FX’s Gen Z Hangout Comedy

There’s a moment in FX’s Adults when Billie (Lucy Freyer), in an effort to win over an older boyfriend’s friends, joins in on their good-natured roasting of one of their own. Only, her joke doesn’t land. It’s too lewd and too loud; the middle-aged moms and dads listening are not just perplexed but offended. As they shuffle away, one mutters to another: “She is 24.”

At the risk, then, of sounding like the geriatric millennial I am: Adults, like Billie, feels very 24, at least in the sense that I remember myself at that age — bursting with energy but not always confident in its own perspective, not that it lets that keep it from shouting every passing thought at top volume. It can be a little exhausting, in a way that occasionally made me want to pull it aside and suggest it take a breath. But it’s also bright enough (and, unexpectedly, sweet enough) to inspire faith it’ll find its footing eventually.

Adults

The Bottom Line

Incredible chemistry, less incredible jokes.

Airdate: 9 p.m. Wednesday, May 28 (FX)
Cast: Malik Elassal, Lucy Freyer, Jack Innanen, Amita Rao, Owen Thiele
Creators: Ben Kronengold, Rebecca Shaw

Adults’ greatest strength is a core cast with chemistry for days. For Billie and Samir (Malik Elassal) and Anton (Owen Thiele, recently of Overcompensating) and Issa (Amita Rao) and Paul Baker (always called by his full name, and played by Jack Innanen), the friend group is the one unshakeable constant each of them can count on, no matter how many astronomical hospital bills or disastrous dinner parties or general quarter-life crises the universe (or, rather, creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw) might throw their way.

No boundaries exist between them — in the Queens home they all share, not even using the toilet is necessarily a solo activity — but nor do any hangups. “Mind wipe?” one asks whenever they want to share something embarrassing or vulnerable that they’d like the others to pretend to forget immediately. Group conversations are a whirlwind of crosstalk, leaping between playful insults, misguided advice and idle musings about life’s unanswerable mysteries (“What is a JoJo Siwa?”) over bites of breakfast cereal. It’s these touches that give Adults its appealingly grungy, lived-in vibe; one look at this crew piled atop one another on the couch and it’s clear they’ve been doing this for years.

But just because they find each other’s company to be endlessly fascinating doesn’t mean every outsider will, and in the six (out of eight) half-hour episodes sent to critics, I found my time with them to be a mixed bag.

Adults follows in the proud tradition of Friends or Happy Endings or Girls (perhaps its most obvious predecessor, getting an indirect shout-out in a premiere-episode line about wanting to be “the V of our G”) as a hangout comedy about 20-somethings in the big city. And like most of those, it harbors no illusions that its protagonists are particularly kind or capable people. One storyline sees Samir and Paul Baker trying to relive the carefree days of childhood by supplying alcohol to teenagers. Another sends Anton and Issa into a narcissistic spiral after they come to believe their dark thoughts drove a therapist to suicide. If they’re self-absorbed, self-destructive and often self-defeating, that’s all part of the fun.

The problem lies in the payoff, or the lack thereof. The first episode introduces the Seinfeld-ian concept of “the window,” described as “the week after a sex scandal or a race whoopsie when everyone is terrified of all the young people in their office” and therefore eager to give out raises or promotions. But then, having raised that deliciously cynical idea, it fails to either escalate it or subvert it, resulting in a resolution that’s significant from a plot perspective but feels anticlimactic from a comedy one. Another, later storyline eventually reveals itself as an elaborate and slow-moving gag about a certain sex act — but once again has no real punchline to offer beyond that initial clever observation.

Edginess does not particularly suit Adults, even if some of its brasher characters might protest otherwise. The show generally fares better with a touch of earnestness. It finds its way to that sweet spot most often with Billie, a pleasure-to-have-in-class type who finds herself without a clear direction for the first time. “Maybe that’s what life is. You go from being all gold stars and potential to just some bitch who peaked in high school,” she rants to a favorite former teacher (Daredevil: Born Again’s Charlie Cox), vocalizing the Gen Z anxiety simmering underneath the gang’s high-key hijinks.

And it’s best at marrying that earnestness with wackiness in Anton, a social butterfly whose fear of intimacy manifests as a nigh-pathological need to “soul bond” with everyone he meets — including, in one of the season’s most entertaining plots, a stabber terrorizing their block.

Unfortunately, Adults has yet to crack its other characters. This isn’t necessarily an issue for a character like Paul Baker, an amiable newcomer whose main purpose is to serve as a gentle Canadian foil to the others’ nervousness and skepticism. But Issa, despite an enjoyably committed performance by Deli Boys scene-stealer Rao, never fully breaks free of her Ilana-from-Broad City mold.

Meanwhile, Samir is so inconsistently conceived that I couldn’t tell if that very unevenness was meant to be part of his character. In one chapter, he’s seized with fear that he may have sexually abused a past hookup without realizing it. (“You an actual baby angel and, on the spectrum of men, a little bitch boy,” he’s reassured.) A few episodes later, he tanks an otherwise promising Zoom interview by dropping trou in front of his prospective employers. So is he supposed to be a little creepy? A lot stupid? Or is he just the victim of erratic writing?

There are odder things for a fresh college graduate to be than confused about who exactly they are, just as there are worse sins for a first-season comedy to commit than needing some time to hone its voice. It is at least a promising sign for Adults that as bumpy as those first six chapters can be, they do tend to get better as they go — and a blessing that its performers’ chemistry starts out solid and only gets stronger from there. As of now, though, it feels perhaps too much of a piece with its own leads, trying too hard to demand your attention but unsure what to do once it’s got it. For the sake of this excellent ensemble, let’s hope the series grows up faster than these characters do.