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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Entertainment
Adrian Horton

Adults review – Friends for the TikTok generation sitcom is a try-hard misfire

three people sitting close together
Amita Rao, Lucy Freyer and Owen Thiele in Adults. Photograph: Rafy/FX

Adults, FX’s new twentysomething comedy implicitly pitched as the Friends or Girls for the TikTok and location-sharing generation, opens with a studiously replicated scene of codependent young adulthood: five friends tangled together on a New York subway, their belongings and in-group references strewn between each other. In barely a minute, the characters gab in the way you’d imagine adult-adults imagine young-adults speak, breezing through exposition, getting high, being broke and not having enough hot water to shower.

This being New York, there’s also a subway masturbator, which Issa (Amita Rao), the loudest and bawdiest of a loud and bawdy group, handles by over-engaging, attempting to out-masturbate the creep. “Is this the world you want?!” she shouts, to the horror of everyone else on the train.

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