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SPOILER ALERT: The following story contains plot details from Season 2 of “Adults” now streaming on Hulu.
It’s Season 2, Paul Baker; we’re doing a classic sitcom.
In only eight episodes, the second season of FX’s “Adults”
has managed to capture the spirit of a classic sitcom that has felt somewhat elusive since the slow death of the 22-episode season.
The raunchy friend group comedy, created by Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, follows Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), Issa (Amita Rao), Anton (Owen Thiele), Billie (Lucy Freyer) and Samir (Malik Elassal). While Samir’s parents are away, the friends are bunking together and navigating their twentysomething lives in his childhood home in Queens, New York.
Following the premiere of the second season (but before the promise of a third), Innanen spoke with Variety about Paul Baker’s arc this season, the limits of delivering sitcom goodness within an eight-episode season and his hopes for a Season 3.
Other then a few network sitcoms, the 22-episode season has fallen out of fashion with the rise of streaming services. Now, fans are lucky to get 10 episodes in one season. “Adults,” with the addition of Paul Baker’s origin story prequel episode, now clocks in at an uneven 17 across two seasons. “If we had 22 episodes, we could do ‘stuck in the elevator’ episode,” Innanen says. “We could do the beach episode. We could do so many fun filler episodes. But it’s just born too late.”
But the show has the trappings of a classic sitcom, despite its shortened airtime.
This season kicks off with the camera winding its way through the Queens house as Issa delivers the meta line, “It’s Season 2, Paul Baker; we’re doing a oner.” The first season set a high bar for guest stars, with Julia Fox playing herself, but the sequel season ups the ante with Raven-Symoné entering as Anton’s sister Talia, to the tune of her own personal laugh track.
“I love that shit, and I’m so glad that they sprinkle it in here and there,” Innanen says. “I think of it like a fun wink, and it’s not overdone. It’s very aware that it’s a sitcom, and I feel like that makes it even more fun and even more — hate to use the term, but Gen Z in the way of appreciating that everyone has deep media literacy.”
Season 2 gives a look into previously undiscovered sides of the group, including Anton’s volatile relationship with his family. Innanen recalls someone saying this season explored the characters’ “inner opposites.”
“That Anton is so externally charming, that he’s a monster to these people, and he prides himself so much in work, but can’t admit that to himself or to others,” Innanen says. “I think that was everyone’s arc this season. What are their inner opposites and how do they contest that, and how does that manifest in the relationships in the house? Which I think served the Paul Baker-Anton arc very well.”
The Paul Baker-Anton arc, of course, was one of the most anticipated plotlines to resolve in Season 2. The first season ended with Anton marrying Paul Baker to keep the Canadian in the country, concluding a season’s worth of intense eye contact with a heated just-married kiss. This season picked up with the introduction of Paul Baker’s alter ego: “Baker,” whose fratty tendencies are at odds with the sexually fluid soft-boy Paul Baker his friends (and audiences) know and love.
“It weirdly paired a complex I have within myself where I was like there are different sides of me, maybe, that I’m ashamed of or that I don’t show around other people, and that was something to deal with,” Innanen says of playing into his character’s duality.
“Also, I will be honest, I was scared about it tainting viewers’ perception of Paul Baker, which I think played into it completely,” he adds. “There’s this shameful side of him, but I was scared people were gonna be like, “Oh, is he a total frat bro? Can he still be Paul Baker with this Baker side of him?” Which I think they thread very well in the show, but it was fun, therapeutic and nerve-wracking.”
Paul Baker’s friends are thrown off by the existence of another friend group that knows Baker, which results in a series of identity crises. For Innanen, these opposing identities playing together was necessary. There’s a moment he loves, where Paul Baker asks if he is a piece of shit because of his alter ego, and Anton says, “No, parts of you are shitty.”
