Being born in 1996 has meant that I’ve always existed on a generational divide: I’m too old to be Gen Z and just on the cutoff as a Millennial. A Zillennial, if you will. Despite growing up with a brother and cousins 25 years older than me and with a “late birthday” in school, I hadn’t felt the confusing generational gap of my age until I watched FX’s extremely Gen-Z-coded sitcom, Adults.
If you’re aware of Seinfeld, Friends, or the Black sleeper hit Living Single, Adults follows their formula, but for a younger generation. Created by Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw under the original show title, Snowflakes, Adults centers on five mid-twenties-somethings going on misadventures across the city while living rent-free in their friend’s parents’ Brooklyn apartment. The quintet is comprised of Samir, a mild mannered worrywart tiptoeing through life as a cishet man; Billie, a reformed workaholic (read: laid off) news reporter hopping from one fling to the next to make up for lost time; Paul Baker, a himbo of a sexually fluid man who miraculously rocks a mustache without looking creepy; Issa, who is basically Charlie from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Ilana from Broad City doing a fusion dance; and Anton, the gay solar entity the entire friend group rotates around for better and for ill.
While there’s been plenty of hilarious sitcoms like Abbot Elementary and What We Do In The Shadows, nothing beats a roommate-style sitcom with a cast whose members are the same age as you and, by proxy, go through similar albeit hilariously awkward mishaps. Watching Adults felt like splitting my consciousness across five characters struggling to navigate being “good people” without grasping what it means to be an adult, at an age when the recklessness of their youth is long past its social expiration date. I’ve seen them tussle with the ethical implications of leveraging sexual misconduct headlines as a Hail Mary career move, saying “cunt” in the workplace, and a meticulously plotted group acid trip gone wrong. Adults is one of those shows that makes viewers feel like the meme of the guy laughing next to a poster of friends eating ice cream like they’re the sixth member of the friend group.
There’s nothing worse feeling in the world to me than needing to have a joke explained to me. That feeling is the same as someone telling me “You’re funny” instead of laughing after I tell a joke. That’s ego death. For the most part, Adults’ anxiety over the awkward stage of being too young and too old in mixed company hits me like a truck in the best way a sitcom can. But sometimes, instead of laughing as I ragdoll over the hood of a comedic bit from Adults, I go under its wheels and utter the youth-killing phrase, “I don’t get it.”
No two moments have made me feel my pushing 30 age watching Adults more than its season one episode, Roast Chicken. Up until this point, I’ve felt right at home with Adults, never having to flee to KnowKnowMeme or Urban Dictionary like I have to with my coworkers to explain why lingo like “soak” and “I’m sliding twin” mean what they mean so I can laugh at a joke. But the moment the show introduced Julia Fox, the first of its many celebrity guests, I really felt my age.
Special guest cameos and appearances are a staple of sitcoms. On paper, they’re supposed to work by having a generation of viewers the same age as the cast equally pog out alongside studio audiences' laugh tracks, glazing the show for having the motion to pull a special guest of Hollywood caliber. Guest appearances can also make or break an audience's connection to a show. As a kid, The Sopranos’ James Gandolfini appearing on Sesame Street still hit me, even though I hadn't watched the show, because I knew it and found it weird that the mean Italian gangster guy was cuddling with muppets. By that same token, as a teen, I rolled my eyes at Parks and Rec and Broad City for having Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton, respectively, because the whole thing was very corny and dated the show’s otherwise great comedy.
As a Zillennial, I grew up watching sitcoms from my mom’s Gen-X generation while also being too old for shows my friends grew up watching, like Adventure Time. While I might not really understand why shows like In Living Color or Regular Show hit, I can still comprehend and appreciate why they were popular thanks to falling in between the fault lines of their audience’s age bracket. However, I’ve never encountered a show whose comedy feels like it passed me by. Adults was a rude awakening.
While Adults doesn’t date itself by having canned laugh tracks to tell audiences when they’re supposed to laugh, it's pretty evident how proud it is to have Fox as a semi-regular. Fox cameos as herself as a friend of Paul Baker who goes way, way back. That fact gags his friends, making them a little insecure over her star power in equal measure to having them fawn over her fawn over. But to me, as Adult’s sixth cast member, her appearance left me slightly confused. Not because I didn’t know who Fox was. I was confused why my five friends were gassing her up like she was Lady Gaga waacking into our Brooklyn apartment.
No disrespect to that lady, but the furthest extent of my knowledge of Julia Fox was that she starred in Uncut Gems alongside Adam Sandler, and that she dated Kanye West before he went full Third Reich. To the show’s token, it treated those two facts as jokes, but beyond that, they talked her up as a generational aspiration—something I just didn’t understand, despite being five years older than them. The moment I caught myself thinking, “It’d make sense if it were Lady Gaga,” was when—for the first time in my life—I felt old.
Like pulling a loose thread from a sweater, more revelations unfurled the longer I watched the show; I kept noticing little intricacies that made me feel old. Chief among them were my own fears that AI was a non-issue for the cast in press runs, where being told they looked like AI was taken as a complimentary beauty signifier. In the show itself, the relatable phenomenon of feeling too old to party with the kiddos was age-bracketed, with 25 treated as ancient by Gen Alpha because they “witnessed 9/11” despite being kids themselves, only succeeded in making me feel even more ancient because I’m knocking on 30’s door. Less severe, but no less “Oh god, am I old?” was seeing the cast exclusively messaging each other via Instagram group chats. Meanwhile, my own verging-on-dormant group chat is on older, and far less hip, Facebook Messenger. As evidenced from my failed attempt to move us to Discord during the pandemic, we’re there to stay.
Getting older is something I’ve only ever witnessed folks older than me come to grips with. When Gen-Xers malded over musicians like Billie Eilish admitting she didn’t know who Van Halen was, I remained calm. After all, the band is from the 80s, and she was 17. Plus, who the fuck is watching Jimmy Kimmel regularly enough to even catch wind of a teen who dresses herself like Murphy Lee and be outraged at such an innocuous fact? That’s certified old-head behavior.
However, the adults making a Mrs. Doubtfire reference, with the punchline being that they only knew about Robin Williams lying in the movie via cultural osmosis despite never actually having seen the movie, is where I felt like Matt Damon rapidly aging in Saving Private Ryan. I feel even more ancient typing this out, realizing in real-time that the adults of Adults probably haven't seen that movie either, but know the reference as the shorthand prompt for reaction GIFs.
God.
Issa, Samir, Billie, Anton, Paul Baker, we are no longer peers. I am a fossil. You’ve dated me.
