How ‘Adults’ Grew Up in Season 2 — and What’s Next
It may be branded a Gen Z series, but FX’s Adults is sneakily quite a throwback.
It’s a hang comedy, in the spirt of Friends or New Girl or any other of a number of sitcoms that once defined broadcast when broadcast still drove the TV business. It’s also a anomaly by 2026 standards, in that it was given every opportunity to commercially succeed in its second season after a first that didn’t grab as large of an audience as its platform had hoped. At any number of other outlets, it probably could have been one and done.
“There was a lot of transparency around ‘Hey, we believe in this thing,” says Ben Kroengold, who created and showruns the series alongside writing partner and wife Rebecca Shaw. “Like, ‘We love that it’s catching on with Gen Z. We love that millennials showed up for it. We need you to go bigger and open the door wider.’”
That door opened with a second attempt at a pilot, one they wrote and filmed after the second season and now plays as if it were the series’ first episode if you go to the queue on Hulu or Disney+. That, on top of a barrage of press from its cast (including, perhaps most notably, bonafide internet boyfriend Jack Innanen) seems to have worked. Initial ratings climbed 40 percent. The international audience doubled. And now, almost a month after the entire season dropped, its going viral on TikTok thanks to a cringy earworm of a K-pop track they recorded as a bit for an episode. Adults is growing up fast.
Kroengold and Shaw recently spoke with THR about the strategy to broaden their audience, leaning into sitcom tropes when other comedies or going for high concept and how they don’t see a cap on the number of episodes they’d like to make a season.
Before you launched season two, you had dropped this special episode that served as a new pilot, a prequel, whatever you want to call it. This was because FX was very candid that the original pilot had an early scene that alienated viewers. Obviously, you were renewed, so they liked the show. So how were these concerns expressed to you? I can’t think of a series that’s done something like that before.
BEN KRONENGOLD We were thinking about a very specific audience, especially when we wrote early episodes of season one. It’s a tall task to try to write something for this generation, a format that they that hasn’t really been served to them by them just yet — especially at that point. We wanted to poke people in the eye a bit and be provocative. That’s all well and good, but as we got to know our own show, there was real warmth, coziness and friendship at the center. Because FX saw those elements, they said, “What if we rolled out a welcome mat that brought new viewers in with those elements of the show that are just as important, if not more important, than the edgy comedy and the raunch and the social commentary?”
REBECCA SHAW It was important to us that we weren’t apologizing. We weren’t getting rid of anything. But I do think that the new episode that is now the first thing you see, it does feel quite representative of what the show has become. It has a little more warmth to it. We wrote it after we had shot season two. We’re telling all these love stories that have emerged over the course of the show … we built this love triangle. So when we got to go back and write this prologue, we got to be like, “What if we told two meet cutes in one episode?”
Ben Kronengold & Rebecca Shaw
Mindy Tucker
How did you convey that to the people who hadn’t sampled it or thought to sample it to tune in? Because people obviously did.
SHAW I think FX really led this blitz of making sure we got the cast in front of people. They have this unbelievable chemistry. So getting to put them in interviews and see them mess around and tease each other in all the ways that they do on-screen and off, it started to open the door to people. Come join this party that’s already in progress.
KRONENGOLD There is something about Gen Z that feels really mystifying to people. Our contention is that these kids are as stupid as you were, they mean as well as you did and they will probably be the same as the next crop of kids that come along. We’re telling a love story between these five kids who only have each other in this really uncertain time of life. And anyone can relate to that.
SHAW If you can believe it, we are not the first generation to drink and hook up with our friends and make bad decisions. The first thing we put on the first card we ever put up in the writer’s room is “They’re older than they’ve ever been.” To them, this all feels very serious. They’re doing their best.
So now you have this momentum shift. What’s it like being in the middle of all that?
KRONENGOLD You’re catching us on a bit of a high because Lena Dunham, an absolute idol of ours….
