot but not enough to engender the kind of emotional audience buy-in necessary for the long-term cultural penetration of a show like this. There’s Samir, the high-strung straight man (comedically and sexually) whose parents own the roommates’ house; Anton, who is gay and cool; Issa, who is brash and sex positive; Billie, a spiraling former overachiever; and Paul Baker (nice). And rather than unfurling these traits slowly over the course of a season, the show drops viewers into the lives of these characters as fully realized (read: unrealized) people because it can’t afford to waste time.

Consider the arc of Billie, an ambitious type-A personality who begins the season getting fired for trying to threaten her boss into promoting her using vaguely accusatory social-justice language. In episode four, she seeks stability by initiating a fling with an ostensibly kind former high-school teacher of hers; in episode five, they are a full-fledged couple, and he remains kind and supportive after she embarrasses herself in front of friends. Then, in episode six — without any lead-up whatsoever — the teacher shows up for a dinner party at the roommates’ house tripping on ketamine, has a crisis of conscience about dating a former student, and breaks up with Billie. The story line is meant to illustrate the dramatic extent to which she has spiraled after the loss of her job, but it’s too rushed to have its intended effect. The takeaway isn’t that Billie stooped so low she’s hooking up with her high-school teacher — it’s that the specific high-school teacher Billie was hooking up with was a great boyfriend until suddenly he wasn’t.

Rushed story arcs and thin characters can be forgiven in a sitcom if it’s able to eke out enough laughs. And while Adults is more successful in this respect, its compressed timeline means it vacillates, often abruptly, between Surrealist and grounded humor without arriving at a steady balance. A joke from the premiere about Samir filling out a form at the bank and hallucinating that one of its questions reads “Are you a fucking idiot? Yes/No” has no echoes until episode seven when Samir hallucinates that a throw pillow reads “Don’t Samir This” while he’s away at a cottage with a girlfriend. A sketchlike bit from the first episode in which Issa tries to justify involving herself in a protest by presenting a series of cards from her purse that read “woman,” “child of immigrants,” and “sex worker” has no analogues in the rest of the season. Again, it’s not unforgivable for a hangout sitcom to take time to land on a comedic ethos; Happy Endings took its entire first season to transition from the rom-com-style jokes of its Runaway Bride premise to the hyperreferential bit machine it eventually became. Over a scant eight 22-minute episodes of Adults, though, it just feels jarring.

Adults exhibits a palpable desire to highlight how of the era it is, and it struggles at times to achieve this goal. Its characters’ parlance, predicaments, and habits are distinctly Gen Z insofar as they’re clearly filtered through the sensibilities of the mostly older writers who shaped them. Yet the show can’t help but feel contemporary in other ways. Had it been born in the era of its network-sitcom forebears, it might have gotten 20-plus episodes to find its footing and rack up more audience goodwill (even if this had occurred on streaming years later, as with New Girl and Happy Endings). Instead, FX is mixing and matching distribution methods to try to replicate this effect in the current streaming-first model: a binge drop on Hulu followed by a weekly linear release on FX and a digital strategy involving the premiere being uploaded to YouTube and TikTok in full. There are signs that it’s working; the show seems to have found a fan base on X. Prolonging its impact beyond the three hours it takes to watch the first season, though, may require a release-strategy recalibration more in line with the tried-and-true model of years past. Just because Adults wants to be of this era, it doesn’t have to be a casualty of this era, too.