Adults review – Friends for the TikTok generation sitcom is a try-hard misfire

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Adults, FX’s new twenty-something comedy implicitly pitched as the Friends or Girls for the TikTok and location-sharing generation, opens with a studiously replicated scene of codependent young adulthood: five friends tangled together on a New York subway, their belongings and in-group references strewn between each other. In barely a minute, the characters gab in the way you’d imagine adult-adults imagine young-adults speak, breezing through exposition, getting high, being broke and not having enough hot water to shower. This being New York, there’s also a subway masturbator, which Issa (Amita Rao), the loudest and bawdiest of a loud and bawdy group, handles by over-engaging, attempting to out-masturbate the creep. “Is this the world you want?!” she shouts, to the horror of everyone else on the train.

To my horror, as well – there’s a fine line between cringe comedy and just cringe, and Adults, created by ex-Tonight Show writers Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw and executive produced by coming-of-age comedian extraordinaire Nick Kroll, is often on the wrong side of it. The barnstormer of an entrance – cue a joke about the progress of feminism – succeeds in setting the tone for the rest of the series (or at least, the six of eight episodes made available to critics): aggressively profane, a little off-putting, onto something but overdone, altogether doing too much. The television equivalent of the friend champing at the bit for inside jokes – Overcompensating, one could say, to borrow the title of another recent twenty-something comedy, albeit one set at US college, that has a better handle on its tone of heightened hijinks and egocentrism during a formative time.

Which is a shame, because the viewing public is starved for a good show about one’s miserable and magical twenties in post-pandemic New York – or, believably for a group of genuinely broke post-grads, an hour-plus train ride away from Manhattan in outer Queens (as played by Toronto). The archetypically messy group living for free-ish in Samir’s (Malik Elassal) childhood home inhabit a recognizable world of post-Covid precarity and interconnectedness. Samir is chronically unemployed and struggling to assert himself. (His parents are off on a post-retirement jaunt.) His childhood best friend Billie (Lucy Freyer), the go-getter of the group, works at a cartoonishly bad media company with no health insurance. Even Anton (Owen Thiele), the house’s resident charismatic gay and admitted “friend slut”, doesn’t know what his job is besides chiming in “uh-huh” on Zoom (an update on the Friends bit about Chandler’s job). Issa appears to have made a career on hijacking social justice protests for personal gain. Her boyfriend, Canadian transplant Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) – always Paul Baker, never just Paul — is the group’s resident softboy, the enthusiastic golden retriever to the over-contrived scheme of the day, such as air-tagging a man as a potential solution to Anton’s dry spell.

Over 20-ish minute episodes – Adults at least keeps it short and snappy – the crew flail about in ways both relatable and obnoxious. The gags are always a notch or two above necessary, such as an over-emphasis on a lack of physical boundaries (don’t you remember letting your best friend pee through your legs?) or Issa and Anton convincing themselves that they annoyed their therapist to the point of suicide. (Issa, in particular, is a too-grating parody of narcissism, as if Marnie Michaels had negative shame and was also a socialist.) The show hits all the expected bases – a go-around on sex-positive app Feeld, an inadvertent and exorbitant hospital bill, the phrase “defund the police and all, but…” – and some unexpected ones, including guest turns from an admirably game Charlie Cox as Billie’s former teacher/older paramour and Julia Fox as her bleached eyebrow self. From house rules to a disastrous attempt at a roast chicken dinner party, all of it tastes overcooked, invoking the classic paradox that the harder one tries to make things look natural, the more contrived it seems.

It’s not that Adults doesn’t have its moments, particularly as the season goes on and distances itself from a turkey of an opener. The cast, a mix of stand-up comedians, internet personalities and screen actors, eventually settles into a more level-headed groove, with Elassal and Freyer in particular demonstrating some emotional texture to their characters. (Thiele gets the award for comic timing). The less the writers strain for ego-centric, no-boundaries twenty-something-ness, the better; the funniest long-running bit is a simple gag about the gang referencing movies they haven’t seen.

But these are too few and far between, and likely too late after the overkill of the first episode to win over its target audience, though if Adults shares one thing with today’s young people, it’s a formless, ambient sense of anxiety. Perhaps that will diffuse if the show is given time to grow, and these young adults learn what most twenty-somethings do: in the game of winning friends and influencing people, one needn’t try so hard.