There’s nothing like a group trip with old friends to activate your most carefree sense of play and relaxation — as well as your long-held resentments.
In Season 2 of The Four Seasons, Kate (Tina Fey), Jack (Will Forte), Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), Ginny (Erika Henningsen), Danny (Colman Domingo), and Claude (Marco Calvani) continue their tradition of travel and pack their bags for some new and familiar locales: upstate New York, the Jersey Shore, and across the Atlantic Ocean to Italy.
“These are not people with bottomless wallets who go to crazy places,” says Fey, who also co-created the series with Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield. “They go to their friends’ house for Thanksgiving, and they drive upstate to hike. We assumed the Jersey Shore was Jack and Kate’s pick of where they always go. Then Italy is our splurge trip.”
So where exactly do your favorite friends visit? And what happens during these four trips? Keep reading to learn more about the filming locations from Season 2 of The Four Seasons.
The new season takes the friend group upstate for Episodes 1 and 2, the Jersey Shore for Episodes 3 and 4, to Nick (Steve Carell) and Anne’s lake house in Episodes 5 and 6, and then to Italy in the final two chapters.
The friends first visited the region in Episodes 1, 2, 5, and 6 of Season 1. They relaxed at Anne and Nick’s lake house, where Nick broke the news about leaving Anne, and took a walk down memory lane at their leafy alma mater, filmed in Poughkeepsie.
The opening episodes of the new season return them to the area for a spring hike to spread Nick’s ashes. The group selected that specific trail because it was Nick’s favorite. “First: beautiful mountains in upstate New York,” says Fisher, “which we joked felt too far upstate.” Watch the group summit a peak in the new season’s first few minutes.
Fey makes her directorial debut with Episode 2, “Funky Motel,” which finds the friends trapped in a rustic upstate hotel. “It was challenging because it was a bottle episode. Almost all of it took place in one room, so I was always on camera,” says Fey.
The group heads back to the lake house for Episodes 5 and 6. “We wanted to revisit that because it was such a prominent location for us in the first season,” says Fisher.
In Season 2, the showrunners used the consistent setting to juxtapose two Thanksgivings. In Episode 5, Anne hosts the holiday, and the group’s anxiety about its changing dynamic boils over — culminating with Jack kicking a turkey off the front porch. Episode 6 also chronicles a turkey day, but it jumps back to COVID times. “[After] we show them at their almost breaking-apart point in Episode 5, we thought it would be nice to go back to when they were at their closest,” says Fey. Hear from Carell about his cameo in the flashback on Tudum.
In Episodes 3 and 4, the friends head to the Jersey Shore, a stone’s throw from Philadelphia, which had on- and offscreen resonance for The Four Seasons cast and crew. “Colman’s character is from Philly, so he would know the Jersey Shore,” says Fey. “Tracey and I love the Jersey Shore and wanted to represent it on the show.” Since Wigfield is from New Jersey, it made sense that she direct one of those episodes, “which brought authenticity,” says Fisher.
It’s at the shore that Jack — and maybe Anne — meet a new friend in Mark Brett (Steven Pasquale). Read more about the new cast member on Tudum.
After Claude and Danny choose not to have a baby, they decide to shake things up and move to Trento, Italy, where Claude is from. Episodes 7 and 8 see their friends jetting across the Atlantic Ocean to visit during Christmas.
Calvani, who hails from a town called Prato near Florence, reminisces about how the trip came to be: “We were shooting in Puerto Rico last year, we were a little tipsy having dinner all together, and I was like, ‘Tina, wouldn’t it be amazing if we went to Italy if we get Season 2? You wrote Italian characters — it’s served on a silver plate, as we say in Italy.’”
Calvani appreciated that the production was set during the colder months, since Americans typically think of Italy as a sunnier destination. “Audiences are not as familiar with that kind of Italy. We have wintertime, too, you know. We have a North — excuse you! We have the mountains, we have snow,” the actor teases.
When Danny’s mother, Beverly (Vernée Watson Johnson), learns she needs more around-the-clock care from family or an elderly facility, Danny and Claude decide to move from the latter’s hometown to the former’s.
Like with Calvani, these episodes also return Domingo to his place of origin: “There’s this meta universe of character and actor,” says Domingo. “I don’t have to reach too far outside of myself to find these characters. There’s something honest about it, more than [in] my other work.”
In the spirit of her hippie character, Ginny, Henningsen observes, “What’s so great about this season is you’re seeing the rising moon of everybody. You’re seeing the part of them that is not how they initially present or that they’ve kept hidden or had to sequester because of family obligations.”
Read more about Season 2 of The Four Seasons on Tudum or grab your passport to visit these locations yourself with all eight episodes streaming on Netflix.
