5 TV Shows To Watch If You Like The Four Seasons

Tina Fey has been a small-screen staple for decades now, and if you watch even a few moments of her Netflix series "The Four Seasons," you know why she's got serious staying power. Alongside her longtime collaborators Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher, Fey created this series for Netflix, which stars her, Will Forte, Colman Domingo, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Erika Henningsen, and Marco Calvani and focuses on a group of now middle-aged college friends reuniting for regular vacations. (It's also, incidentally, a modern adaptation of the 1981 movie written and directed by Alan Alda, who plays Kenney-Silver's father throughout the series in a small role.)

If you're wondering why we didn't mention that Steve Carell in "The Four Seasons," that's not an accident ... but if you haven't watched the show's first season, we won't dive into that whole thing here. As far as the rest of the cast goes, Fey and Forte play wife and husband Kate and Jack, Domingo and Calvani portray husband and husband Danny and Claude, Carell portrays Nick, and Kenney-Silver plays his ex-wife Anne — and Henningsen, who appeared in Fey's Broadway adaptation of "Mean Girls," plays Ginny, the woman that Nick dates after Anne. As you can see, it's a pretty tangled web — but it's also endearing, funny, and wholly relatable.

As of this writing, you can watch two full seasons of "The Four Seasons" — but what should you watch when that's done? This list does, admittedly, skew heavily towards Fey's body of work, but when someone makes a lot of great TV, you must honor it. From Fey's other shows to a series about old friends reuniting under different circumstances to a show about how people behave on vacation, here are five shows you should watch when you finish "The Four Seasons."

While "Girls5Eva" was created by the also-brilliant Meredith Scardino, Scardino got her start working on "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" with Tina Fey ... and believe it or not, Fey appears briefly in the first season of "Girls5Eva" as legendary country singer Dolly Parton. (No, Fey doesn't look anything like Parton; you'll understand when you see it.) Fey also serves as an executive producer on this gut-bustingly funny series about the titular girl group, Girls5Eva, who disband after a few hits in the 1990s and find themselves drawn back together in their 40s after a rapper samples their song "Famous 5Eva" and puts it back on the charts.

Together, meek but supremely talented mother Dawn (real singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, who contributed original music to the series), ditzy but lovable Summer (Busy Philipps), and dentist and "first lesbian in the state of New York to get divorced" Gloria (the incomporable Paula Pell) try to reach out to the most glamorous member of their group, Wickie Roy (Tony winner Renée Elise Goldsberry). When it turns out, in the pilot, that Wickie isn't a jet-setting fashion maven — she actually shoots geese at the airport and gets "paid by the goose" — the foursome reunites despite the fact that their fifth member, Ashley (Ashley Park), died years prior in a "tragic infinity pool accident." To say their return doesn't go well is an understatement, but it is hilarious.

"Girls5Eva" began its life on Peacock before moving to Netflix and then getting canceled, which is a crying shame; it's one of the funniest shows in recent memory, and the music is good. At least we'll always have stone-cold bangers like "Dream Girlfriends" (which brags that the singer's dad is dead) and "B.P.E." (an acronym we cannot print here). Please, someone revive this canceled gem!

Francesca Delbanco and Nicholas Stoller's show "Friends from College" can definitely skew a bit darker than the often-lighthearted "The Four Seasons," but if you want a story about old friends finding their way back to each other, you'll definitely want to check this one out. The series, which ran for two seasons on Netflix, introduces us to the main gang — including married couple Ethan and Lisa Turner (Keegan-Michael Key and Cobie Smulders), who are struggling to conceive and trying to make use of options like in-vitro fertilization. What Lisa doesn't know is that, for years, Ethan has been having a physical and emotional affair with their close friend Sam Delmonico (Annie Parisse), a wealthy interior designer who's "happily" married to Jon Spurling (small-screen staple Greg Germann). 

Elsewhere, we've got the cheerful but quietly troubled Marianne (Jae Suh Park), who's trying to launch a career as an actress, the too-wealthy bachelor and party boy Nick Ames (Nat Faxon), and literary agent Max Adler (Fred Savage) in the friend group, and to say the dynamics are constantly shifting on "Friends from College" is an understatement. Again, this show can be a bit bitter and acerbic, and truthfully, critics didn't love it; the first season earned a 24% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. "Friends from College" is on this list, though, because it feels like a precursor to "The Four Seasons" ... and if you like your comedies to be at least a little mean and weird, this might be a good pick for you.

