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In between the first and second season of Adults, series creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw received a compliment that changed the way they thought about the Gen Z-focused comedy.
“This very amazing and incredibly public person told us, in private, that they loved the show and considered themselves to be a Samir-Billie hybrid, aspiring to be more like Anton,” says Kronengold. (He declined to name the celebrity in question, but it’s worth noting that Adults star Owen Thiele recently revealed on his podcast that Taylor Swift is an avid viewer). “We realized they were watching the show as self-analysis and self-reflection,” he adds. When the pair opened the writers room for the second season, they decided to kick things off in a similar fashion.
“We were like, we just saw this person and she said the characters are almost like your Zodiac signs — your sun, moon, and rising,” he says. “We asked everyone in the room to answer that for themselves, and it was such a good way to learn about the dimensionality of these characters, and to realize how much of each of them we had inside each of us.”
Their work on the second season had, at that point, been a long time coming. All eight episodes of the show, which follows a group of five friends sharing a house in Bayside, Queens, and is executive-produced by Nick Kroll, premiered in May 2025. The cast and crew then waited five months for FX to announce an official season two renewal (it came shortly after Kronengold and Shaw celebrated their wedding, with the cast and all of their characters’ real-life inspirations in attendance). The showrunners were optimistic that good news was coming, and had even started fleshing out the new episodes. This season sees the gang moving past the new-to-the-real-world shenanigans of last year and into juicier interpersonal drama — mainly, a love triangle between Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), Issa (Amita Rao) and Anton (Thiele) teased in last year’s finale.
