The 20s feel like a superpower.
When I look back on my mid-20s as a 40-something writer, I feel awestruck by the sheer recklessness and invincibility of those postgraduate years. Life was not only significantly ad hoc, pinballing from ill-advised impulse to impulse, but also lived without physical consequence. The body, mighty and un-hungover, bounding from one shenanigan to another with the occasional bruise that was immediately shrugged off, made it through without having to think about what it was going through. That unmoustached young man sometimes feels like someone else entirely.
Actually, let me amend that: its consequences, I realise as I embark on my routine of morning stretches that enable me to get out of bed without (much) creaking and sighing, are now. The body is cashing its cheque. If only I knew then what I do now, I tell myself, thinking of mistakes made and misadventures that should never have been…
And yet. The whole point of being young, dumb and broke—as the infectiously addictive Khalid song goes—is to not care about what anyone has to say, least of all an older version of yourself.
This brings me to Adults, a smart and snappy comedy that really gets the vibe of young recklessness. The series—created by Ben Krokengold and Rebecca Shaw, and streaming in India on JioHotstar—is now in its second season, and somehow this feels like a better time to get to know the gang. The first season was a blast, but it felt raw and unformed, like cookie-dough. Its first episode (which has now been made into the second episode) started off in gloriously bad taste, promising an It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia for a new generation which Adults, all quips and sarcasm and self-deprecation, really was not. It felt bright and clever, but not distinctive enough.
The second season is fully baked. The talented ensemble cast of housemates, is described by the irrepressible Issa, played by Amita Rao, as “diverse as a f***ing brochure, we have almost one of every one,” which refers both to race and sexual orientation. The second season (and a newly added episode one) leans heavily into the warmth with which these characters play off each other, and while still cuttingly sharp-tongued—it’s a lot more wholesome. They are less like the degenerates of It’s Always Sunny... and more like the gangs from Happy Endings or Difficult People or How I Met Your Mother. You root for them.
Malik Elassal plays Samir, a wealthy, neurotic and affable fellow who allows his friends to live rent-free in his parents’ townhouse. Owen Thiele plays Anton, all raised-eyebrow condescension and cutting remarks, a boy who likes other boys but rarely enough. Lucy Freyer is Billie, a frequently unemployed people pleaser who tries, clumsily, to be mature. Jack Inannen plays Paul Baker—always referred to in full—a sweet, sexually fluid Canadian who goes along with whatever the gang prescribes.
Most of the aforementioned prescribing is done by Issa, unquestionably the show’s lead, a madcap heroine who wants it all and thinks long after she acts. The cast is delightful but Rao is an electric presence who energises the show completely, like Barney Stinson in How I Met... or Penny in Happy Endings. It’s her world.
This reflects in her self-awareness. The new season opens with a long tracking shot, with Issa literally saying “It’s season 2, we’re doing a oner.” Later, when the gang’s life in that conveniently large house is threatened, she maps out her character trajectory. “I always thought we were going to live in that house forever,” she sighs. “And it’d be so cute, and I’d get sad, and then I would move out and try to spin off, and that wouldn’t work, so I’d move back in and it’d get cute again.”
My favourite running gag in the show has to do with Issa never having seen the movies she references in conversation. This is a perfect, perfect illustration of the way meme-culture operates, where a snippet of a scene is singled out without context, and the actual movie remains unseen. (It’s what makes bad Pacino films look like classics.)
The girls refer to the importance of a talk not just as a “capital-T talk” but as a “Helvetica Bold” conversation. When Billie tells Gen Alpha youngsters that she’s “25, which Maxim says is the best age to be,” one of them cuts in with “Is Maxim your husband?” A guy assuming that Samir is Jewish tells him how he’s big on Hannukah. When told that he’s actually Muslim, the guy fumbles. “Well, I’m a big fan of…. Jafar.” This Aladdin reference is as sharp as Michael Scott of The Office performatively declaring he’d trust Apollo Creed more than Jesus.
I realise, as I’m writing this, how much I’m falling back on comparisons with old great sitcoms in order to describe a fresh new one. I think that’s because this gang—whom I’m befriending when I’m older and not when I was their age—is evoking the nostalgia not only of my youth but of sitcoms my age. The coming generations will do remarkable and powerful things, and we need to applaud them as they find, and fumble, their own way forward. We can only tell them how we met their mothers.
Raja Sen is a critic, screenwriter and columnist. His first play, a murder mystery called The Simla Affair, recently opened in Delhi. He is currently writing a horror film.