There is something about “Adults”, FX’s raunchy, chaotic comedy series about five twenty-somethings living together in Queens that people just can’t seem to get over — and we can’t really blame them. Nobody in this friend group has their life together, nobody communicates well, and almost everyone is sleeping with, falling for, or emotionally entangling themselves with someone they probably shouldn’t.
In other words, it feels remarkably real.
Created by Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold, “Adults” initially looks like another entry in the long tradition of the young-persons-in-a-house sitcom. We can see the faint shadows of Friends, Girls and New Girl creeping through the window; roommates, hookups, bad jobs, impulsive decisions and a commitment to stir up a storm and yet spend time together.
At the center of “Adults” are Samir, Billie, Issa, Anton and Paul Baker, a friend group we know all too well, whose friendships are constantly shifting between intimacy, irritation, sexual tension and outright dysfunction.
They all live in Samir’s parents’ house, which throughout the show becomes the epicenter of everything chaotic, giving the show its funniest material. A hookup becomes everyone’s problem, a friend’s romantic decision is dissected collectively, via airplay on the TV. People invade each other’s privacy, meddle in each other’s dating lives and routinely make situations worse because they “just want to help”.
The result is a group of funny, horny, emotionally immature and unsurprisingly queer… Adults.
The genius of “Adults” is that beneath all the raunchiness it presents a very real thought. It places friendship as the central relationship of young adulthood. Older sitcoms too have maintained that idea, but there exists a traditional hierarchy: romantic partner first, friends second, family somewhere behind them. “Adults” writes that down and throws it in the trash. It imagines that same friendship outside the heterosexual conventions that have been engraved in the sitcoms that came before.
For young people, somewhere along the line the friend group becomes the family. Sometimes the person who knows you best is the person who has watched you make the same terrible decision six times. Not your family, not your partner but a very loud group of friends.
It is this very idea that resonates deeply with queer people. Our adulthood has historically involved building families and communities outside conventional structures. “Adults” doesn’t dwell on this history, but it lives in its aftermath: a world where a group of friends can be so committed to each other that they’ll even marry each other to keep one of their own from leaving.
The fun thing is, the married couple soon get their own slow-burn romance plot.
Unlike the heterosexual pairings that have defined the genre for decades, this one centers on Anton (Owen Thiele), a gay Black man, and Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), a sexually fluid person who enters the group as Issa’s boyfriend. The resulting triangle could have been reduced to a conventional sitcom obstacle: gay best friend develops feelings for straight friend’s boyfriend. Instead, “Adults” lets the attraction breathe.
It distinguishes Anton and Paul Baker’s relationship from the “will-they-won’t-they” pairings of the past. The show doesn’t manufacture drama for drama’s sake; instead, it allows the relationship to develop naturally, woven into the fabric of the friend group’s daily life.
In a television landscape where queer characters have historically been relegated to supporting roles or defined by their trauma, “Adults” refuses to let Anton be reduced to a sassy gay character. He’s the romantic lead, with all the messy emotional complexity, uncertainty and vulnerability that role entails.
The show also explores the instability of social identity that queer people often experience. It navigates, very hilariously, questions of who gets which version of you, what masculinity is supposed to look like, and how much of our personality is genuine, through Anton’s workplace and Paul Baker’s straight friend group.
Season 2 ends with Anton and Paul Baker finally kissing. But the real genius (and potential disaster) is that “Adults” doesn’t stop there. Billie and Samir, lifelong friends, also hook up. Suddenly the house is an even more complicated network of romantic and sexual relationships.
“Adults” shows that the boundaries between friend, chosen family, hookup, crush and partner can be blurry. People fall in love with people they promised themselves they wouldn’t. Sexuality doesn’t have to arrive with a neat label and masculinity can be performed, discarded and performed again.
The show invites queer people to recognize themselves in it—and then laugh because, unfortunately, we’ve probably been there. Queer characters are allowed to be annoying, horny, jealous, selfish, ridiculous and insecure. They are allowed to have terrible judgment. And perhaps most importantly, they are allowed to experience romance without the story becoming about their queerness.
“Adults” is politically and socially contemporary without constantly announcing how contemporary it is. It asks what happens when friendship, sex and romance stop occupying separate categories? And what happens when everyone you love lives in the same house?
The answer, apparently, is: nothing good, but a whole lot of funny.
