Adults season two premieres August 27 on FXX and Hulu.
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Adults season two premieres August 27 on FXX and Hulu.
The tricky thing about hanging out with Amita Rao, who plays Issa, the roommate with main-character energy on the FX sitcom Adults, is remembering she is not Issa. Except when she totally is. Issa would bring a picnic and sketchbooks and miniature watercolor palettes to meet up with a stranger, for instance. But Issa probably wouldn’t casually mention the Jungian concept of “creative depression” or cop to the fact that her sense of humor is a “trauma response from social alienation.” She would, however, describe an ex as a “thembo.”
We’re perched atop the hilly Sunset Park at Rao’s favorite picnic spot in the city, sitting on a blanket that emerged from her giant tote along with wraps (chickpea for her, chicken for me) and art supplies. She whips out a Sharpie. “This exercise will be familiar to you from ‘doodling in class,’” she says, then starts a curvy line I continue into some loops, and soon we’ve drawn the outline of a face that we go on to fill in with watercolors in fantastical shades. “I think he’s a general. What do you think his name is?” she asks. I am most assuredly in the presence of someone who has a background in improv and has dabbled in clown. I feel like I could sit here and draw with Rao forever except it’s 90 degrees and humid and eventually we’re going to have to pee.
Feeling entertained and engaged with only the slightest tinge of discomfort is not unlike the experience of watching Adults. Originally conceived by then-20-somethings Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold as a Friends for Gen Z, the show is making a bid for a wider audience in its second season. Four college friends who live together in New York City — smirky perfectionist Anton (Owen Thiele), innocent Samir (Malik Elassal), hapless striver Billie (Lucy Freyer), and quirked-up sexpot Issa — adopt a sexually fluid, golden-retriever-ish Canadian named Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), who becomes Issa’s boyfriend. Now the adults are growing up a little bit, and that adds depth to the show but doesn’t sacrifice jokes.
All the roommates were relative unknowns when they were cast, but Rao, 27, has been doing theater since kindergarten in Virginia; by 9th grade, she would memorize Netflix specials by comedians such as Aziz Ansari and Ali Wong and perform them for her friends. There was never any doubt in her mind about what she would be when she grew up. After forming a sketch troupe called Gag Reflex at Virginia Commonwealth University with her best friend, Chelsea Matkins, she moved to Chicago to soak up the improv scene there. She got a manager after being selected for Saturday Night Live’s showcases in Chicago and Los Angeles at 23, then spent a little over a year auditioning fruitlessly while slipping into what she describes as a “depressive episode.” This is when Jung came up. “I think the brain and the heart and the soul are doing something in that period where you don’t feel alive. Not that I would ever be like, I should have experienced that,” she says. After meds and therapy got her -feeling alive again, she experienced what she calls a “creative wave” and immediately booked her first three TV gigs — supporting parts on The Emperor of Ocean Park and Deli Boys and then Adults.
The pilot turned off so many viewers that the show creators developed a “prequel episode,” which is now listed as the first in the series — essentially a do-over. FX executives could measurably tell viewers had dipped out at various points during the pilot, including when Issa starts aggressively masturbating at a perv on the subway, a perfect encapsulation of her character. Rao plays Issa as someone who rides the fine line between fearless and clinically disinhibited but whose intentions are always pure; why shouldn’t that perv get a taste of his own medicine? “She has such a good heart, and she loves so hard. I totally identify with Issa in that way,” Rao says.
I came to Adults fandom late, coerced into watching by a younger colleague who was mildly disappointed in me for gulping down the first season of Mindy Kaling’s recent frothy roommate show Not Suitable for Work. He told me that, unlike NSFW, in which the characters are 20-somethings by default, Adults is as accurate a portrayal of his generation as he has come across on TV. The roommates don’t easily slot into sitcom archetypes. Each of them is at times the hot one, the funny one, and the chaos agent, and Issa is all of those things at once as well as the glue. Her improv energy keeps the roommates “yes, and”–ing, perpetuating the ridiculous situations they inevitably find themselves in. The Adults roommates also do drugs, have tattoos, and aren’t defined by their jobs, which they either don’t have or don’t take too seriously. It’s a calming fantasy of young adulthood in which the stakes are never too high — they live in Samir’s parents’ house, so no one pays rent — and the borough of Queens (played by Toronto) they inhabit welcomes their presence as long as they don’t try too hard to take over the homeowners association.
Rao explains that the cast’s intense chemistry was manufactured deliberately by Kronengold and Shaw, who paid for the actors to spend three weeks in Toronto before season-one shooting began. “They locked us in a hotel room and said, ‘When at least two of you have come, just knock on the door,’ ” Rao says, and then, as I convulse with laughter, keeps the bit going. “Well, they really only cared about the girls coming. The guys probably come every day. With the girls, it was like, ‘Prove that you can make a woman come and then knock on the door.’ Jack and Owen really took that super-seriously.” She pauses, then lands on a button. “Malik had trouble with it, of course.”
Kronengold and Shaw’s gamble paid off; the cast bonded so deeply that they soon became close to inseparable. “It just sort of snowballed, and we started hanging out every night after that, getting room service and catching each other up on our entire lives,” Elassal says. “We’d go vintage shopping and hang out all day. It felt like Kevin McCallister at the Plaza Hotel in Home Alone 2, just getting to do whatever we wanted.”
Innanen recalls the first time he met Rao at a chemistry read in March 2024. “She walked in in a full parka coat and sat right next to me. She told me later that she sat next to me because I seemed safe, and I remember thinking that was such a compliment and also so Issa and Paul in a beautiful way,” he says. “I was alone in the corner because I was so nervous. She then proceeded to take her parka on and off 15 times over the next few hours. It was the best introduction to Amita and Issa I could’ve asked for.”
In season two, the roommates’ bonds are tested. In “Raccoon,” Issa is tasked with ridding the house of not one but two invading animals and dealing with the unignorable sexual tension between Paul Baker and Anton, who, for plot and green-card reasons, got married at the end of season one. “Amita has to keep the character emotionally grounded. All these wild decisions are these dominoes that are falling, and it’s on her to make you believe it makes sense,” says Oz Rodriguez, who directed the episode. Rao found it easy to relate to Issa’s relationship drama, which comes to a head right after the roommates all eat acid tabs. An opossum enters the mix at a maximally inopportune moment that I’m not permitted to spoil. The show’s range — heartbreaking, horny, and gut-punchingly hilarious — is on display in a ten-second clip, most of which tracks the expression in Rao’s eyes.
Kronengold and Shaw decided to have some fun with Rao by telling the cast that Amita would have to spend several weekends alone in her trailer with the opossum. “The lights would be off, of course, so the possum could get used to her scent. The cast was horrified on Amita’s behalf. The only problem was Amita was excited,” Kronengold says. Rao remembers being crestfallen when she learned she’d been pranked. “I was so pissed off,” Rao says. “They got me so excited for no reason.”
As we draw portraits of each other (“It’s okay if you give me body dysmorphia,” she tells me), our conversation covers astrology, AI data centers, and birth order before I interrupt her lavish praise of my (bad) drawing to turn the conversation back to her career. She shot her first movie this summer, a Maya Hawke rom-com with lots of comedian cameos, and she says in the future, she wants to do horror and action movies because she loves “throwing my body around.” Still, she’s most excited about a recent run of improv shows in New York with her Gag Reflex partner Matkins, including a festival called About to Bust that showcased women, femme, and non-binary comedians. Her drawing of me comes out pretty solid (if much too flattering). “I fucked up your eyes, but I think there’s something there,” she says, handing me the sketchbook as a keepsake.
