- Share via
In many ways, Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold are adults. Their Yale comedy sketch-cum-graduation speech in 2018 went viral, and they got jobs as the youngest writers ever for “The Tonight Show.” Since then, they’ve written multiple movie scripts and a book, “Naked in the Rideshare,” together. They’re on their third New York apartment now, this one in Greenwich Village. But it’s a brand-new apartment, and — the day before The Times called them for a joint video interview — the pair said they cried on the phone with Con Edison while trying to set up their electricity. What’s more 20-something than that?
Shaw, 29, and Kronengold, 28, politely unsubscribe from identifying as either Gen Z or millennials, but some days they feel like they’re 85 and some days they feel like “the stupidest 14-year-olds that have been let out of school early,” Kronengold said. And that’s incredibly 20-something, too, or maybe it’s just human. Either way, it positions the pair well to create, write and executive produce “Adults,” a new FX comedy premiering May 28 about 20-somethings living in Bayside, Queens, far from the heart of New York City. In this series, there are five of them: Samir (Malik Elassal), 24, who offers his parents’ empty house as a cozy crash pad for his friends Billie (Lucy Freyer), 24; Anton (Owen Thiele), 24; Issa (Amita Rao), 23; and Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), 26.
“It’s this time of life when your most intimate relationships aren’t your romantic relationships — they’re your friends,” Shaw said. “That’s who you’re vulnerable with and who you fight with and who you prioritize over everything. So in a lot of ways, the show is a love letter to our friends.”
The characters are based on Shaw and Kronengold’s friends, but not directly. They’re amalgamations of the people who hang out on their couch: They have three or four Paul Bakers in their lives and a few Billies. And everyone in the writers room — Stefani Robinson, Sarah Naftalis, Curtis Cook, Allie Levitan, Sanaz Toossi and Shaun Menchel — knows an Issa. That was a big takeaway: Characters like these, whether on “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “Girls” or “Broad City,” iterate in every generation because this era of life has remained, well, largely the same.
“One of the things that we said in the room early on is, ‘Yes, they’re young, but they’re also the oldest they’ve ever been,’ ” Kronengold said. “So we wanted to give them that agency to march into everything head-on — even if that thing was a glass wall.”
That universality, coupled with the sense that before the prefrontal cortex has fully formed, feelings will always run hot and bright, meant that the writers had a lot of empathy for these characters. This is a comedy, yes, but not a satire: These are just five kids — sorry, adults — who are trying their damnedest, whether at the bank, with a hospital bill or even roasting a chicken.
This is not, if you haven’t realized it yet, “Sex and the City.” “As much as this isn’t wish fulfillment in the classic sense of a glamorous Manhattan apartment, cosmopolitans every night — it’s wish fulfillment because they’re really happy there,” Shaw said of the characters. “They have all these dreams of where they want to be, but you get the sense that this is going to be a time of life they’re going to look back on.”
That goes for the actors in the series as well, most of whom are fresh faces. Get to know them here.
Amita Rao, 26
she/her | plays: Issa, 23
Amita Rao has been herself for a very long time. She discovered comedy when she was 15 and thought that making people laugh sounded like the best job in the world. (See: all of her high school diary entries.) She went to school for acting, which taught her to embody herself, to trust her body and to live in it. Then she moved to Chicago to train in long-form improv, first at the Annoyance Theater and then at Second City.
To her, the way you “stand out as any performer is straddling that line of allowing the collective experience to inhabit you while bringing your voice forward enough to bring that own specificity,” Rao said. “I think the combo of improv and acting allowed me to figure out how to do that.”
She inhabits each character fully, down to their fingertips, whether that’s as a member of a fictional basketball team, the Jonestown Jumpers, at the Annoyance; the neurotic, intense but ultimately chill Nandika on “Deli Boys;” or Issa on “Adults,” the youngest and perhaps most Gen Z of the bunch. Rao sees herself as Gen Z too — it’s something she thinks about a lot — but she’s not nearly as self-absorbed. Although she loves that about her character.
Issa, she says, is always at the party in her head. Who wouldn’t want to be there? “I loved that she had all the right beliefs and all the wrong actions,” Rao said. “Her heart was in all the right places and her actions were in all the wrong places.”
Virgo (Her Enneagram is more accurate, but that’s classified)
Which Face Is Real? (On Safari, on her phone)
The three finger puppets in her purse (Left at Owen’s apartment)
Owen Thiele, 28
he/him | plays: Anton, 24
Owen Thiele hates the word “multihyphenate.” He would never describe himself that way — but it’s a little bit true. His podcast, “In Your Dreams With Owen Thiele,” a wry nod to his chronic insomnia, has recently hosted the likes of Holly Madison, Geraldine Viswanathan and Benny Blanco. As an actor, Thiele has graced screens big (“Theater Camp,” “Parachute”) and small (“Dollface,” “Overcompensating”).
Compared with the more narrow role actors played in the past, “there’s something really beautiful about today where we can kind of be everything and not be judged for it,” Thiele said. “I think I’m really lucky to get to show myself through podcasting and also then be a different kind of person in a film or a TV show.”
But “Adults” marks Thiele’s first time as a lead, something he finally gets to sink his teeth into. When he read the script, “I have never in my life laughed five times per page, and I have never wanted to leap into this world so badly,” Thiele said. “I felt like Alice, but wanting to go into Wonderland.”
