This piece first ran on the Obsessed by Kevin Fallon Substack. Subscribe here to read more like it!
No one likes to acknowledge the youths. Because that means acknowledging you’re old.
Me? It has come to my attention that I am, in fact, an old now. As far as the youths go, it’s not so much that I’m reluctant to acknowledge them, but I’m scared of them. I would go so far as to say that I’m not the only one who feels that way.
That’s why it’s been so interesting to see how audiences—specifically us olds—react to pop culture that centers the younger generation. We’ve all had our own shows and movies about our specific generation to both cherish and debate. Gen X had Heathers, The Breakfast Club, and Beverly Hills: 90210. Millennials had Girls, Mean Girls, and Superbad.
It’s not hard for a younger generation to admire or engage with the content about the generation above. But when the youths start getting their own TV shows and movies? Pearls are clutched. Judgment is passed. The quality is scoffed at. (You should see my face while watching an episode of Euphoria.)
It’s the snootiest of age that makes it hard to fairly judge these new shows. Gen Z should make their version of Broad City. But would I be capable of enjoying it?
The FX series Adults answered that question with a resounding yes in its first season.
The show does what so many great series over the decades have done: depict what life is like for a bunch of struggling young twentysomethings who live together in New York City. In this case, it’s five friends who share a house in Queens (which you will have to just go with, ignoring the fact that they are clearly in Toronto).
They fumble through the juggling of underemployment and partying. They stumble through dating and sex. They are distinctly individual, but so codependent they essentially function as one unit, the kind that only exists for one lightning-strike post-grad moment. And, of course, they talk with a whiplash banter tangled with so many clever pop culture references and asides you’re dizzy by the time the laughter comes out.
Watching Adults is a surreal experience. As I wrote after the first season, “It’s weird to both identify with their struggles, the way that, often to my horror, certain plots in Girls and Broad City resonated with me, but also feel so…old. I find the curios of their travails humorous... I also want to shake them by the shoulders and give them advice.”
Season 2 is officially back at the end of August, but a preview episode just dropped to whet fans’ appetites, featuring the plot line that officially announces the arrival of Adults as a seminal friends-hanging-out comedy: the episode explaining how they all met. Or, in this case, the origin story of the character that’s become the fan favorite, Paul Baker.
Played by Jack Innanen—who social media routinely informs me is a Gen Z It Boyfriend, and, oblivious, I must believe them—Paul Baker is the roommate who didn’t have a years-long connection to the core friends group.
In all the ways he fits in with their very Gen Z ways—he’s sexually fluid and enthusiastically pursues any social justice cause that is the group’s blip passion for the day—he’s an obvious outlier. He’s Canadian and, as such, so polite. He’s selfless genuinely, not performatively. And, it turns out, didn’t have the same linear path to this woke, almost polycule-esque life his roommates seemed to have.
This special episode, “Marathon Day,” shines a spotlight on the (albeit exaggerated) monstrous things that Gen Z will do to get through a jam. That’s not said patronizingly; diabolical schemes pulled off by friends are a hallmark of every generation. It’s the details here that are generationally specific.
Anton (Owen Thiele) is stunned to learn that his coworkers are all at the New York City Marathon, holding signs rooting for him and waiting for him to pass. The thing is, he never signed up for the marathon. In fact, he can’t even properly conjugate the verb “run.”
It turns out that he lied during a company icebreaker where he had to name a hobby—he famously doesn’t have any, his friends remind him—and improv’d that he likes running. That became his “thing” at work, and suddenly he was fabricating 5Ks and 10Ks and, then, training for the New York City Marathon to raise money for breast cancer awareness.
Rather than encourage him to come clean, the roommates help him to continue spinning the web of lies, photoshopping a bib, creating posters themselves, and inventing cockamamie stories about why Anton would be running the marathon without actual running shoes.
It’s in the midst of this scheming that Paul Baker comes crashing into things. That’s kind of literally; while they’re making posters at a café, Paul Baker (who is always referred to by his full name) enters after finishing the marathon himself and collapses. Issa (Amita Rao), despite her pledge to stop dating “broken” men, leaps to his rescue and smuggles him home to recuperate.
The whole Anton marathon ruse escalates and, now stowed away at the shared Queens house, Paul Baker becomes an unwitting pawn in it. But, rather than be repulsed by the rampant lying he’s witnessing—his first, very Canadian reaction—he’s enamored by the lengths these friends will go to protect each other: an endearing, very Canadian empathy.
The fun thing about learning how Paul Baker came to be a part of this wokely narcissistic group (I swear that description makes sense) is how it buoys Adults to a status where it can now participate in the parlor game that is the benchmark of any generational series: the “which character are you?” debate.
I’m a Marnie, a Miranda, and, now, can say pretty certainly that I’m a Paul Baker. Well, like, Paul Baker’s uncle. (Old.)
