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.