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The potential glimpsed in the first season of “The Four Seasons” remains stubbornly out of reach in Season 2. Arguably, it’s the same potential that was evident from the series announcement: Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Colman Domingo, Will Forte - these are great performers to build a sitcom around, and co-creators Lang Fisher, Tracey Wigfield, and Fey are ideal craftspeople. But rather than engage with the project in front of them, as it evolves from episode to episode and season to season, the assembled team appears content to sacrifice every modicum of ambition and simply coast on their innate appeal.

Despite the shocking loss of their friend, each couple ends up better off by season’s end than they were at the start - save for Ginny (Erika Henningsen), Nick’s young girlfriend, who admits to being pregnant with her dead lover’s baby right before the credits roll. That last-second reveal tees up Season 2 to embrace change in any number of ways.

For one, the baby ties Ginny to the friend group even more than their promise to honor Nick’s memory with yet another holiday, which is important, because otherwise she could lift right out. It also provides a clear call to action: the trip to honor Nick. Not only does it offer a reset after a death that felt too heavy for a show of this frivolity to handle, but it could also rally the friends “Three Couples and a Baby”-style, wherein they commit to helping out the single mom until she gets on her post-pregnancy feet (thus eliminating the need for all of these increasingly disconnected couples to find a reason to take a vacation every three months - they can hang out in one of their palatial homes, all our clever comics under one roof, taking care of a cute little kiddo).

Really, even those missed adjustments may not have mattered if “The Four Seasons” chose to either earnestly wrestle with mortality (and accept the tear-jerking drama that requires) or run the other way and turn their altered group dynamic into a chaotic comedy of errors. Instead, Season 2 remains frustratingly mediocre; a kind-of funny, sporadically poignant “comedy” in which every scene feels like it could be vastly more effective if it weren’t in service of a series so stubbornly committed to being OK at everything that it’s never great at anything.

The fourth episode, written and directed by Wigfield, comes the closest to reaching the high ceiling “The Four Seasons” never hits. Domingo and Fey get snarky, a clever visual gag earns a surprise laugh, the dialogue is sharper than usual, and the main pairings get jumbled up with purposeful, delightful results.

"Why do I keep making these jacked-up decisions?," Anne asks Danny, in one of their rare one-on-one sit-downs. “Maybe it's because we're old,” he says. “The stakes are too high. Every decision feels like I'm trying to stick the landing on my entire fucking life." Then, quietly, as if she knows this conversation is unlike so many others she’s been in of late, Anne slyly says, "Well, at least it's almost done.”

For once, the big laugh she gets out of her friend can be shared by their audience, in part because “The Four Seasons” is broaching the darker territory it typically only feigns toward. But it doesn’t last. The series is built to sustain those conversations, but it doesn’t evolve enough to allow space for them to land. It’s exactly what we saw in Season 1, no better, no worse - unless you factor in wasted potential.

“The Four Seasons” Season 2 premieres Thursday, May 28 on Netflix. All eight episodes will be released at once.