Comedy’s new generation finds its absurdist voice

THE CREATORS OF FX’S ADULTS MUST HAVE known comparisons between their show and Girls were inevitable, because they leaned way into them. Beyond the similar titles, both comedies follow 20-something friends in New York City.

- BY JUDY BERMAN

There’s an explicit callback in Adults’ premiere to Girls’ pilot, when Lena Dunham’s narcissistic aspiring writer informs her parents she might be “a voice of a generation.” Adults abbreviates this cliché as “V of our G,” and applies it to a media-savvy young man who becomes the envy of his peers after a workplace sexual-harassment scandal lands him a six-figure payout.

Equal parts tribute and send-up, the moment cleverly heralds the arrival of a new generation anointing its own voices. Adults is the creation of Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold, a couple and comedy team whose Yale graduation speech went viral in 2018. Along with comedian Benito Skinner’s college-set Prime Video romp Overcompensating, it’s the second hangout comedy to debut in May from creators born in the mid-’90s. Neither as internet-addled nor as pandemic-damaged as you might expect, these shows update the genre with all the absurdism and self-awareness of a generation that distracts itself from a world in crisis by binge-ing Girls, Friends, and Sex and the City.

While previous zeitgeisty series about young adults in New York were set in aspirational environs, Adults gestures toward Gen Z’s limited horizons by packing its five characters into one guy’s childhood home in an unfashionable part of Queens. Timid sweetheart Samir (Malik Elassal) is the man of the house, fumbling through challenges like a broken water heater. Issa (Amita Rao) is a dramatic, sexually liberated heir to