Tina Fey's New Netflix Show Remakes a Hit 1981 Movie. It's a Major Improvement.

Alan Alda was one of Hollywood's first prominent male feminists. He campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, contributed to the star-studded gender-equality album Free to Be … You and Me —that's him and the project's originator, Marlo Thomas, narrating the story of Atalanta , a retold Greek myth in which a legendary huntress challenges a male suitor to a footrace and, in this version, crosses the finish line alongside him—and spoke out on what were then called women's issues so frequently that the Boston Globe dubbed him “the quintessential Honorary Woman.” But Alda's 1981 movie The Four Seasons , a bittersweet comedy about midlife marital crises which he wrote, directed, and stars in—and which has now been remade into a new Netflix miniseries—is run through with a pronounced sour streak that, at least with four-plus decades of hindsight, feels a lot like misogyny.

The setup is simple: Three long-married couples, played by Alda and Carol Burnett, Jack Weston and Rita Moreno, and Len Cariou and Sandy Dennis, meet up for a woodsy weekend getaway outside New York City in honor of the latter's wedding anniversary. But, as Nick (Cariou) and Jack (Alda) gather up sticks for a fire, the former makes a confession: He's about to leave his wife, Anne (Dennis). The problem, Nick explains, is that “she doesn’t do anything.” He's a rising star, albeit in the unglamorous field of insurance sales, and she's going nowhere. The woman he married to bring stability to his life, he rages, “isn’t just stable—she’s inert.” Nick casts her off, and the next time the friends meet, he's replaced her with a younger model, a pretty blond flight attendant who repeats his inflated boasts verbatim.

Nick comes off as boorish and self-centered, so preoccupied with his new lease on life that he doesn't notice, or doesn't care, that his longtime friends are left grimacing on the deck of a cramped sailboat while he and his new girlfriend Ginny (Bess Armstrong) have noisy sex down below. But he's not exactly wrong, at least as far as his soon-to-be-ex-wife is concerned. The way Dennis plays Anne, she's not only inert but practically nonfunctional, so airy and disconnected it's as if she's three steps from a Victorian sanatorium. Her husband fumes that rather than taking up a productive hobby, she's “spent three years photographing vegetables,” and while that sounds like an inattentive spouse's mean-spirited caricature, the movie never gives any reason to question it. Kate (Burnett), who works at a glossy magazine, offers her a gig shooting portraits of the city's most influential people, but Anne demurs: She prefers her subjects cruciferous. And with that, the movie is essentially done with her. Anne turns up during the film's third segment, when she impishly uses her married name to check into Nick's room at a crowded college-town hotel on parents' weekend, but she disappears soon after, and we're not meant to miss her. As Janet Maslin put it in her contemporary New York Times review , “Nick tires of her almost as soon as the audience does.”

Both versions of The Four Seasons depict marriage as a marathon, not a sprint: When movie Nick breaks the news of his intention to split, Jack argues that every relationship has its good and bad spells, and while Nick's affection for Anne may be in a downturn, surely he'll feel it again. (Nick moans, “I've never felt it.”) But the film is in an awful rush to get Anne out of the way so that Jack's newfound love can stir up doubts in his still-married friends. Weston's anxious hypochondriac and Moreno's volatile painter mostly just scream at each other, but Jack and Kate fight like grown-ups. Jack is a therapist, and while he drives his friends nuts by pressing them to reveal their feelings while keeping his own hidden away, he seems to understand the importance of expressing anger without giving in to it—at least, that is, until he finally blows his top and lays waste to the group's winter cabin. Perhaps the movie itself is a form of acting out. The most obvious reading is to see Jack and Kate as a reflection of Alda's own long and successful marriage; he and Arlene Alda have been married since 1957. But it's hard to resist the observation that he gave his wife's profession of photographer not to his character's onscreen mate, but to Anne, the movie's grating and disposable ex.

Alda shows up in Netflix's The Four Seasons , an eight-episode remake created by Lang Fisher ( Never Have I Ever ), Tracey Wigfield ( Saved by the Bell, redux ), and Tina Fey, who heads a cast that includes Steve Carell, Colman Domingo, Will Forte, Marco Calvani, and Kerri Kenney-Silver. But he's there—as Anne's father, funnily enough—just long enough to give the project his blessing, and to give Fey's character, who is somewhere in her third decade of marriage, his tip for keeping things fresh: Every so often, get yourself cleaned up, brush your teeth, and inform your unsuspecting spouse, “Congratulations—today is a sex day.”

The new version is more overtly structured as a comedy—Fisher and Wigfield are both alumnae of Fey's 30 Rock —but it grows more melancholy over time, as its characters dig deeper into their own discomfort. As before, the catalyst is the breakup of Nick and Anne's marriage, with Nick and Anne played by Carell and Kenney-Silver. (Fey and Forte take on Alda and Burnett's roles; Domingo and Calvani make up the third couple.) But this time, Anne's humiliation is deeper and more public: Rather than taking place in the middle of an intimate getaway with a few close friends, Nick has unwittingly chosen to drop the bomb on the day of a surprise vow-renewal ceremony that Anne has put together for their ^25th anniversary. For a moment, it appears as if being forced to proclaim his dedication in front of a small army of friends and family might have reconnected Nick with all the things he loves about the woman he's spent half his life with. But when the story jumps to the next season, he, like his Reagan-era predecessor, has a new blond on his arm, this one played by Erika Henningsen, who's currently playing the Sandra Dee to Jonathan Groff's Bobby Darin in Broadway's Just in Time .

This Anne, however, doesn't disappear. She keeps turning up, booking a room at a nearby hotel when Jack's new girlfriend, Ginny, persuades him to let her plan a vacation for the entire friend group at a hip but threadbare eco-resort, then swiping his suite at parents' weekend again. It's desperate and a little pathetic, painful even for her longtime friends to watch—the kind of turmoil that generates a combination of sympathy and a fierce determination not to end up in the same spot. But Anne sticks it out, both in the story and on the TV series, and our respect for her grows as she taps back into herself. Her first attempts at flirting, with a cute young paddleboard instructor, are so inept you want to crawl under your couch cushions, but eventually she finds a new boyfriend, which is good, and realizes he's not enough for her, which is even better. Over time, Kenney-Silver's slouched shoulders and dust-mop haircut are replaced by a more confident serenity.