At first, Anton was maybe the most mature of the group. He’s insightful in a way that Thiele really respected, holding a quiet, powerful energy. As the filming and season went on, Shaw and Kronengold asked Thiele (and the rest of the cast) to add parts of themselves to their roles. Now, Anton is friendly to a fault, chock-full of charisma, and maybe lacking a few boundaries (Thiele would never).
Scorpio (But not in a scary way)
Iced matcha, as sweet as possible
Drugstore reading glasses (Solely for the Look)
Malik Elassal, 29
he/him | plays: Samir, 24
It was probably Spider-Man, the Tobey Maguire version, who made Malik Elassal want to be an actor: “Spider-Man is my guy.” The movie was the first thing Elassal remembers watching that — when he walked out of the theater — made him want to do that too.
So in high school, Elassal auditioned for the Calgary Young People’s Theatre’s “Count of Monte Cristo.” The rest is history. Since then, Elassal was named one of the New Faces of Comedy at Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival, returning to perform in its “Just for the Culture” showcase and landing on Vulture’s 2024 “Comedians You Should and Will Know” list.
“I like that you don’t have to be right,” Elassal said. “You don’t have to have the answers. You’re just showing where you are.” The type of comedy he likes poses responses to what’s happening right now, “And, right or wrong, you’re just seeing where I sit inside of that.”
It’s the same reason he loves “Adults.” “All these characters are often wrong, but there’s a lot of purity in their being wrong,” he said. “They’re just genuine people a lot of the time, and they’re just trying to be good people. … But that doesn’t always mean that they have the right take or behavior.”
Elassal plays Samir, who’s trying hard to be the man of the house. He auditioned with a scene (now tweaked) in which everyone at a bank is judging Samir, hard. “I always jump to that worst-case scenario, like, what if that happens to me?” Elassal said. “And it was like, oh man, this guy is my kind. Man after my own heart.”
Aries (Texted his mom in real time, unprompted, to confirm his birth time)
Mr. Mattress merch (Probably the best place he’s worked, other than “Adults”)
Poking his head into a doorway, cartoon style
Lucy Freyer, 28
she/her | plays: Billie, 24
A year and a half ago, if you asked Lucy Freyer to describe her dream job, she would have described “Adults.” She was looking for a comedy that was genuinely funny — and not sitcom, wink-wink funny. She wanted to work with talented people who could also be incredible friends off-screen, and she was hoping for a creative team she could inherently trust. “So to then have that all come true is, like, ‘Oh, my God. Pinch me,’ ” she said.
When Freyer was at Juilliard, she was drawn toward lighter-hearted, contemporary comedy. After Juilliard, she found that in her film debut “Paint,” with Owen Wilson and Michaela Watkins. And now, the dream job.
“Things that require you to be one thing, like the ‘this’ type of girl or the ‘that’ type of girl, I never book,” Freyer said. “I never fall into any one of those specific boxes. I’m a little too this to be that, or a little too that to be this. That gets frustrating. But then the beauty of it is, when a role like this comes along that isn’t any one particular thing but is a really fully fleshed out human, I can fall into that box.”
Freyer plays Billie, who ostensibly has her life together. But then s— hits the fan and suddenly Billie is adrift. “Everything she does, she wants to be the best at,” Freyer said. “Even if it’s being a f—-up, she’s like, ‘I want to be the best version of that.’ … That was something in drama school that I had to have really shaken out of me, this need to get things right.”
Pisces (She’s not a big Zodiac person, but she is a Pisces)
The Mondo Mondo golden heart necklace she wears every day
“Degrassi: The Next Generation”
Jack Innanen, 26
he/him | plays: Paul Baker, 26
Jack Innanen was actually just talking to Malik Elassal yesterday. Innanen told Elassal that he still wasn’t entirely convinced that he didn’t get hit by a truck on the way to the chemistry read and that he hasn’t been in a coma this whole time. “Adults” feels almost too good to be true.
While at the University of Toronto, Innanen started crafting Snapchat sketches for friends, then shifted to creating content full time a year later. Now he produces videos — absurd, offbeat, boundlessly creative — on TikTok for 3.3 million followers.
“I just really loved messing around on camera, making videos, trying to storytell, having fun and just fell in love with comedy … and fell in love with acting and performing,” Innanen said. This experience has “solidified that within me — that I want to try everything and be the best performer or actor or comedian.”
Paul Baker (a “firsty-lasty,” who goes by both names) is Innanen’s first lead role, and this is among his first professional acting jobs. The character recently moved to New York from Canada, and has been bouncing between friend groups since. He’s trying to figure out who he clicks with and who he is — and he reminds Innanen a bit of himself a few years ago.
“It was almost like therapy,” he said, “just really diving into who this guy is, and what parts I related to, and if those were good or bad parts. And I think you do that all throughout your 20s, and [it’s] kind of what the show is about: it’s just analyzing who you are.”
An April Aries
Premade Target charcuterie packs (They’re like adult Lunchables)
Books he already has, but on ThriftBooks with cooler covers
“Adults” premieres May 28 at 9 p.m. PT on FX with two episodes, and all eight episodes will be available to stream on Hulu the following day.
The complete guide to home viewing
Get Screen Gab for everything about the TV shows and streaming movies everyone’s talking about.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
