Long before the term heteropessimism was coined, Tina Fey made the sentiment a staple of her comedy on “30 Rock.” Her quasi-autobiographical heroine, Liz Lemon, was the chronically single head writer of a “Saturday Night Live”-like sketch show, and a woman who rarely minded being overworked and undersexed. Liz’s disastrous dates—and the ways men disappoint in general—proved an inexhaustible well to draw from, so much so that later seasons revolved around the possibility that she might settle down with a boyfriend she found intolerable just to avoid meeting any more new people. Liz eventually parlayed this well-earned misandry into a book (and an aborted TV pilot) called “Dealbreakers,” which was predicated on the assumption that pretty much all of its female readers should immediately dump their male partners. Even as a little girl, she rarely fantasized about a traditional happy ending: one flashback shows her play-acting her wedding, introducing a stuffed animal as her husband, Saul Rosenbear, who’s accompanied by “his son, Richard, from a previous marriage.”
“30 Rock” premièred in 2006, just as big-budget romantic comedies starring the likes of Kate Hudson and Katherine Heigl were on their last gasps. Over the course of the series’ seven-season run, women’s humor, especially on the internet, followed in Fey’s cynical footsteps. The twenty-tens gave rise to mugs labelled “male tears” and Reductress headlines like “How to Break Your Promotion to Your Man Without Emasculating Him.” The heteropessimist cloud that Fey helped usher in has become the prevailing climate. In some circles, having a boyfriend has gone from a status symbol to a source of embarrassment. The widening political divide between young women and men has made the search for love an even more fraught endeavor. There are now more unattached women in the country than married ones. Given the choice between a lacklustre man and no man at all, straight women are leaning toward the latter—a fate even the romance-resistant Liz Lemon saw as tantamount to giving up. Television has taken the hint, with the small screen increasingly populated by dysfunctional unions (“DTF St. Louis,” the second season of “Beef”) and husbands who are scornful, menacing, or both (“All Her Fault,” “Imperfect Women”).
Kate and Jack’s relationship is the most interesting aspect of “The Four Seasons,” not least because it feels like a continuation of Liz and Criss’s romance. Both Liz and Kate are women who don’t want matrimony to be the be-all and end-all of their lives—and who therefore tend to sideline or overlook their partners. But if it’s a letdown that Fey doesn’t give us more Liz Lemon-y sourness, “The Four Seasons” ’s depiction of a beta husband who’d put up with (or delight in) such a cranky companion is an unexpected pleasure. Jack emerges as both a truly original character and, one suspects, a new archetype: a sincere, somewhat ineffectual softie whose sensitivity isn’t a product of emasculation but of a sense of justice, and more than a hint of moralism. (After Nick takes up with a much younger woman post-divorce, Jack declares, “I’m better than Nick. I’m a good guy”—the kind of casual judgment that makes him and Kate perfect grousing partners.) As the vicissitudes of middle age pile up, Kate, an inveterate hater, realizes that her role in their marriage is to pull herself out of her jadedness and preserve her husband’s boyish decency. It helps that Forte, who’s so often cast as a goon, a slimeball, or a freak, excels here as a Jack Lemmon-esque straight man, revealing layers of barely repressed neuroticism beneath the surface.
Kate frequently resents that she has to be her husband’s keeper. More than once, she’s accused of preferring Danny’s company to Jack’s, and you can hardly blame her; she feels young around her best friend, whom she met when she was nineteen, and like the adult in the room around her husband. (During a fight in the first season, as the spectre of separation hangs over the group, Kate snidely tells Jack, “I could never leave you. Your life would fall apart.”) But the new season, which benefits tremendously from having shaken off the source material, reframes such caretaking as a literal labor of love. Kate and Jack, whose empty nest she describes as an “Edgar Allan Poe immersive experience” in the months following their friend’s passing, experiment with leading more independent lives. (Jack agrees to stop insisting, for instance, that they train for a marathon together as a couple.) But the emotional distance between them grows alarmingly large—a gap that Jack becomes desperate to close. In one of the show’s most moving scenes, Kate helps him complete a race while he elicits all the anxieties she’d kept from him, including her terror of mortality being mingled with the thought that “the big sleep” sounds kind of “nice.” The push out of their respective comfort zones is sweaty, arduous, and, the series suggests, exactly the kind of exertion that sustains a relationship. At the end of the run, Kate and Jack discover that they share the same fear of growing older and it’s creepier if they don’t continue to tend to each other. Marriage is work—but for Fey, who’s made a career of writing and playing workaholics, that’s precisely where the romance lies. ♦