SHAW She posted a really wonderful warm thing about the show. Just the fact that she’s watched it, much less that she likes it, was so moving to us. We got very choked up so that was a really cool one.
A hang comedy like this scratches an itch for me that’s been neglected since maybe New Girl, but that’s a kind of show that gives you a steady IV drip of episodes eight months out of the year. I’m not suggesting you could ever do that, but do you have the desire to make more episodes a season if that’s what FX wants?
SHAW We’d love to do more. Our answer is always more. We love these characters. We wanna live with them for as long as possible. I understand and empathize with the feeling that audiences have when it comes to this because I feel the same way. There are these comfort shows that I grew up watching that I still turn on when I’m feeling lonely or sad or just need something running. The more of that you get the better. It feels like sitting there with your friends for hours on end.
KRONENGOLD Our fans, and I think fans general, are so media literate. They’re like, “Hey, we want filler episodes.” That’s a very inside baseball term! They want a Halloween episode. To do more [than eight episodes a season], it’s not the norm anymore. There would be a lot for us to learn about how to execute that.
SHAW We’d have to talk to people who had done it before, but we we’d be up for the challenge. We’d love it.
How much do you think about the sitcom form in making this show. The second season opens with a joke about a oner. “Raccoon,” the bottle episode, has gotten so much attention. You really flirt with the fourth wall. Do you have this like checklist of tropes that you want to reimagine?
KRONENGOLD TV’s in our blood, whether or not we were TV writers. If we were lawyers, we would probably be watching as much TV as we are now. We grew up on these sitcoms. Zosia Mamet pops into our show and says, “You aren’t the first kids to be young and adorable in New York.” We’re paying homage to the people that came before us, who formed our personalities and our neuroses and taught us how to deal with them. We love classic sitcoms. For a show that is, on its face, about young people, it has a very old soul. When you’re making a sitcom, that’s worth embracing. So we like poking fun at that from time to time.
SHAW It didn’t feel like it would be true to us to not have them tap on the fourth wall a bit. In the way that when you’re talking with your friends, you editorialize in ways. You take a step above yourself. It felt like our characters would do the same thing.
You don’t get Raven Simone to guest star, slide into a living room and not have canned applause.
Shaw She should enter every room to applause, so that felt appropriate.
KRONENGOLD We found that on the day, which was odd because then we didn’t even have the sound cue. We had to mime it. But it struck us as appropriate for such an absolute legend and queen of of this genre.
SHAW [That’s so Raven] was one of the real reference points that we and so many of our cast have for our first sitcom we loved. It felt appropriate that we would greet her as the matriarch that she is for so many of us.
What are the comedy series that you like rewatch? Do you have comfort watches that you go back to?
KRONENGOLD We’ve been very public about our love for Friends. When our pilot was picked up to series, we reached out to Marta Kauffman and David Crane. “Hey, we know this is crazy and you are busy and living full lives, but would you ever sit down and give us the boot camp that we need?” When you reach out to someone that incredible, some people think, like, “Hey, let’s impress them!”
SHAW We were like, “We have one hour. We just need to ask them every question we can.”
KRONENGOLD Like we were going into war. And so we were trying sap the tree of knowledge from the people that really defined this genre. And before Friends, there’s Living Single. That’s a big reference for us, just a formative show for the genre. How I Met Your Mother, New Girl, Girls, Seinfeld, Broad City. There’s very little that we didn’t watch.
What was the most edifying takeaway from your hour with Kauffman and Crane?
SHAW They gave us one very tangible piece of advice about the name. Snowflakes was working title. It ended up prompting a really interesting conversation. We were talking about how we started watching Friends when we were in middle school and then high school. And, for us, those characters felt like grown-ups. It made us think about the idea the twenty-something comedy as a thing that means different things depending how old you are. For younger kids, it’s a show where they imagine what adult life is like. For older people, it’s a show where you laugh because, well, they’re not adults yet. They don’t know what they’re doing.
