Adults Season 2 Has Grown Into the Coming-of-Age Comedy Gen Z Deserves

This review contains spoilers for the first four episodes of Adults season 2.I’ve been waiting since Community sputtered to a close 11 years ago on Yahoo Screen — which, yes, was a real streaming service — for a sitcom to figure out how to flesh out its own internal lore and experiment with reshuffling its core relationships in surprising ways. And let’s just say it’s been a long decade.It has often felt to me like one of television’s most reliable formats either retreated back into comfortable formats or aimed for high-concept abstraction instead of just trying to refine the sitcom formula. Even Community toward the end of its life got a little too heady for its own good. This isn’t rocket science, but it is hard: you need to thrust a group of funny people together through shared circumstances, and then just… write them really well. Move the chess pieces around in new ways. Think laterally.Enter season two of Adults, which takes a perfectly fine sitcom about a group of Zoomers getting into misadventures at their shared house in Queens and turns it into, well, a great sitcom about a group of Zoomers getting into misadventures at their shared house in Queens.If you’ll recall, Community started out in much the same way — a passable addition to NBC’s lineup that later figured out how to get creative with its existing elements, in much the same way that Taco Bell somehow combines tortillas, cheese, and meat to maintain an ever-evolving menu, lest we forget the chain’s innovative Mexican Pizza. It’s rare, these days, for shows to receive the runway they need to become the best, “quesarito” version of themselves before getting yanked off the air, but Adults has accomplished it in just 17 episodes. And that recombinative creativity is on full display in the series high, “Racoon,” which culminates in perhaps one of the funniest threesomes put to the small screen.In the fourth episode of season two, the titular mammal finds its way into the