One cannot simply walk into Mordor, and one cannot simply watch Tina Fey's other situational comedies without experiencing all of "30 Rock." Created by Fey and based on her time as the head writer of "Saturday Night Live," "30 Rock" — which revolves around a fictional and frankly unwatachably bad fake show called "TGS" — is one of the funniest television shows ever made, and that is a fact that's not up for debate. Fey stars as Liz Lemon, a trainwreck of a woman trying to "have it all" and failing miserably at every turn ... partly because she's married to her job at NBC running TGS alongside her corporate boss Jack Donaghy (a genuinely sublime Alec Baldwin), and partly because, honestly? Liz is kind of a horrible person. That doesn't matter, though. Every time Liz trips over her own feet trying to achieve something, it just gets funnier and funnier.

With some of the highest joke density of literally any show that's ever aired on network TV — seriously, it's a quip a minute on this series — "30 Rock" also stars Jane Krakowski as the ego-driven lunatic actress Jenna Maroney, Jack McBrayer as the potentially immortal and wildly enthusiastic NBC page Kenneth Parcell, and, of course, Tracy Morgan as Tracy Jordan, an erratic comedian. (In one memorable scene when Tracy shows up to work shirtless, Liz asks if he went home and where his shirt might be; Tracy just responds, "no and at large.")

"30 Rock" established Fey as a comedy heavyweight and took home a ton of Emmys — somehow, though, Krakowski never won for playing Jenna — and it's still one of the greatest TV comedies in the canon. Go watch "30 Rock" if you haven't, or rewatch it if you have; you'll find new jokes every time.

If the traveling aspect of "The Four Seasons" really draws you in — because, as we all know, everyone acts differently on vacation — you should probably add "The White Lotus" to your watchlist. Created by Mike White and inspired partly by his stint on the 37th season of "Survivor," "The White Lotus" began its life as a miniseries before transforming into an anthology where, during each season, a group of wealthy and privileged people enjoy stays at the titular and fictional White Lotus hotel chain. 

The first season takes place in Hawai'i and features Jake Lacy as an irate guest, Murray Bartlett as an exhausted hotel manager, and Sydney Sweeney as a truly terrifying teenage girl, just to name a few; the second season then brings the action to Sicily and gets bigger and better. With Jennifer Coolidge reprising her role in that season as the off-kilter heiress Tanya McQuoid, we meet her oft-abused assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) and some of the Italian island resort's other guests, including the flighty Daphne Sullivan (Meghann Fahy), her disloyal husband Cameron (Theo James), and their somewhat reluctant friends Ethan and Harper Spiller (Will Sharpe and Aubrey Plaza). Then, in Season 3, Natasha Rothwell returns as spa manager Belinda — who appears in Season 1 at the Hawai'ian resort — and we're also introduced to the rich but dysfunctional Ratliff family (led by patriarch Timothy, played by Jason Isaacs), three gal pals on a long-overdue trip who seem to hate one another, and odd couple Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins) and his much-younger girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood).

There's something different to love in every season of "The White Lotus," so if you haven't watched it, what are you waiting for? For a more luxurious version of "The Four Seasons," try "The White Lotus."

The newest entry on this list, "The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins" reunites Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan, with the former serving as an executive producer and the latter starring as the title character Reggie Dinkins, a disgraced football player hoping for a cultural comeback. To achieve that goal, Reggie — who was banned from the National Football League for sports betting, even though, in a really funny twist, he was betting on himself for encourgaement — hires Oscar-winning documentarian Arthur Tobin (a wonderfully wry Daniel Radcliffe), allowing Arthur to live in his house and study Reggie's dynamics with his friends and family. In that camp, we've got his much-younger fiancée Brina (Precious Way), his best friend and fellow former football player Rusty (Bobby Moynihan), his ex-wife, manager, and agent Monica (Erika Alexander), and Monica and Reggie's teenage son Carmelo (Jalyn Hall).

The reason that "The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins" works so beautifully is that it's actually sweet — and works hard yet seamlessly to build relationships between its characters. Brina and Reggie's age difference doesn't seem to matter, because they're actually really good together — and Brina's friendship with Monica is also a series highlight. As Arthur integrates into the Dinkins clan, he becomes a part of the family in his own right and forges his own relationships with Reggie, Rusty, and Monica ... and even though Radcliffe and Morgan seem like an unlikely comedy duo, they're genuinely fantastic together as director and subject. "The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins" is yet another outstandingly funny series with Fey's name on it ... and if you saw their unreal "Epstein's eye land" joke in Season 1, you know we're right.

"The Four Seasons" is streaming on Netflix now.