“I think what everyone wants, I’ll speak for myself, is to open your chest up and be like, ‘This is who I am, completion. Yes or no? Do you still love me in spite or even because of these things?’” Innanen says. “I think Anton does that in that scene. I think that was a really good way to jumpstart, where here are the things that Paul Baker’s ashamed of, and this kind of ugly multitude to him, and for Anton to be the one who says, ‘It’s OK, you’re OK, we’re all like this, I love you still.’ We couldn’t have had that without the Baker story. I think that they actually served each other in a very beautiful way.”
Paul Baker and Anton get their happy resolution, in the end, with a balloon-covered real kiss in the Season 2 finale. With the two finding some stability, Innanen wants to see what a future season would bring.
“Malik had said something really beautiful, where he said that there’s a finite amount of love in the house, and it just transmutes different ways,” Innanen says. “I’m curious what that does for everyone else, with the Paul Baker-Anton relationship in a stable place, what does that mean for everyone else? We’ll have to see.”
Innanen is also hoping for a holiday special in Season 3. “We need the filler episodes,” he says. “I desperately want a Halloween episode. I got lunch with Ben and Rebecca, and they were telling me all the ideas for a Halloween episode.” One of his ideas is a group costume gone wrong. (Think The Beatles, but John Lennon is shot — or Billie insists on being Yoko Ono.)
And speaking of things you might find in a classic sitcom: “I need to know what our other bottle episode is because the bottle episodes — chicken dinner and raccoon — those are the most fun episodes to film,” Innanen says. “That’s the highlight of my year, every year, is the two weeks when we do the bottle episode.”
Even when they aren’t purposefully contained for a bottle episode, the characters spend a lot of time in the house (partially a constraint of the fact that while the show is based in New York City, the production is filmed in Toronto). But that means both Innanen and Paul Baker are intimately familiar with the house.
“It feels almost like my childhood home where I can tell you where everything is, because there’s been so much time in there,” Innanen says. “It feels like the house is that other character where we get to play around and it mutates and we find new fun things in each room. I love that house.”
STD tests. Baby photos of Malik because this is Samir’s childhood home, after all. Podcast equipment to hint at a fictional podcast hosted by Anton, Issa and Billie. The fridge in particular, Innanen says, is full of Easter eggs.
“One thing I saw people picked up on, which I thought was very sweet — because the set dec people fucking killed it, and props killed it too — they added Paul Baker to the chore chart this season, which I thought was really fun. That was one of the first things I came in and saw on the fridge,” he says. “I almost want people to be able to walk through and pick apart the fridge.”
And it’s not just the characters who have hidden Easter eggs. “I have cheese and salami and Sour Patch Kids and water bottles and my scripts, my sides, hidden all over the house,” Innanen says. “And I, dead serious, opened up a drawer this season, and there was the most disgusting bag of cheese and crackers I had left from the last season was hidden really well.”
“Boy’s gotta eat,” Innanen says with a laugh about snacking during the long day they spent shooting the possum scene this season. “We shot that scene for like 12, 14 hours, I think,” he says. “It’s a long time to be kissing your friends, but we shot that for a long time to get it as right as we could, because, at least for me, it felt like the most important scene for Paul Baker this season.”
The scene in question is a foursome between Issa, Paul Baker, Anton and a possum that has found its way into the room. Innanen says the choreography was “unexpectedly rigorous,” but finding the moment where Paul Baker grabs Anton’s leg to keep him from leaving made for one of his favorite moments from the season.
The night of the foursome eventually proves the catalyst for Paul Baker and Issa’s mid-season breakup, but that can’t keep her down. “I get very envious of Issa, because I think Issa is the only one where everything rolls off her back and she’s in the driver’s seat,” Innanen says. The other characters, on the other hand, don’t catch many breaks. The finale ends in a rare moment where everything seems to be resolved — at least relationship-wise.
Innanen says he was happy Paul Baker and Anton got to consummate their slow burn after two seasons, even as the finale introduced a new possible relationship in the house. “I think that they did it in such a beautiful way, and I’m glad that they had it where every relationship knot is tied, like no one feels left out, and then there’s a new cliffhanger,” he says. “I fucking want Season 3 so bad so that we can explore that, and I’m really geeked about that.”
