Every generation has their own culturally defining sitcoms about tight-knit friend groups trying to balance their personal and professional lives in New York. Gen X had Friends, Living Single, and Sex and the City. Millennials had Girls, Broad City, and How I Met Your Mother. And now, with the return of Adults—alongside the recent debut of Not Suitable for Work—Gen Z finally has their own take on the classic hangout comedy set in the Big Apple.
Created by the husband-and-wife team of Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, who previously wrote on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Adults follows a ragtag group of early 20-somethings—Samir (Malik Elassal), Billie (Lucy Freyer), Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), Issa (Amita Rao), and Anton (Owen Thiele)—living together in Samir’s childhood home in Queens. When Adults debuted a year ago, viewers quickly embraced its heightened portrayal of Gen Zers who will bend over backwards just to avoid a difficult face-to-face conversation.
Whereas the first season was about what it means to start to grow up, the second eight-episode installment is about “what it means to grow up with four other people strapped to your back,” Kronengold tells Teen Vogue in this exclusive first look at Adults season 2, which will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 11 before launching on FX and Hulu in August.
Shaw reassures that the friend group in Adults is strong enough to survive any shockwave, but the new season will ask different questions of its main characters: “How do you bicker and get through problems without losing track of why you love each other? When relationships change, how do you still continue to love each other as people?”
The Love Triangle
Long before cameras began rolling on the first season, co-showrunners Shaw and Kronengold always knew that they wanted to set up a messy love triangle between Issa, her new sexually fluid boyfriend Paul Baker (who is a “firsty-lasty,” meaning that he always goes by both names), and her gay best friend Anton.
After Issa convinces Samir to let Paul Baker move into their cramped house, Anton finds himself unexpectedly drawn to his newest roommate. Anton and Paul Baker grow closer in the penultimate episode of season 1, in which an overextended Issa tasks them with babysitting an out-of-state teenager who comes to New York to get an abortion. (Who could forget Anton’s “He is fluid!” outburst?)
Although Anton shares a close connection with everyone in the house, Thiele believes his character is his most authentic self around Paul Baker. “Anton is a talker and can explain his way out of things and into things, but he doesn’t need to say anything to Paul Baker,” Thiele says. That dynamic goes both ways. Through hanging out with Anton, Innanen notes, Paul Baker is “learning that he can be himself.”
In the finale, when Canadian-born Paul Baker learns that his visa is about to expire, the friends scramble to find a way to keep him in the country legally. Issa initially agrees to marry him, but after she gets cold feet, Anton steps up as the groom instead. Later that night, while celebrating the nuptials in their living room, Issa points out that Anton and Paul Baker have yet to actually kiss, essentially peer-pressuring them into locking lips. But the newlyweds’ kiss turns out to be much longer—and steamier—than anyone expected.
Part of the fun of this romantic entanglement is that Issa is now responsible for unwittingly setting up her lover with her best friend. “This is something that she asked for,” Shaw remarks of that cliff-hanging kiss. “[But] this is really a problem that, when you trace it back, comes from everyone. One big theme of this season is group problems—problems the group makes and has to solve together.”
Adults fans can rest assured that, despite the two-month time jump between seasons, they have not missed any major fallout. In fact, the roommates have effectively swept any discussion of that kiss under the rug. Viewers should not expect an immediate resolution in the premiere either. “We want to do justice to how Issa and Paul Baker are feeling, in addition to how Paul Baker and Anton are feeling,” Shaw says. “And frankly, equally as important as those two [relationships] is Anton and Issa. It’s a true triangle, in that these are two best friends who love each other and really don’t want to hurt each other.”
“There’s tension, but I also think that we find a way to put it aside in a really beautiful way—and they’re like siblings,” Thiele adds of Anton and Issa’s dynamic. “We filmed a scene where we are screaming at the top of our lungs at each other, and then two minutes later, I’m like, ‘Love you, girl.’ The showrunners have done such a great job at keeping all of the relationships intact, even if there are bumps along the way.”
Naturally, the quintet are each dealing with that uncomfortable silence differently. Shaw remarks that Anton, whose maturity means that he has always struggled with the battle between his head and his heart, is “figuring out what it looks like for him to admit what he really wants.” Issa, meanwhile, has been ruminating over that kiss. “She’s the third wheel in some ways now,” Kronengold adds, “so how does she get territorial and scrappy and fight for her relationship, but also try to protect her heart?”
By contrast, Paul Baker is “still realizing how much Anton really means to him and what the relationship with Issa means or doesn’t mean,” Innanen says. It isn’t until mid-season that the character’s true feelings start creeping to the surface. And even though they have clearly noticed the sense of uneasiness within the house, Billie and Samir are both reluctant to discuss the source of that discomfort as a group. “Things go unsaid for so long, but that tension causes the pairs in the group to migrate a little bit in a way that’s funny,” Rao teases. “It’s like a little animal herd.”
