Adults rocks: This share-house comedy is one for the age(s)

Adults ★★★★

At its most basic, Adults is a share-house comedy. But like the best of this admittedly niche genre, it uses that basic premise to say something much more sweeping about the time in which it emerges.

The Odd Couple had something to say about the divorce epidemic of the 1960s, and the sometimes comical efforts of grown men suddenly having to find their way in the world without women to prop them up.

We’ve all been there: The housemates of adults.Credit: Pari Dukovic/FX

The Young Ones captured the post-punk anger and early ’80s austerity that was the flipside of class mobility in Thatcher’s Britain. Friends had much to say about being young, single and aspirational in 1990s New York. And Girls was about the near-impossibility of making a go of life in Manhattan without the aid of a trust fund (though, really, it was about sex, drugs, career, gender, mental health, self-esteem … there was a lot of meat on them thar sitcom bones).

Which brings us to Adults, which has distinct echoes of the above – Girls and Friends, especially – but with a huge dollop of identity politics and cancel culture tossed into the mix. It doesn’t skewer its twenty-something characters, but it does poke fun at their foibles and performative posturing even as it empathises with them.

It throws down a marker in its first moments, as Issa (Amita Rao) responds to the affront of a creepy middle-aged guy masturbating on the subway by doing it right back at him. Her friends are appalled, but outwardly supportive. “She’s doing this for your daughters,” one of them yells to shocked onlookers. “I think.”

Later in the same episode, Samir (Malik Elassal) begins to fret he might be one of those men who doesn’t even realise he’s crossed a line in terms of unwanted sexual behaviour. So he starts checking in with exes, revelling in their reassurance he did nothing wrong, and then recoiling in horror as they remember that, actually, they were really too drunk that one time to consent, so on second thoughts maybe he is a predator after all…

Again, though, the friends are there for comfort.

“Samir, we talked about it,” says Anton (Owen Thiele) of Samir’s possible transgression. “We all spoke about it, and we do feel like it’s not cancellable.”

Not so cancellable, at any rate, that they feel the need to move out of his parents’ house, where they’re living rent-free.

And when Billie (Australian Lucy Freyer) frets about her lack of career progress, and confesses to being jealous of the attention an acquaintance is getting for being the alleged victim of sexual harassment at work, her friends advise her to take advantage of the window that has just opened.

“The week after a sex scandal or a race whoopsie, when everyone is terrified of the young people in the office,” Issa says, explaining The Window. “These people are in their 50s. Make them think you could cancel them on an app they don’t use.”

Not everything works in Adults, but much of it does. At its best – as in the sixth episode dinner date, where Billie tries to impress her much older (and former schoolteacher) lover by cooking a roast chicken – it is hilarious, unhinged, and has plenty to say, for the adults and their elders alike.

Adults streams from May 29 on Disney+.

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