What’s so special about the Fab Four? On the surface, shows like Seinfeld, Girls, Sex and the City, The Sex Lives of College Girls, Insecure and the Good Place may not sound so similar. But they actually have a lot in common, thanks to being based around a group of four. All are known for excelling at what we’ll call the 3 C’s: character, conversation, and commentary. Here’s our take on what’s so special about the number 4 onscreen – and the four life paths we’re symbolically offered to choose between.
Transcript
What’s so special about the Fab Four? The four-person ensemble creates a particular sceen magic audiences love, especially on TV. On the surface, shows like Seinfeld, Girls, Sex and the City, The Sex Lives of College Girls, Insecure and The Good Place may not sound so similar. But they actually have a lot in common, thanks to being based around a group of four. All are known for excelling at what we’ll call the 3 C’s: character, conversation, and commentary. Let’s unpack these.
“Look, you’re a nice guy but I actually only have three friends. I don’t need anymore.”
- Seinfield
First, it’s no coincidence that four-lead shows are the ones that inspire all those quizzes and debates about which character you identify with – The four-person story is the ideal format for investigating personality, through contrasting a memorable assortment of character types.
Second, these four-person-led shows are known for their conversation – the interesting way they process ideas, often in a long-winded, colorful banter between the foursome
Third, thanks to all this conversing, Fab Four shows are really good at delivering cultural commentary and critiquing social norms of their moment.
Here’s our take on what’s so special about the number 4 onscreen – and the four life paths we’re symbolically offered to choose between.
The Four Essential Characters
There’s a reason so many of these stories inspire personality quizzes and identity crises. Actually, the four-category personality test or classification system goes back centuries. Think: the four humors, or the four elements in the zodiac, the four blood-type personalities, and of course, the four seasons. Even in stories that aren’t strictly about four main characters, we often still see four central personality types expressed symbolically: like Harry Potter’s Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff or Slytherin, or the four that get the most focus out of all the houses in Game of Thrones: Targaryen, Baratheon, Stark and Lannister. Are you a Carrie, a Samantha, a Miranda or a Charlotte? Who’s the Kramer in your group, the Jerry, the Elaine, the George? Susan, Bree, Lynette or Gaby? The Archie, Veronica, Betty or Jughead?
The first character type is The Narrator-Storyteller, or Melody. They might be a writer or in the arts, so their creative form becomes a way of expressing the show’s deeper style and perspective. This person is the social glue holding the Fab Four together, and their role is to observe and understand the spirit of their times.
“I couldn’t help but wonder… ...when did being alone become the modern day equivalent of being a leper?”
- Sex and the City
The second character is The Image-Conscious Rule-Follower. This person is generally too hung up on markers of status or what their life should be like and they reflect their society’s prevailing rules and traditional images of success. This is the character the show tends to be most critical of, but they’re also perhaps the one the show is most interested in because they capture some of the contradictions or challenges at the heart of the show’s topic.
“You frame a lot of things in your life with ‘should’.”
- Insecure
The third character is the Progressive or Intellectual one. They think for themselves and have some principles that contradict society’s norms. While they’re typically composed and professionally successful, every now and then they’re riled up into provoking a public confrontation or a scene. Even in shows that are a little more on the amoral side, this character pushes for more liberal ideals and sometimes challenges the narrator.
“How did it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?”
- Sex and the City
And finally, the fourth character is The Conversation Starter. This rulebreaker and boundary pusher gives the show its edge, delivers its most memorable moments, and inspires the most conversation about the show because they probably best embody the story’s central argument or question. They have a lot of Id – almost the opposite of type 2, they’re unconstrained by social rules about what they should act like.
“You’re back on the drink again. Come on I’ve been drinking since I was a child.”
- Girls
If we want to figure out which of these four buckets we most fit into, sometimes it helps to focus on what each one’s major challenge or flaw is. Classic cinema gave us the four archetypes of Dorothy, The Scarecrow, The Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion – and defined them all by what each worried was lacking in themselves: a brain, a heart, courage or a home. More recently, The Good Place explores four characters who arrive in the afterlife each having failed to realize their potential on earth because of a particular moral weakness: Chidi’s indecisiveness, Jason’s impulsiveness, Tahani’s need for approval and Elanor’s selfishness.
“Do you not remember one single thing about me?...Dude things have been nuts around here…You are too selfish to ever be a good person.”
- The Good Place
The Chamber Music of TV: Conversation and Commentary
The four-person ensemble is the chamber music of storytelling.
