A 2014 review of Alan Alda’s 1981 directorial debut, The Four Seasons, on the website The Dissolve described it as offering an “unspeakably tedious … oppressive vision of middle age”. Kudos, then, to Netflix’s eponymous reboot of Alda’s sour portrait of midlife malaise, which is every bit as mean-spirited and pessimistic as the original – and just as deficient in laughs. It also features a honking lack of chemistry among the cast – all of whom have the body language of people who’d skip town at first opportunity rather than spend another five minutes in the company of their supposed lifelong friends. Who could blame them? Here are some of the most annoying people you are going to encounter on screen this side of The 2 Johnnies Late Night Lock-in. Jack (Will Forte) and Kate (Tina Fey) are self-satisfied New Yorkers who go on holidays with their annoying couple friends every year – a smug-fest that is derailed when hedge fund manager Nick (Steve Carell, playing a whining narcissist far too convincingly) reveals his marriage to Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) is on the rocks. READ MORE This is news to Anne, who plans to acknowledge their relationship in a highly public fashion – in front of beloved family members, including an older relative portrayed by Alda (now 89 but still with a twinkle). There are vague gestures toward a White Lotus-style deconstruction of upper-middle-class foibles – but Four Seasons lacks the electric zing of nastiness that ripped through that series. Instead, it gives us three couples (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani complete the line-up as Danny and Claude) who seemingly have nothing in common and whose banter has all the spark of an inferior Saturday Night Live sketch. There are several twists as the story traces the friendships from spring through to winter, mostly concerned with Nick’s desperate desire to rewind the years and make up for lost time. In that respect, the show seems to have stumbled upon an intriguing new premise: the midlife crisis. But this, of course, has been a staple of American mass culture all the way back to the 1980s and Alda’s original Four Seasons (plus the superior The Big Chill – that original of the Boomer pity party species). Decades on, the first Four Seasons is justly forgotten – a fate the pulse-free Netflix remake feels sure to suffer, too.