After years in “Reno 911,” Kerri Kenney-Silver wondered if she’d ever be in a more conventional comedy.
“I spent 34 years of my career doing a very different comedy and I always wanted to have a chance to do something like this,” she says of “The Four Seasons,” a new Netflix comedy. “But nobody would really see me that way. Just getting the audition, I felt like I had won something.”
Now, as one of the friends who vacation together at various times of the year, she’s getting the comedy opportunity of a lifetime. “I still can’t believe it’s real,” she says.
In the series, based on the 1981 Alan Alda movie, Kenney-Silver plays wife to Steve Carell. They’ve invited friends to their lake home for a vacation and, in the process, discover their 25-year marriage is falling apart. The friends — played by Tina Fey, Will Forte, Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani — try to help them through the rough patch.
In the next season (the series is told in four trips over four seasons), the couple has split, and the husband has moved on to a much-younger woman.
Can the friendships last? That’s the question producers tackle, albeit 40-plus years after the first film was made.
Back to the source
Fey, who’s also executive producer of the series, says she relied on Alda’s original script for structure, then infused it with contemporary references and moments from the series writers’ lives.
“Everyone was really generous about sharing their real experiences and their real feelings about all their own relationships,” Fey says. “Hopefully, that added up to stories that felt very truthful.”
Domingo, who also directs an episode, says there were moments that rang true from his own life. Danny, his character, insists he needs five-star accommodations. “And I’m like, ‘Tina, did you read my journal?’” Domingo says. “A yurt would turn me completely off, so I didn’t have to act much.”
When the gang is roughing it on an island, he slips away to a nearby resort and revels in the luxury.
When they shot the scenes at the resort, Domingo urged others to “feel the towels; feel the towels,” Fey recalls.
“It was as if we’d never known nice things before,” Domingo says. “We were touching and feeling everything.”
Life lessons
Kenney-Silver found truth in so many situations, “I was like, ‘Have they been watching me in my real life?’”
In addition to giving her those based-in-life comedy scenes, “Four Seasons” offered Kenney-Silver a chance to dabble in drama.
“At its core, I authentically delivered it, and it was devastating,” Kenney-Silver says. “And Tina came up and said, ‘You know this is accurate … this is probably what this character would be feeling at this moment, but the tone actually can’t be this.’
“It was such a masterclass in understanding the levels and riding this wave of emotion because life is all things.”
Domingo says he upped his directing chops, particularly since he has done heavy dramas of late.
“I wanted to have a bit of sleight of hand and make it more like an independent film and focus on the performances,” he says.
Kenney-Silver remembers Carell’s character saying, “I don’t want to be married to a woman who has to take a few practice steps before she gets on an escalator.”
“I do that,” she says, “and I did text my son when he went away to college to say, ‘Oh, don’t forget, don’t ever step on an escalator in Crocs, ‘cause you could lose a foot.’”
“The Four Seasons” premieres May 1 on Netflix.
