Middle age is a brutal time of life. As those of us mired in it know, it’s perfectly suited to being mined for laughs (the unhinged type of laughs that are bound up with tears, crisis, and, inevitably, death.) But still too few comedy series take this pressured segment of time and squeeze it for all its acidic worth. Enter middle-aged joke machine Tina Fey, who with The Four Seasons – her zippy 2020s update of the 1980s film of the same name, co-created and written with Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher – has triumphed once again. The second season of her midlife comedy drama is even more perspicacious, poignant and hilarious than the first.

Again there are four fancy holidays split across the seasons, each one given two gag-packed episodes – a rigid but neat structural device that allows the big moments to happen off-screen. Meanwhile we get the aftermath soundtracked by an avalanche of Vivaldi and bracing jokes about sad lonely donkeys, secret vapes mistaken for thumb drives, and the tragicomedy of being an angry, unravelling fiftysomething man in a T-shirt printed with “Keep Calm and Fuhgeddaboutit”.

The three couples have been reconfigured after the death of Nick (Steve Carell) at the end of season one. So there’s Kate (played by Fey) and Jack (the uptight/softie duo relentlessly workshopping their marriage into the ground), Danny and Claude (gay, unbearably chic, forever bickering) and Nick’s ex-wife Anne and the much younger woman for whom he left her, Ginny – now heavily pregnant with his baby. “Ladies aren’t supposed to be friends with the woman their dead husband left them for,” wails Anne. “You’re right,” says Kate. “There is no Beyoncé song about that.” Anyway, come summer the two women and a baby have moved in together, and Anne’s so besotted with her new role she is testing Ginny’s breast pump on her own nipple.

Springtime. The grief-stricken sextet go on an upstate hike to scatter Nick’s ashes from his favourite mountain. The first time they’re interrupted by a Brownies group. The second time everyone hates each other, plus Danny forgot the ashes. The third time they’re reeling from an active manhunt in the area that traps them in a retro motel overnight, in a town so depressing “Tracy Chapman sped away from it” – a joke so specific I felt it was written for middle-aged me, which is Fey’s special power. There are moments in The Four Seasons so hilarious I laughed like I do (re)watching 30 Rock. Which, considering I have a Romanian rescue dog called Lizzie Lemon, is a compliment of the highest order.

Summer: to the beach. Ginny has given birth, Danny and Claude (sort of, maybe) want a baby, and Jack has found a man friend to have play dates with on the beach. Aw, says Kate (at first): “I didn’t think middle-aged straight men could make new friends!” The conversations between Danny and Claude are particularly funny, moving, and sensitively wrought. Meanwhile Kate and Jack are “freeballing”: the name given to their decision to “grow apart on purpose”. If anyone else was writing these characters they would be insufferable. Instead, what unfolds is a beautiful meditation on the endurance test of long-term relationships.

Big Thanksgiving culminates in Jack kicking the turkey down the stairs and twisting his ankle. Little Thanksgiving travels back in time to the Covid pandemic when Steve was alive, and Anne almost left him. In many ways this second season belongs to Anne. She makes a joyous transition from lonely, fearful ex-wife to contented (enough) single woman willing to dress up as an folkloric old witch at an Italian Christmas pageant. She gets many of the best lines, and the most fabulous wardrobe.

It’s worth watching The Four Seasons for the knitwear alone. The laughably exquisite settings are straight out of a Nancy Meyers movie, and this being Fey, there’s a joke about that, too. “Life is not a Nancy Meyers movie!” claims Anne after an attempt at a summer fling goes awry. Of course, the joke is that The Four Seasons looks like a Nancy Meyers movie, but is nothing like one. Pull back the woven rug and the neutral linen curtains and – how would Meyers put it? – it’s complicated. This is a dark and difficult world in which good men smash up vintage snack shacks, regrets must be lived with, sacrifices made, childhood traumas kept buried, and people who love each other want completely different things.