In string quartets, or in a show like Seinfeld, the number four is the sweet spot where it’s still intimate enough to hear the individual voices of each instrument, yet four is still a large enough group to offer a variety of voices and feel representative of greater society. Because of how well you can hear each voice, chamber music often has parts that sound like a musical conversation between the instruments. This can take a few forms: 1) a back and forth – listen to how the strings respond to each other developing a melody – a solo voice plays the tune, and then the other voices pick it up or call back to it later, or 3) Harmony – multiple voices within the quartet unite in a certain musical agreement.
Let’s take a look at this same type of conversation in action in a scene from Seinfeld.
In “The Contest” episode, George introduces a topic:
“My mother caught me…caught you doing what? you know…”
The other voices provide a banter of back and forth to develop his story:
“My mother had a glamour magazine I started leafing through…Glamour?...I didn’t know whether to keep her from falling or zip up, so what did you do, I zipped up.”
And this leads to the development of the episode’s melody or theme, as Jerry and George decide to make a bet:
“I’ll tell you this though, I am never doing that again…Oh yeah give me a break…you think you could/ well I know I could hold out longer than you.”
Kramer and Elaine pick up the melody too:
“Count me in on this, you? you’ll be out before the check”
while the men harmonize in their objections that Elaine has an unfair advantage:
“I wanna be in on this too to, no no, that’s outrageous it’s a whole different thing, why cause you’re a woman.”
This conversational exchange also happens on the episodic, plot level. In Seinfeld, the characters’ plots usually converge in the end, leading to a final button that hammers home some unifying irony or comeuppance. Sex and the City organizes many episodes around a particular dating question for urban women over 30, and it replies to that question through the four women each experiencing a plot that provides a partial answer– thus, the four voices in harmony add up to a nuanced resolution to the topic.
Conversation-driven storytelling allows Fab Four stories to center on subjects that are a little more abstract or open-ended than your average show – from single life or young millennial women’s post-college years to the frustrations of suburban marriages or the nature of the afterlife. Fab Four shows often feature the four central characters sharing regular meals and unpacking what’s going on in each others’ lives. The beauty is that these group chat scenes get to spend time on what more plot-driven stories consider unimportant minutia. This captures the realistic way people actually talk and the kinds of things that take up our focus in a day – and it also allows for exploring topics that aren’t often covered on TV. Shows from Seinfeld to Girls to Sex and the City were seen as envelope-pushing in their time because they often discussed things most shows glossed over.
In Sex Lives of College Girls, the four central roommates offer different perspectives on whether Bella should report an assault by an upperclassman, and the interplay between contrasting points of view adds up to honesty about the complexity of her choice.
Yeah she’s right reporting it may not be a good idea. What? Hey I don’t like it…Don’t listen to her…He needs to pay…Hold on maybe as a first step you can go to another upperclassman and ask what they think…”
In The Good Place, the central four characters who meet in the afterlife get to dissect dry topics like moral philosophy which the vast majority of TV assumes is way over audiences’ heads - but the interplay between the four voices makes it lively and relatable.
“We’re talking David Hume today bundle theory of the self, sounds like a real banger.”
All this conversing helps these shows pull off the third C in our list: offering insightful commentary on social norms and etiquette of their day. Seinfeld, famously called a “show about nothing,” was really about critiquing the customs in society that we frequently don’t question but are actually absurd while many of the things these shows pay attention to may seem small, these details can be revealing windows into larger truths. Take this conversation from Season 2, Episode 10 of Sex and the City, when the ladies are discussing Miranda’s love interest, Steve. As they banter about whether a relationship can work between a high-earning lawyer like Miranda and a working-class bartender like Steve, what follows is an exchange of multiple dominant points of view about class in the late 90s.
This guy is working class…It’s the Millennium. We don’t say things like “working class” anymore…You’re trying to pretend we live in a classless society…and we don’t.
Meanwhile, this scene is also a perfect illustration of how the four-person conversation illuminates character. Each of the Fab Four is responding to the topic of class by being classically themselves — Charlotte is concerned with social norms and appearances:
“It’s normal for the man to make more money”
Samantha is just focusing on pleasure:
“How’s he in bed?
Miranda’s critiquing the double standards of how her own success is held against her:
“When single men have a lot of money, it’s to their advantage. If a single woman has money, it’s a problem to be dealt with.”
And Carrie is chiming in with pithy doses of humor:
“Okay Marie antoinette we get the picture”
or making it about herself and her own love life:
“Rich men date not-so-rich women all the time. Look at me and Big.”
Outro
What’s perhaps most remarkable about a lot of these four-person stories is that they spend their screentime talking about topics that conventional wisdom previously said couldn’t work on TV.
But the four-person magic proves to us that audiences do want windows into real life – the actual talks we’re having, the norms we’re brushing up against in daily existence, and the central drives that shape our personalities. Shows that leave space for conversation and character development capture something specific about their times and process social questions with honesty. And there’s nothing that makes for better, more satisfying TV.