Adults (2025)

The premise

Five friends in their twenties crash together in Samir's childhood home in Queens, New York, while his parents are away — sharing meals, anxieties, and occasionally toothbrushes. Samir (Malik Elassal), Billie (Lucy Freyer), Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), Issa (Amita Rao), and Anton (Owen Thiele) are leaning on each other to navigate love, work, friendship, and family, held together by the show's defining thesis: they're trying to be good people despite being neither "good" nor "people" yet. That framing — unfinished people, not lovable messes — is the smartest thing about the show, because it turns every bad decision into a thesis statement about a generation raised on the internet and dropped into an economy that doesn't want them.

Adults is the first series created by Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, a real-life couple who wrote more than 400 episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon between 2019 and 2021 before walking away to build something of their own. The late-night DNA shows: the joke density is high, the bits are engineered, and the show has a monologue writer's instinct for a tag. But it also shows in the show's warmest moments — Kronengold and Shaw write like people who genuinely like their characters, a rarity in a genre that often treats twenty-somethings as punchlines. Executive producer Nick Kroll shepherded the project through his Good at Bizness banner alongside a murderer's row of comedy veterans: Sarah Naftalis (What We Do in the Shadows), Jonathan Krisel (Baskets, English Teacher, who directed the pilot), Alicia Van Couvering, Stefani Robinson, and Rob Rosell (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, DAVE). FX Productions is the studio, and the show premiered on FX on May 28, 2025, with the full first season landing on Hulu the next day.

The cast

The ensemble is the engine, and it's an ensemble of relative newcomers carrying a flagship FX comedy — which is exactly why it works. Malik Elassal's Samir is the closest thing to a center of gravity: the homeowner by accident of parentage, generous and chaotic in equal measure. Lucy Freyer's Billie is the show's most quotable presence, the friend who weaponizes honesty. Jack Innanen's Paul Baker is the group's softest nerve — earnest, anxious, and the subject of the season-one cliffhanger with Anton that sent fan cams flooding social media and arguably willed the renewal into existence. Amita Rao's Issa brings the show's sharpest comic timing, and Owen Thiele's Anton — an Out100 honoree — rounds out the five with a performance that made him the breakout, all off-kilter sincerity and physical comedy that never quite lands where you expect it.

Around them, the show has become a stealth magnet for guest stars: Charlie Cox, Julia Fox, Susie Essman, Raven-Symoné, Gaten Matarazzo, Jake Shane, Isaac Powell, Ben Marshall, and Zosia Mamet have all dropped through. That's not a coincidence — comedy actors can smell a good room, and the Adults room clearly is one.

Seasons one and two

Season one was a slow burn commercially and a respectable one critically: 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, solid Hulu numbers, and a fanbase that built itself episode by episode. The renewal didn't come fast — it arrived October 30, 2025, after months of the cast and fans essentially campaigning for it in public. Then FX got clever with the rollout: a standalone prequel episode, "Marathon Day," dropped July 31, 2026, a month before season two, and it worked like a flare — season-one streaming viewership jumped 50% off that single episode, pulling lapsed viewers back right before the new season needed them.

Season two premiered August 27, 2026, on FX and FXX, with the full season on Hulu the next day, and it detonated. Viewership was up 40% over season one across Hulu and Disney+ globally after twelve days, with international viewership up 100% — the growth came substantially from outside the U.S., which is how you know a hangout comedy has crossed from a show into a thing. And the critical turn was even sharper: season two sits at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. Variety's Alison Herman, who was lukewarm on season one, wrote that she "frankly did not enjoy the show's first batch of episodes," but that season two "finally has its own momentum, largely generated by a cast whose rapport obviates the need for any sweeping statements about their generation." The New York Times called the show "Friends for a new generation" — a comparison the show has now arguably earned rather than merely invited.

Why it matters

Every generation gets exactly one definitive hangout comedy, and the slot has been open for a decade. Friends defined the nineties for people with landlines; How I Met Your Mother and New Girl split the 2000s and 2010s; the current generation — raised on group chats, gig work, and rent that eats half a paycheck — has been waiting for its version. The candidates keep arriving: Hulu pointedly cancelled the similarly pitched Not Suitable For Work after one season, and by Deadline's reporting, Adults simply performed better while costing considerably less to make. That's the unglamorous math underneath the cultural conversation, and it's why a third season feels less like a question of if than when.

What separates Adults from the pile is specificity. The great hangout comedies aren't about "twenty-somethings" — they're about these twenty-somethings, in this apartment, with this particular damage. Season two found that texture: the Queens of it all, the rent as a villain, the group chat as a character, the particular millennial-adjacent/Gen Z cusp anxiety of people who did everything right and got nothing they were promised. The show that nails the current version of New York owns the next decade of comedy. Adults isn't auditioning anymore — it's hired.

The verdict