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 — watch the trailer that just dropped, below).
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.
Below, Shaw and Kronengold explain what went down behind the scenes of the long-awaited renewal and tease what fans can expect in season two.
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First, I’m curious about the decision to drop a surprise prequel episode ahead of the second season; whose idea was that?
BEN KRONENGOLD FX came to us and said, how should we welcome viewers back, do you have any ideas for something big and out of the box? Since we started the series by dropping people into the middle of this friend group, we figured we should do an origin story. It’s also a way to bring in new audiences who weren’t there last year when the show came out.
REBECCA SHAW We liked the challenge of doing two meet-cutes in a single episode. There’s the initial meet-cute of Paul Baker and Issa finding each other, but it also alludes to a deeper, sweeter connection between Paul Baker and Anton.
Last year, as season one was releasing, what were you paying attention to — with fan reaction and the like — to help gauge whether the show was a success?
SHAW We really do think the show got renewed because of the connection that fans felt to the characters.
KRONENGOLD We’d be walking around New York with the cast, to get a coffee or dinner, and we’d see people stopping them in the street, and then doing one thing in particular which was to FaceTime in the rest of their friend groups.
Did you feel like you needed to advocate for the show’s renewal? Or did you know all along that it was going to happen and you just had to wait for that official word?
KRONENGOLD More the latter. FX are really good advocates for their shows. We had a shared text group with our execs and we’d all share stories about fan responses. And we were all equally interested in, can this kind of show break through and connect with people?
What were your priority storylines for season two, things that you knew from the jump you needed to cover?
SHAW We left the season one finale on a cliffhanger of a blossoming love triangle, so that was the biggest question going into season two. We knew we had to get it right. It’s a full triangle: Anton and Paul Baker have a connection; Paul Baker and Issa are dating; Anton and Issa are best friends. So we wanted to do all sides of that justice. It wasn’t going to be an illicit, sleeping with each other behind everyone’s back kind of plot line.
As Luca Guadagnino says, all sides of the triangle have to touch.
KRONENGOLD Yes, Challengers was a big reference. The thematic thrust of season one adulthood proper, and responsibility and maturity. Season two is about the friend group, and the secrets they keep.
SHAW In 201, the first episode back, it felt like the most true thing to our generation and our friends would be that Issa decides essentially nothing happened. She clocked the kiss [between Anton and Paul Baker], but she hasn’t gone to enough therapy so she decides that if she just ignores it, it will probably go away. So much of your twenties is about transference and projection. We decided she’d put a lot of that energy into this revelation that Paul Baker has a secret friend group; that’s an easier thing to talk about, and it’s a lowercase-b betrayal compared to, Paul Baker might have feelings for my best friend. She won’t be ready to look at this thing head on until a few episodes later.
Adults gets a lot of comparisons to Friends, and one similarity I notice is the way that you’re constantly changing up which characters have storylines together from episode to episode. Do you have rule about that?
KRONENGOLD We got to speak to Marta [Kauffman] and David [Crane] before we shot season one, and we asked them this exact question. The answer we were expecting was that you don’t have to keep track. What they did, really wisely, was share with us that in fact you have to keep close count. You have to watch how you’re distributing story among the characters, not for the sake of the actors but for the sake of servicing an ensemble show well.
SHAW No character should ever feel reduced, and every character needs to take two step backwards for every one step forward. Something we talked about a lot in this season’s writers room was how to put people together in unexpected pairings. One of my favorite plotlines is between Paul Baker and Billy, where he gives her advice about how to get a job and it goes incredibly poorly.
KRONENGOLD We also made it a point to showcase Issa and Samir together. The two of them bring out an almost feral side of each other. We have a storyline where Samir helps Issa freeze her eggs, and it gets really wild. Malik and Amita are also really talented physical comedians and we wanted to let them bounce off each other.
That episode reminded me of the episode of Friends when Rachel won’t take her eyedrops and they have to get physical with her.
KRONENGOLD The medical problem meets incompetence is always a really fun sitcom intersection.
FX’s ‘Adults.’
Similarly, do you have a rule about how you handle conflict between characters on the show?
KRONENGOLD We’ve never been attracted to stories where characters aren’t speaking to each other for five episodes. This is a love story about five people. We’re not interested in a friendship breakup.
SHAW One of our executive producers came up in indie film, and she was really helpful in guiding that pathos. Sometimes we would say, oh, the characters aren’t mad at each other. and she would say, they can’t get to the next level of a friendship until you move through things. So that helped us introduce a little more drama and tension, but always in service of them becoming better friends.
Being on FX lends the show the ability to really push the boundaries on its jokes; like the guy masturbating on the subway in the pilot. Did you ever have a backup plan for a version of this show without that leeway — say on Netflix or something similar?
KRONENGOLD Look, one of our producers is Nick Kroll. He knows how to go there. But to us, it’s way more interesting to look at what’s on the other side of a joke like that. So we open the show on that subway masturbation scene, but to us, the show is about the scene flip that comes right afterwards, when we smash to Issa walking down the street saying, “Was that bad? Did I make a huge mistake?” And the friends tell her no, you’re perfect and brave. That, to us, is our show in a nutshell.
SHAW And by the way, these are four friends who 30 seconds previous were begging her to stop. So much of your early twenties is watching your friends make huge mistakes and then going 10 toes down for them on the other side of it. But we’re lucky FX let us show a really true and raw form of that.
Has it been hard to shoot in Toronto when the show takes place in New York?
SHAW When we first found out we’d be shooting in Toronto, it required a little bit of an adjustment in our minds. But being on location helped the show feel like sleepaway camp for the actors. It turned into a workshop. I also think, to the extent that there is a sixth character on this show, it isn’t the city but the house.
Can you talk about finding the guest stars for this season?
SHAW We knew we wanted to meet a family member of Anton’s, so we were figuring out, who could have the charisma of Owen Thiele and go toe to toe with him? Raven-Symoné and Owen are friends outside of the show, and we were screaming when we found out she wanted to do the show. We also liked the idea of showing a different side of people; audience haven’t heard Raven-Symoné curse very much. Gaten Matarazzo is playing sort of a sexy role, where Billie’s dragging him into the bathroom. And the meta element of getting Zosia Mamet to call them out and say, “You guys think you’re the first people to be young and adorable in New York?” was a truly out of body experience. We wrote that really hoping she would do it. She’s a really incredible improviser and we really hope she comes back for more.