“Marathon Day,” the new first episode of Adults
Russ Martin/FX
Were there any other titles ever in consideration or did you go straight to Adults after Snowflakes?
KRONENGOLD I’ll read you some of the worst.
SHAW There’s some really rough ones in there. For a while we wanted to call it The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance.
KRONENGOLD Then it was called Family Unit, because they lived in a family home. Then we wanted to call it You Guys. What is the vocal stim of this generation? And everything is “You guys…” And it kind of has a gender neutrality. The list couldn’t have been longer.
SHAW Do any stick out to you?
Family Unite would need a live studio audience. That’s multicam.
SHAW Correct.
This is a bit of spoiler for anyone who hasn’t read the show, so I suppose they can stop reading here, but going back to tropes… You did something potentially unprecedented in the ensemble comedy genre in that the end of the second season. Not one but two sets of characters who have had romantic or sexual tension got together. Tell me a bit about that choice.
KRONENGOLD The writer’s room fell in love with it because, yes, it rocks the foundation of this friend group. But in two very different ways. We love this idea that your eye throughout most of the season, and the finale especially, is on the ball of Anton (Owen Thiele) and Paul Baker (Jack Innanen). We’re telling a love story that by modern sitcom standards is more of a traditional slow burn. We’re really excited about the opportunity, if we get so lucky, to tell a relationship story with the two of them now. They are pretty deep in their feelings for each other for a couple that’s never really had the chance to be together.
SHAW Our contention is that is the beginning of a really fun story, not the end of one.
KRONENGOLD We’ve been dating since we were 17.
SHAW There’s a lot of really interesting exploration to do about what it feels like to be in the first sort of real big relationship of your 20s. There’s a lot of fun to be had there. We’re excited to see how those characters, who are very different, navigate that kind of thing. But then, on the other side of the table, we have a hookup that we intentionally wanted to come a little bit out of left field. We loved the idea of pulling off a little bit of a hat trick. Along the way, we’ve set up this sort of room swap conceit where all of these characters have moved around. So when we see a locked door at the end of the final episode, we assume it’s Anton and Paul Baker behind it. Door opens, it’s two other characters who’ve hooked up in a way that feels pretty rash. We want to see what it looks like when two people jump into something headfirst. Maybe it’s something they’ve been thinking about, maybe it was just a really impulsive decision. That looks really different than a couple who have maturely been coming to this for a long time and really have a hunch that they might be right for each other. It’s two very different stories to give ourselves to explore in the next season, hopefully.
You both keep saying “hopefully” and “if we’re lucky to do more. It feels like there’s gonna be panic in the streets if this show is not renewed.
SHAW We’d be leading the panic at the streets.
KRONENGOLD That’s very kind. We’re we’re trying not to be presumptuous and but we have our picket signs ready too. I’m just kidding! That is not a threat. (Laughs.)
In not being presumptuous, are you the kind of writers who already know exactly what you want to tackle in future seasons?
SHAW Because the concept is open-ended, there were stories we didn’t have time to tell in seasons one and two that we still really want to tell. We have funny date stories, job stories and all of these things that I think we’ve always wanted to find a way for in the series.
KRONENGOLD I’ll give you two examples from last season. Rebecca and I knew we wanted to do something based around the idea the social media scrub. It was something that had sort of come up in our own friend group and we brought that to the room and said, “Hey, what would this reveal?” The room came up with “Baker” as this sort alternate ego for Paul Baker and his shame friends. Something that just came from the room was the C-word episode. All of the writers came up with this depraved, really interesting, exploration of what language means to kids right now — off of the most outrageous mistake you could make in a workplace.
I’d argue that episode speaks to a universal fear for those of us in multiple generations.
KRONENGOLD Jake Bender and Zach Dunn wrote it with so much precision. The Issa (Amita Rao) and Anton episodes, now that we’ve done a few of them, we have a really high bar for the hijinks of this duo. We believe that their chemistry between Amitha and Owen. There is no ceiling for them.
It may be branded a Gen Z
