What's the Secret to Comedic Timing? The Creators and Artisans of ‘The Four Seasons' Pull Back the Curtain
' In the shows that Tina and Tracey and I have done before, it's been really rapid fire and there's been a lot of tight coverage and I feel like when we first started talking to [cinematographer Tim Orr], we'd like to play things looser,' co-creator and director Lang Fisher told IndieWire as part of a recent USG University Panel. 'To have more cinematic composition in the shots we're doing and more movement and, you know, to have it feel more like an indie movie.'
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The plot of that indie movie is, fittingly, broken up into fourths as it checks in on a set of friends, all well-to-do couples, across four different vacations. Steve Carell and Kerri Kenney-Silver's Nick and Anne go through the biggest changes, beginning with a hail mary vow renewal that the latter puts on to save their marriage; but Tina Fey and Will Forte's Kate and Jack have their own struggles about how they do (or don't) show up for each other; and Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani's Danny and Claude sometimes have very different ways of looking at the world.
Co-creator and actor Tina Fey was drawn to the original movie's tone, as well as the groundedness of Alda's writing. 'It felt like you were just really with these people. I loved what we refer to as the container play rules of the original. We're only seeing them on vacation. We never see their homes. We never see them at work. We pick up clues about who they are and what they do on the vacations,' Fey said.
The original cast wasn't too shabby, either, and one of the highlights of the second episode of the Netflix series is the rare Alan Alda appearance, as he shows up at the vow renewal to give a little relationship advice to the current iteration of characters before dealing with the consequences of a spicy cup of coffee.
'It was all people that you love from other things coming together. And so that was our goal as producers,' Fey said. 'Could we put together this ensemble that people go, 'Wait, I like these people from other things and now they're all together. There's something kind of fun about that.'
Assembling the right team behind the camera was just as crucial. 'We want this to be a beautiful show,' Co-creator and writer Wigfield told IndieWire. 'We want the visual language of the show to be prettier, slower, cozy, [to] welcome you in. But these kinds of words are nonsense coming out of my mouth if we don't hire the right people to interpret them and make real decisions based on them.'
Chief among the interpreters were cinematographer Tim Orr and production designer Sharon Lomofsky, who tried to craft each season to be very classy and elegant while also hinting at the mess each of the characters would very much like to leave behind on vacation. 'We all wanted to make it feel timeless to where the cinematography was naturalistic and grounded but still had a richness and texture that was built through the lighting and where we placed the camera and how we moved it,' Orr told IndieWire.
Orr avoided handheld coverage, which might be more ungainly, and an over-reliance on the tight shot-reverse shots sitcoms often employ to make sure that each improv riff gets captured. Dolly work and wide shots, to capture a sense of environment and of the characters' relationship to each other, and to themselves, did more storytelling work. 'And that's a thing I really appreciated about this show, is that there was a fearless attitude towards it [being OK] to play it in that wide shot,' Orr said.
Likewise, Lomofsky wanted the homes and vacations we see in the show to look quite classy but to always give the audience some information about the characters they wouldn't necessarily say themselves. 'It's a dance and a symphony, picking the right [color] palettes for each bedroom but making it all feel like one house,' Lomofsky told IndieWire.
From an exploding pottery shed to eco-yurts on a beach resort that Lomofsky and her team constructed truly out of nothing but a mud field, the production designer had a lot of logistics to manage in her builds. But some of the groundedness that supports the comedy comes out of building in a sense of history into the vacation houses that we see, down to the smallest details.
'It was all composing different eras, in a way, because we are staying in this [vacation] house for a really long time and bringing in collections over time and family photographs, which take a lot to actually do. We had to do photo shoots to do the family photos on the wall,' Lomofsky said. 'What I'm always going for is that it looks effortless — but it's really not effortless at all.'
'The Four Seasons' is streaming on Netflix.
IndieWire partnered with Universal Studio Group for USG University, a series of virtual panels celebrating the best in television art from the 2024-2025 TV season across NBC Universal's portfolio of shows. USG University (a Universal Studio Group program) is presented in partnership with Roybal Film & TV Magnet and IndieWire's Future of Filmmaking. Catch up on the latest USG University videos here.
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