SPOILERS are ahead for The Four Seasons, now streaming with a Netflix subscription.
It’s only been a few weeks since Tina Fey’s The Four Seasons TV show landed on Netflix, but I’m one of the millions of viewers who gobbled it up when it landed on the 2025 TV schedule. Now, thanks to all that viewership, it’s already been greenlit for a second season. Personally, I’m excited and already have some ideas about how I want to see the dramedy continue. However, it is a big bummer that Steve Carell probably won’t get to be part of it, considering his character died before the end of the season. I was curious about how the actor thinks about it, and his reaction did not disappoint.
When Tina Fey spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the shocking plot point at the end of The Four Seasons, she revealed that Steve Carell wasn’t too happy about what happens to his character, Nick, either. Here’s how she recalled it:
He was like, ‘Why does this keep happening to me?’... I didn’t know [a similar thing happened to his character in The Morning Show] when we pitched it, so that’s on me. But I dug my heels in.
Steve Carell is such a popular and lovable guy that, for some reason, I thought he’d brush off the reveal since it frees up his schedule to work on other projects. However, as it turns out, he was as disappointed as I was. And, what makes it worse, is that one of the other great shows he was on, Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, also had his character, Mitch Kessler, die unexpectedly at the end of Season 2.
As Tina Fey shared, she had no idea that this wasn’t Steve Carell’s first rodeo when it comes to finding out a TV character of his would be dying, and it only made things worse when she let him know about what happens to Nick. While I’m still in shock over how nevermind one writer, but two, would kill off the actor in their show, she did share why they found it necessary for the project with these words:
We felt like at the time that everything was sort of grounded and human scale in terms of story, and we were like we do want something to happen, and that is a thing that happens to humans. We wanted this show to really reflect the time in the lives of these people. And when you’re in your 50s, it’s not like a crazy thing to imagine losing a friend. We wanted this show to have big human stakes, and so someone dying and the group having to come together to deal with that felt right.
I know when the moment happened late in the season, I was really surprised because Steve Carell’s character was so central to The Four Seasons, and had a lot going on plot-wise when he suddenly dies.
He was in the middle of a ski trip with his younger girlfriend Ginny, and having a rocky time there because he felt out of place with her friends. He had just called his group of longtime friends and had a sweet visit with them, before playing the iPad game that he once scoffed at his ex-wife for playing. While it seemed like the show could get into these threads more, it instead decided to remind us that death can come out of nowhere, no matter what’s going on in one’s life.
However, while he's gone, Nick will likely be a character of note in Season 2, given the first season ended with Ginny revealing she’s pregnant with his child. We do wonder if it will explore Ginny more prominently next season. It’s just sad we won’t get to see more of Steve Carell’s Nick.
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