Spoilers for Season 2 of The Four Seasons are ahead!
One of the best new shows to watch with a Netflix subscription last year was Tina Fey’s dramedy The Four Seasons. Since it stars a bunch of funny people alongside Fey, like Will Forte and Steve Carell, a lot of viewers (including myself) really didn’t see it coming when Carell’s character Nick unexpectedly died in Episode 7 of Season 1. Since the show was renewed for Season 2 after the big pregnancy cliffhanger, we knew we were going to miss the actor in the show, but the showrunners found a way to bring him back.
Now that Season 2 has come out on the 2026 TV schedule, we know that Steve Carell’s Nick makes a comeback in Episode 7, “Little Thanksgiving.” It’s a flashback episode set in 2020 where the group of friends comes together to enjoy the holidays after dealing with isolation and social distancing all year. When CinemaBlend spoke to Tina Fey about bringing Carell back to the show, here’s what she had to say:
We talked about a bunch of ideas ever since the moment I screwed it up. As we were finishing Season 1, I would be in the van in Puerto Rico with Steve being like, ‘Steve, I'm gonna figure it out. We got this. We got this Steve.’ And I knew that he would probably only wanna come back if it felt like an impactful reason for him to come back. He didn't wanna just show up randomly… It's not like the kind of show where you'd necessarily look into the mirror and talk to your old friend magically or whatever. So this seemed a logical way to do it, and thank God he was willing to do it.
When Tina Fey was promoting the first season of The Four Seasons, she shared a funny anecdote about how when Carell learned he was going to die in the show, he reacted by saying, “Why does this keep happening to me?” Fey had no idea that a similar thing had recently happened to him on The Morning Show, too. So, perhaps bringing him back was partially driven by guilt. But then again, obviously, if you can have Steve Carell in your show, it feels like you should.
As I pointed out to The Four Seasons showrunner and star, she had joked about bringing the character back as a ghost or zombie, but ultimately, what made sense for the show was a flashback episode. As she added:
We just spent a lot of time in the writer's room figuring out, like, ‘Okay, if we go back to the past, what can it tell us about the present?’ Like, to give it a reason to be there. And so, I think we do learn a lot about Nick and Anne's relationship and the beginning of what kind of started to break her down early on and how she got to be kind of fragile in the present. And also what a mentor and how important he was to Jack and why Jack was struggling so much without him in the present.
In the episode, we learn that prior to Nick and Anne’s divorce (which we saw start to take shape in Season 1), Nick had flirted with an extramarital affair with a woman that he ultimately ended once he was found out. It really shot Anne’s confidence, which she’s been living with for quite some time. One especially memorable moment in the episode is when Anne almost decides to leave Nick, but can’t bring herself to. Fey spoke to that scene with these words:
[Kerri] gives such a beautiful performance in that episode. That final sequence [in Episode 6] was actually where they kind of have that big fight, and she runs outside and comes back in. And that, I think, was actually one of the few things we rewrote after the table read. We kind of dug in deeper, and she really did a beautiful job with it.
After the ending of Season 1, I know that I didn’t expect to see Steve Carell back in the show, but it was really welcome, and I loved learning more about the backstory of The Four Seasons friend group. Tina Fey and the other showrunners definitely found a great way to bring Nick back in a way that made complete sense.
