Freeballing
The Four Seasons almost got it right. Then it panicked.
The Four Seasons is Netflix’s Vivaldi-titled remake of the 1981 film, a rom-com built specifically around what happens after the wedding, when the rose-tinted glasses have taken on a shade of grey, and the beloved is cause for tenderness and annoyance in equal measure. You know, real love.
If you’re as excited as I am, wait for it: it gets even better. At some point, a husband tells his wife they should each be responsible for their own happiness. I was on the sofa when he said it. I nodded so hard my head ached. In fact, I didn’t just nod: I yelled “Yes! Finally!” so loud I gave my husband a fright.
That sentence encapsulates the whole reason to watch. This is a show that spends its runtime on the terrain romance usually skips — fidelity and lack thereof, grief, the kid question, the specific unglamorous boredom of a person you chose on purpose and are now ordering the same anniversary dinner with for the eleventh year running. It’s also, refreshingly, unpredictable. There are at least two or three turns I didn’t see coming, and that’s in a genre that tends to be predictable by contract.
Cherry on top? They cast an actual Italian to play the Italian, not the generic Latin-adjacent performance the industry usually reaches for — see House of Gucci, a film that remains, to anyone who’s ever lived here, a genuine act of hostility.
And when the show shoots in Italy, it skips Rome, Venice and (God forbid) Florence for Trento — a real place, treated mostly with real respect, one Befana bit stretched for comedy notwithstanding.
Which brings me back to the sofa.
“We’re each responsible for our own happiness.”
Truer words have rarely been spoken. Love doesn’t entail being each other’s happiness project — for the simple reason that any such effort is doomed to fail in the best case, and turn into some toxic codependency in the worst. The couple call the experiment freeballing, and for about four minutes, this show is braver than almost anything else in its genre.
Except.
It doesn’t test the idea. It sabotages it. The characters don’t practice independence, they just stop being decent to each other — drift far enough apart that one of them turns up alone to a family holiday because she couldn’t be bothered to wait for the other. “When we were freeballing, it was horrible,” they conclude, and of course it was — if by freeballing you mean reverting to teenager-worthy dickish behavior. The show can’t tell the difference between autonomy and neglect, so it blames the premise instead of the execution.
And lo and behold, where do we end up? You guessed it: a reaffirmation of the Standard Model. The one the genre is hellbent on selling you as the One and Only acceptable form of love — same bed, same finances, same holidays, same friends, etc. The Four Seasons hands you a legitimate, healthy alternative, lets it breathe for one genuinely thrilling scene, and then chickens out.
I have to say, I was very disappointed.
Because the standard model is not hard to write. In fact, we’ve hardly written anything else in the genre. Two people who don’t need each other, but still choose each other — that’s the actual plot nobody’s brave enough to finish.