FX's 'Adults' Is Not the First Great Gen Z Comedy, but It Is Great

There’s no official showdown for the crown of best new Gen Z comedy between Benito Skinner’s Overcompensating and Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw’s Adults, but if there were, I’d give the edge to Overcompensating. It’s marginally funnier and considerably more heartfelt.

That said, Adults does have Charlie Cox.

Still, while Overcompensating will resonate with anyone who’s ever tried to find themselves and their people in college, Adults mostly left me feeling grateful that I’m no longer in my twenties, juggling career anxiety, romantic mishaps, and rent checks while sharing a house with too many other people. With all due respect to anyone still in the multiple-roommate phase of life, it’s the last era I’d want to revisit. Especially now, when entry-level jobs are being outsourced to AI, dating has become a gamified hellscape, homeownership is a fantasy, and weird, wispy porn mustaches are inexplicably fashionable. What in the Paul Mescal hell is going on?

It’s a goddamn miracle that Kronengold and Shaw manage to find humor in a generation that just feels like a walking existential crisis. Some, including the show’s marketers, are positioning Adults as Gen Z’s answer to Girls’ “voice of a generation,” but wisely, the creators aren’t leaning into that comparison. That said, if I had to base an entire generation on one series, I’ll give them this: these characters are more self-aware, more resourceful, less self-important, and far less solipsistic than Lena Dunham’s crew.

They’re also a lot funnier. Adults is, at its core, a comedy, and that’s exactly what it wants to be. It succeeds, even if, like Girls, it leans heavily on discomfort.

The show follows five roommates: the jobless one, Samir (Malik Elassal); the one desperately trying to find herself, Billie (Lucy Freyer); the dry-spell-having, sarcastic one, Anton (Owen Thiele); the sexually adventurous one with rich parents, Issa (Amita Rao); and Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), Issa’s sweet, sexually fluid boyfriend. It’s like Friends, if they lived in a crap house and were close enough to hang out around the toilet while one of them took a dump.

So, not really like Friends at all. But each of the eight episodes follows a sitcom-like plot: there’s a Friendsgiving chicken roast (with a Julia Fox cameo); a “House Rules” episode where each roommate demands a change from another; a greencard marriage situation; Billie’s colonoscopy episode; one where Issa and Anton turn to a Ouija board to find out whether their therapist died by suicide, possibly from dealing with them. My favorite is episode seven, “Annabelle,” about a Southern woman who stays with the group for an abortion weekend. They expect her to be thankful and giddy about her NYC adventure, but she’s not. She just wants a better “abortion vacation.”

Adults is funny, and often kind of ick — there’s a bloody butthole before Billie’s colonoscopy, and Samir literally cuts into his own turd with a knife and fork to unclog a toilet. But it never gets sentimental or touchy-feely. It’s a straight comedy, to its credit. The best arc involves Billie dating her former high school teacher (Charlie Cox), who seems lovely until a ketamine bender reveals that the “cool teacher” is actually a completely unhinged disaster.

It’s a quick binge, and frequently hilarious, if you can get past the existential haze and the gnawing feeling that everyone should take a shower and clean their goddamn house. That might just be me channeling my inner Gen X parent, which is a profoundly uncool way to watch Adults. Still, it takes a few episodes to find its rhythm, but by the end, it starts to feel like a show that could define a generation, especially because it successfully captures something no one will want to fondly look back upon in two decades.