• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Yesterday

The only reason to characterize the following description of the opening sequence of “Adults” as a Spoiler Alert is that it might spoil some people’s appetite for watching the show at all.

In the show now streaming on Hulu, five 20-something friends are riding a subway when their high-spirited conversation is disrupted by the realization that a man in a suit seated nearby is publicly masturbating.

Shock gives way to anger on the part of one of the female friends, who then plunges her hand down her own pants and simulates masturbating too.

While still engaged furiously in this activity, she then rises to berate the man, apparently in an attempt to shame him for his public display, even while she undertakes her own public display that is just as odious.

In the next scene, as the group of friends is walking home, she fears that she may have overreacted. Ya think?

Maybe I’m overreacting too, but once again and for the 1,000th time, I have to ask how this kind of scene results from the process of free-wheeling brainstorming that we all believe takes place in the writers’ rooms of TV shows.

Why this idea and not a dozen or more alternatives? Maybe it has to do with an effort to push the envelope on what is permissable in TV content -- an effort that has been underway for decades already.

As always, the marketplace will decide the acceptability of a new TV show such as “Adults” and the opening scenes of its first episode described above, plus one other scene of wild sex in a bathroom.

In these ways, “Adults” seeks to be an adult “Friends.” Perhaps the 2020s are sufficiently evolved from the “Friends” era (1994-2004) that a new show seeming to be inspired by “Friends” can get down and dirty in 2025. “Ay, there’s the rub,” said Hamlet. 

“Adults” is about five friends, all single, living in Queens, New York, where they live rent-free in the home of one of their parents as mom and dad go on a very extended vacation.

As young people do, the quintet have lots of conversations about their lives, their loves, their careers, their futures, and the world and its problems. 

Twenty-something audiences might relate to them, or maybe not. I try and avoid such generalizations about social groups.

Notwithstanding the crassness (to say the least) of its public masturbation scene and later its wet and wild bathroom sex romp, the show gets better when satirizing social issues.

In the series premiere, the issue at hand is sexual harassment in the workplace as the fivesome discover that a friend of theirs is trending all over the place for his claims that he was sexually assaulted at work and came away with a $200,000 settlement.

This has one of the friends deciding to take advantage of the MeToo movement to advance her career at a fictional TV news channel. 

This fails and, in the process, emerges as the only real moment of humor in the whole show. 

Why? Because it is a punchline, which is something modern comedy on TV seems to have forgotten.