I found the levels of lush lakeside lawns and lobster rolls ludicrous at first but by the time these flawed, flailing friends were wintering in the Italian alps and Kate was delivering an Emmy award-deserving speech to Jack (while running a marathon!) about her secret levels of despair, I was all in. The sublime locations are a lure to reel you into the murky depths of midlife experience. “I worry that you and I are going to get weirder and weirder and keep pulling apart until we’re living like strangers,” she wheezes, “and all the neighbourhoods kids are gonna skip our house at Halloween because we’re too creepy. And sometimes honestly I’m afraid to die and other times I’m like sure, it seems nice, the big sleep … let’s fucking do it!” At which point Kate and Jack cross the finish line together, and embrace.

Britain is “sleepwalking into a food crisis” caused by extreme weather, inflation and the impacts of the Iran war – and the government is failing to take the threat seriously, food experts have said.

Farmers are facing severe strain from the current heatwave following a dry spring, with many crops likely to yield less as temperatures rise beyond their tolerance. Livestock are also suffering heat stress and there is a rising risk of wildfires. Economic losses are likely to be measured in the hundreds of millions of pounds.

Food prices were already on track to be 50% higher this November than they were five years ago, and the current weather – with more heatwaves likely to follow in the summer, when temperatures could top 40C – is adding to the inflationary pressure.

Even if the Iran war is resolved soon, fuel and fertiliser prices will stay high until the supply crunch through the strait of Hormuz can be eased. Last week, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, floated the idea of voluntary price caps on staple foods, but was knocked back by supermarkets and opposition parties.

A group of food experts have written to ministers this week calling for the national food strategy to be updated to take account of the risks and prepare the UK for a future of higher temperatures and more severe weather.

The nine signatories to the letter include Mike Barry, the former director of sustainable business at Marks & Spencer, Anna Taylor, the executive director of the Food Foundation, and Lee Stiles, the secretary of the Lea Valley Growers’ Association. They highlighted three priorities on which they said ministers should concentrate: resilient domestic production of healthier food; greater preparedness for supply chain shocks; and access for all to safe, affordable and healthy food.

Tim Lang, a professor emeritus of food policy at City St George’s, University of London, said the government’s current strategy amounted to little more than “business as usual” and that warnings were not being heeded.

“This government has received serious scientific, intelligence and policy advice that it should take significant action on food security, but it keeps signalling all is OK. It’s not,” Lang told the Guardian. “Whether we see food security as an issue of escalating food poverty and deepening cost of living squeeze or as the ‘hard’ version of security as defence, there are no grounds for complacency.”

Ministers have failed to make the connections and are behind the public in awareness and readiness to act, according to Lang. “Volatility is the new normal. We are in escalating trouble from climate heating, geopolitics, [the cost of] living squeeze and more,” he said. “I find the public ready and willing but need leadership and support. What’s more important a state responsibility than ensuring the population can and will be fed in all circumstances?”

Richard Nugee, a retired general, who also signed the letter, told the Guardian that food security should be a top-level national security concern. “There’s the potential for food to be reduced in quantity through heat domes over grain baskets [in Europe and around the world]. The food chain is also being more damaged by war and the inability of people to export to us and us to import food. Farmers in the UK are also struggling really hard,” he said.

Nugee said civil unrest was still unlikely, but people would start to blame the government for problems with food supplies. There is potential for people “being extremely stressed by not being able to afford food and therefore taking matters into their own hands”, he said, adding: “There is the potential for disruption, of supply chains and of supply, and [the UK may not be able] to provide the sufficient food at the right price for its people. That is a national security issue.”

A report by the UK’s spy chiefs – revealed by the Guardian last year and so far only published in part – told ministers that the collapse of key ecosystems overseas was a national security risk for the UK that could lead to conflict, migration and competition for resources.

The Climate Change Committee advised government last week not to allow domestic food production to drop below 60% of the UK’s food needs, and said the damages inflicted by climate change on food production could reach more than £2bn a year in the 2030s, from about £200m today.

Jez Fredenburgh, a senior analyst for food and climate at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank, who was not a signatory to the letter, said: “Farmers and consumers cannot afford this pressure.”

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was approached for comment.