While his green card marriage with Paul Baker is still very much intact this season, Anton will have a new love interest, which “takes him off guard,” Thiele reveals. “Feelings don’t go away, but friendship, in my mind, takes precedence. Anton never wants to hurt anyone, but he does have this void in his life. The one person he feels like he could fill this void with is Paul Baker, so [dating] is so confusing and so scary for him.”
Regardless of how those storylines play out, the cast recognizes the need for such representation at a time when escalating attacks on LGBTQ rights have coincided with a noticeable drop in queer representation on television. “I’m so lucky that I get to play a queer character in probably the scariest time that I’ve ever lived through,” says Thiele, who is openly gay.
“Ben and Rebecca have done a brilliant job at not making it moralistic or making [Anton] feel like a talking point or a stereotype. They’ve just folded this queer character into the lives of this group,” Thiele continues. “I’m really lucky that this show and Heated Rivalry, honestly, are doing it in such a smart way that doesn’t feel like a slap on the wrist or like we’re looking at someone saying, ‘This is what TV should be.’ This is just what life is. TV should imitate that.”
And speaking of Heated Rivalry, Innanen is well-aware that he has been fan-cast for the show’s highly anticipated second season, with showrunner Jacob Tierney even following him back on Instagram in January. Have they discussed working together yet? “Maybe there’s been a conversation,” Innanen grins. “Who knows?”
Mi casa es tu casa
Walking through the downtown Toronto sound stage that houses both floors of Samir’s childhood home, one can’t help but notice the rest of the roommates’ handprints all over the residence. The friends have pasted cutouts of their own faces on top of the ones in Samir’s framed family photos, and they have added their own heights to the kitchen wall where Samir and his sisters marked their own growth as kids. Issa wants to repaint the living room walls, but her progress is currently limited to three different colored swatches on a single wall. In the shared bedrooms, clothes are scattered across various kinds of furniture—pretty much everywhere except inside a laundry basket.
“At every turn, we wanted to feel the almost archeological levels of this house, making this a place [where] you really feel the era Samir grew up in. You feel the old video cassettes, the old DVDs, and the Furby that’s in the den somewhere—all of these things that feel very reminiscent of a specific era,” Shaw says, crediting the detailed work of production designer John Dondertman. “But on top of it, [there’s] a level of sediment that is bongs, weird discarded alcohol bottles, sunglasses, pimple patches—things that feel very true to a group of 20-somethings living in a house.”
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The single piece of furniture that the creators labored over the most was the living room couch, which Shaw says needed to be “nice to look at” and also “feel like something your mom would have bought.” Ultimately, the team wanted to create a space where the audience, like the characters, would never want to leave. “The structure of most episodes is like, ‘They have to go out into the outside world, because something’s f*cked up,’” Kronengold adds. “But then they always get to come back here, and the feeling of so much of your 20s, hopefully, is leaning back on your community at the end.”
The Kids Are Leaving the Nest
In building out the world of Adults, Shaw says the writers wanted to move past the first season’s heavy exposition to get “a fuller picture” of each character individually. They asked themselves, “What’s the surprising part? What’s the thing that you wouldn’t expect at face value about these people?’”
For instance, the season premiere leans fully into Innanen’s “bro-y,” “fratty” online persona, with the writers introducing a secret group of straight male friends for his character. “Paul Baker—who’s so gentle, somewhat passive within the friend group—has this other group of bros where he is able to let out the grosser, stupider sides of his personality,” Shaw explains. “The group’s going to discover that in a really shocking way, and [his] two worlds are going to collide.”
Of all the roomies, Samir may have the most stable romantic relationship, having dated Carly (Rachel Marsh) for a few months now. Elassal reveals that season 2 picks up at the tail end of the couple’s “honeymoon phase,” when Samir—who has grown comfortable with the idea of “playing house”—starts worrying about how to navigate being in a “real relationship.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Billie—who previously embarked on an ill-fated relationship with her former teacher (played by a surprisingly very funny Charlie Cox)—will have many dalliances this season. “She’s loosening the reins a little bit and embracing the messier side of herself before she has to really buckle down and figure her adulthood out,” Freyer says.
Anton will have more of a work life this season, but “makes pretty much the biggest work f*ck-up you could possibly imagine,” Kronengold says. “We’re going to watch this person who is the most composed, at least in our friend group, have to wrestle his way back into the good graces of his office.” Thiele, for his part, particularly relished playing out a more “emotional side” of Anton: “It’s really fun to play someone who’s crashing out in every single episode. I’m constantly screaming.”
