A quick look at the credits of the first two episodes of “The Four Seasons” Season 2 show two familiar names taking a seat in the director’s chair. For season opener “Hiking,” series star Colman Domingo, who earned an Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series nomination for his performance as interior designer Danny on Season 1, to the helm in what he describes as quite a departure from his previous experience directing TV.
“Before I directed ‘Fear the Walking Dead,’ which is big special effects and stunts and all,” said the Emmy winner during a recent virtual USG University Panel moderated by IndieWire. With the Season 2 premiere serving as a welcome back to the audience, rejoining the friend group at the center of the comedy inspired by the 1981 Alan Alda film of the same name, Domingo’s challenge as a director was to set the tone. “I wanted to take us to a place of remembering all those warm feelings of why you want this group to stay together and then setting up that there’s going to be some conflict, some little things that become bigger things that will challenge the group,” he said.
The framing was meant to pull the group closer together. “That 360 turntable shot, it’s very indicative of ‘Roseanne’ or ‘Hannah and Her Sisters.’ It’s like watching people come together and eat together and enjoy each other, but there’s all these little side conversations happening across the table as well,” said Domingo.
Meanwhile, the second episode of Season 2, “Funky Motel,” marks “The Four Seasons” co-creator, co-showrunner, writer, and star Tina Fey’s directorial debut. When asked why this particular series was the one for the 10-time Emmy winner to finally take on that mantle, Fey said “I’ve always felt that as a writer first, I always wanted to make sure that if I was going to direct that it was additive in some way and it wasn’t just the writer policing that no one changed their lines.”
She continued, “But the nature of our show compared to other shows I’ve worked on is it really is so much about the actors and their relationships and the kind of rapport they have with each other, that kind of stuff of talking to the actors I’ve always really enjoyed and I was always intimidated by the camera part of it, but Tim helped me.”
The Tim she references is Tim Orr, who serves as the sole cinematographer for the series. Speaking to the experience of working opposite a rotation of directors, he shares that his primary role becomes “the keeper of the tone visually. And what we established in Season 1, trying to carry that over through the second season and keep it cohesive.”
Orr says “There’s new ideas from each director that kind of come into play into each episode and it’s navigating the right way to incorporate those and have it still feel like it’s the same show.” Words he uses to give an idea of what that looks like onscreen include “real,” “naturalistic,” and an “elegant simplicity.”
Often, that makes for a hilarious juxtaposition with the work of the show’s production designer Sharon Lomofsky, who brilliantly captures the absurdity of certain vacation destinations like a barbecue restaurant a stone’s throw from the remote Upstate New York hotel the characters are staying at. “I put all the animal heads facing everybody so that they were looking at them wherever the camera turned, the animal heads were looking at our table,” she said. “It was sort of like that fine line of, ‘Do we like this hotel? Is it a bad hotel? Is it a hipster hotel?’”
“It’s beautiful about what she does because every character has a different opinion about the hotel and so it’s depicted in her seating design too,” said Domingo.
But the glue that ultimately keeps the show together, and Netflix viewers tuning into the series produced by Universal Television, is the cast it continues to assemble. Casting director Sherry Thomas joked “It is not difficult to cast for a Tina Fey show. Everybody wants to come and be a part of it.” In terms of what made this cast of characters so interesting from the start, she said “When we assembled our core group, we really had a sense of the other elements to bring in because tonally you don’t want everybody to feel exactly the same. You want people to feel like their own person.” Teasing Season 2, Thomas said “you will recognize people from very significant roles on other things that are popping in for a day because they want to be a part of it and there’s no ego about it for them to come and be a part of the show.”
So what qualities make for the perfect person to join “The Four Seasons” cast? “Ultimately they feel like somebody we would hang with,” said Fey, citing actors Toby Huss and Steven Pasquale as two examples from Season 2. “And they’re usually people who are genuinely funny, truly funny.”
“The Four Seasons” is produced by Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group. It is now streaming exclusively on Netflix.
IndieWire partnered with Universal Studio Group for USG University, a series of panels celebrating the outstanding artistry and artisans behind the 2025–2026 television season across NBCUniversal’s portfolio of shows. USG University, a Universal Studio Group program, is presented in partnership with the Motion Picture & Television Fund.
