Adults Season 2 Review: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Adults Season 2 sheds its need to constantly announce itself as a Gen Z comedy and instead lets its five leads and their genuine chemistry carry the show, resulting in a sharper, funnier, and more emotionally grounded season.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Platform: FX, Hulu, JioHotstar
Genre: Comedy
Episodes: 8
Cast: Malik Elassal, Lucy Freyer, Jack Innanen, Amita Rao, Owen Thiele
Growing up is usually supposed to mean becoming more responsible and slowly figuring out what you actually want from life. Nobody seems to have told that to the five friends at the center of Adults. Season 2 takes us right back to the Queens’ house where bad decisions spread faster than good advice, and somehow, that chaos feels sharper and funnier than ever.
The premise remains delightfully simple. Five twenty-something friends live together in Samir’s childhood home, stumbling through jobs, relationships, family drama, and whatever new disaster someone has accidentally dragged into the house that week.
Season 1 spent its time establishing these characters and the show’s heightened comic world. Season 2 benefits enormously from no longer needing to explain any of it.
We already know these people, and more importantly, they know each other, which lets creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw build jokes around the specific, messy dynamics between these friends rather than just whatever ridiculous situation happens to be unfolding around them.
What really elevates this season is how it lets each character exist a bit beyond the walls of the house. Issa continues turning nearly every conversation into an event, but this season also gives her real questions about relationships and her future that reveal something more vulnerable underneath all that confidence.
Anton, usually the effortlessly charming one, gets some of the season’s best material in moments where that confidence completely disappears, especially once his family enters the picture. Billie’s storyline about her old fake ID getting passed down to someone younger hides a quietly bittersweet realization that being young eventually stops feeling like a given.
Samir continues to be the emotional anchor of the group, while Paul Baker remains such a strange, specific comic presence that even the way everyone insists on calling him by his full name becomes part of the joke.
Then there is the unresolved emotional tangle between Paul Baker, Anton, and Issa, which the show smartly avoids treating like a standard sitcom love triangle. Because these characters clearly care so much about each other, every awkward glance carries more weight than most of the show’s louder comic disasters.
One episode in particular, titled Raccoon, captures exactly why this season works so well. The setup is gloriously simple: the friends take acid, and a raccoon shows up in the house, giving them roughly thirty minutes to solve one problem before the other one gets significantly worse.
That is genuinely all the show needs. It traps these characters together, gives them an immediate crisis, and just lets their personalities collide, blending physical comedy with real character work. Even better, the fallout from that chaotic night continues rippling through the rest of the season instead of being conveniently forgotten by the next episode.
The show also does a nice job pulling back the curtain on these characters’ lives outside the house this season, introducing family members and workplaces that add real texture. Raven Symone’s appearance as Anton’s older sister is a particular highlight, revealing a surprisingly different side of a character who usually seems completely unshakable.
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What is refreshing is how the show’s generational jokes land better this season simply because they stop trying so hard to be generational jokes.
The humor feels specific to these characters rather than built around broadly labeling them as Gen Z, which makes the show feel more durable and less like a passing trend piece.
There are still a few missteps, like a subplot about normalizing certain language in a corporate setting that runs out of steam fast, but overall, the writing has become noticeably more confident and less afraid to lean into its absurdist instincts.
The biggest complaint with Season 2 has nothing to do with what is actually on screen and everything to do with how quickly it ends. Eight half-hour episodes simply are not enough for a hangout comedy this strong, especially once you start wanting the weird, low-stakes episodes that let these characters simply exist together without a big plot driving things forward.
Adults Season 2 does not make its characters more mature, thankfully. What has matured is the show itself, and it is becoming a genuinely great hangout comedy in its own right. It just needs a lot more room to breathe.