Viewers will also get to see a more insecure side of Issa this season. “When Paul Baker and Anton kiss, and she senses a little bit of Paul Baker choosing someone else, there’s a little bit of this seed of, ‘Maybe I’m not as special as I think I am,’” Rao remarks. Though initially surprised by her character’s vulnerability, Rao notes that it’s unrealistic for anyone—especially someone as headstrong as Issa—to have never experienced self-doubt. “I really liked the addition of that, because I was like, ‘Oh, not only has Issa been insecure in the past, but she has been so insecure and socially ostracized and still loved herself more than anyone,’ which is a really awesome character trait.”
Although there is a clear boundary between fiction and reality, the cast members all recognize shades of their younger selves in their characters. That shared familiarity has fostered a rapid bond off-screen, mirroring the dynamic of the show itself. The main cast lived in the same apartment building again while filming season 2, braving the most recent Canadian winter together. “I’m opposite Malik. Jack’s next to Malik. Owen is above Jack, and then Amita is next to Owen,” Freyer recounts of their living arrangements. “So Owen will be in his room and working out, and Jack will text him and be like, ‘Are you jumping? What’s happening?!’”
“The one thing that is very true of the cast—that is also true of the characters—is that they are really friends with each other,” Shaw adds. “If you sit down and have lunch with the five of them, it does feel like watching an episode of the show in the ways that they genuinely tease and support each other and pick each other up in those more vulnerable moments.”
Over time, the writers have been able to incorporate parts of the actors into their onscreen alter egos. For example, when Shaw and Kronengold got married between seasons, Rao sang “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables at their afterparty. Issa will sing the same song this season. “The way I sing is more theater kid, and the way Issa sings—or thinks she sings—is part Britney Spears, part Fergie,” Rao says with a laugh. “Issa thinks she’s supposed to be a pop star.”
But while the characters’ misadventures drive the comedy, Adults has always found its emotional anchor in the universal challenges of early adulthood. In season 2, Billie tracks down the girl who inherited her fake ID, prompting the rest of her roommates to follow suit. “We’re going into our past to see what the people who have our fake IDs now are up to,” Elassal teases. “We go into what we were doing at that time, and there’s some lore that gets dropped.” In the process, the friends come to the jarring, yet inevitable, realization that they are no longer young adults—they are simply adults now.
“We really want the punchline to be about these five people who are earnestly doing their best, and often falling really short of what their best should be,” Shaw says of the show’s R-rated approach to comedy, which ramps up in season 2. “While we find them in edgy situations, our best-case scenario is you’re always laughing at the characters, but also looking at them with a lot of empathy saying, ‘Oh, I remember when I was dumb like that,’ or ‘I can see how they got there, even though they shouldn’t have.’”
Expanding the World of Adults
For a show helmed by two first-time creators and led by a younger cast of relative newcomers, the freshman season featured a surprisingly high-caliber roster of guest stars, including Cox, Julia Fox, and D’Arcy Carden. The sophomore season will carry on in the same tradition, bringing in Raven-Symoné to play Anton’s older sister. Shaw was also personally thrilled to cast Susie Essman—the Curb Your Enthusiasm star whom she describes as not only an “unbelievably brilliant comedic performer,” but also someone who “feels so New York”—as the mother of a girl that Billie went to school with.
Gaten Matarazzo of Stranger Things will play the kid to whom Samir passed down his fake ID. “Talk about a role you’ve never seen someone in—he’s really going to blow people’s minds,” Kronengold says. Teen Vogue can also exclusively reveal that Zosia Mamet, Ben Marshall, Jake Shane, and Isaac Powell will all guest star in the second season—and at least one of them will be a love interest. “We want to see people play romantic interests in ways that would surprise you,” Shaw adds.
The writers ultimately want Adults to become a playground “where some of your favorite actors, comedians, internet symbols can come in and blow your mind with how funny and talented they are,” Kronengold says. Some actors will be playing into type; others will actively play against it. “As we get to build out the world of the show, populating it with the people that we and the cast just have enormous admiration for, and to get to invite them to play, has been a real privilege.”
Since wrapping production earlier this spring, Shaw and Kronengold are already mulling over ideas for a potential third season. While they do not have a specific number of seasons in mind, the partners agree that they want to keep making Adults “until Samir figures out what ‘microwave safe’ means.” (Translation: They don’t want to wrap up this show anytime soon.)
“What is such a privilege about this kind of show is that there’s so many stories to tell within it,” Shaw says, noting that the cast and creative team have received feedback about Adults resonating across generations. “Like all of our favorite friend group comedies, it’s always two steps forward, one step back, but watching them navigate things that start to feel a little more grown up is such a special part of the show. We want to watch these characters very slowly evolve, and we get to tell new stories as they start to grow up a teeny bit.”
