Adults review – Friends for the TikTok generation sitcom is a try-hard misfire

A group of twentysomethings living in New York (except it’s Toronto) pratfall through life in an often embarrassing and rarely funny attempt to fill a gapAdults, FX’s new twenty-something comedy implicitly pitched as the Friends or Girls for the TikTok and location-sharing generation, opens with a studiously replicated scene of codependent young adulthood: five friends tangled together on a New York subway, their belongings and in-group references strewn between each other. In barely a minute, the characters gab in the way you’d imagine adult-adults imagine young-adults speak, breezing through exposition, getting high, being broke and not having enough hot water to shower. This being New York, there’s also a subway masturbator, which Issa (Amita Rao), the loudest and bawdiest of a loud and bawdy group, handles by over-engaging, attempting to out-masturbate the creep. “Is this the world you want?!” she shouts, to the horror of everyone else on the train.To my horror, as well – there’s a fine line between cringe comedy and just cringe, and Adults, created by ex-Tonight Show writers Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw and executive produced by coming-of-age comedian extraordinaire Nick Kroll, is often on the wrong side of it. The barnstormer of an entrance – cue a joke about the progress of feminism – succeeds in setting the tone for the rest of the series (or at least, the six of eight episodes made available to critics): aggressively profane, a little off-putting, onto something but overdone, altogether doing too much. The television equivalent of the friend champing at the bit for inside jokes – Overcompensating, one could say, to borrow the title of another recent twenty-something comedy, albeit one set at US college, that has a better handle on its tone of heightened hijinks and egocentrism during a formative time. Continue reading...

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