FX “Adults” Season 2: Everything Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw Revealed at ATX

The creators and showrunners of FX’s Adults helped close out ATX TV Festival 2026 in an intimate microprogram that revealed Season 1 secrets and teased what’s to come in Season 2. Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw sat down with moderator Alan Sepinwall to reflect on the breakout success, going viral, and how they keep the energy going.

Adults was born out of a specific feeling. Kronengold and Shaw, who connected over a mutual love of Friends and How I Met Your Mother while writing for late-night television, found themselves asking a simple question: where was the hangout show for their generation?

"We grew up on this genre," Kronengold said. "And when we found ourselves in a position to have a stab at being part of that conversation, it was really humbling." The show they made is self-aware about the tradition it's entering. Their characters, Kronengold noted, would probably recognize the tropes they're living in. "Issa, Paul Baker, and Anton would deep down know, 'Oh, we can't be the love triangle right now,'" he joked.

Both creators were careful about the weight of being labeled a Gen Z touchstone. Friends is Gen X. New Girl and How I Met Your Mother are millennial. Adults may be the first major hangout show aimed squarely at the generation after them. "We did not want to purport to represent Gen Z," Shaw said. "We can't even begin to. All we can do is say: these are kind of our friends, these are their stupid decisions. That was a good place to start."

The characters themselves are composites of real people, but the specificity is very much drawn from life. Billy, for instance, is built from friends who care deeply about work but also show up for the people they love in ways that don't always look respectable on paper. 

Paul Baker's origins were a little harder to pin down. "That guy is hard to know when you only run into him occasionally," Kronengold said. At school, there were always a few Pauls; sweet, earnest, perpetually working on something like prison reform, beloved by everyone, but somehow always disappearing and leaving a trail of heartbreak. The audition scene that introduced Paul Baker to audiences, in which he tries and catastrophically fails to call out a pawn shop owner's retrograde language, came from watching a friend of that type interact with service workers. "He was so kind," Kronengold recalled. "It was just a little condescending."

The casting process was, by any measure, enormous. FX came to Kronengold and Shaw with an unusual mandate: don't cast stars, discover them. "We've never discovered one person," Kronengold told FX. "What are you possibly talking about?"

Working with casting directors Henry Berkstein and Alison Estrin, the team screened around 40,000 tapes and watched approximately a thousand themselves. To narrow the field, they employed a decidedly low-tech method: they had friends over to watch. "Who do we want to hang out with? Who would be sitting on this couch next to us?" Kronengold said. "Because you could be really funny and really charming, but there's also the hangout ability."

Chemistry reads happened in person in New York, and the ensemble they assembled is genuinely eclectic: Amitha Gananathan from Chicago improv, Lucy Freyer is Juilliard-trained, Malik Elassal has a stand-up background, Jack Innanen was a TikTok sketch creator, and Owen Thiele had been stealing scenes in features for years. 

The story Kronengold told about landing Innanen got the biggest laugh of the panel. During chemistry reads, the team had been encouraging actors to improvise. Innanen, they noticed, was not, hitting every word of the script with precision. As the group wrapped and filed out, the room filled with chatter about how fun the improvising had been. The last voice heard was Innanen: "Wait, we were supposed to improvise?" That's him, Kronengold said. It was, incidentally, Innanen's first professional audition.

Getting those five actors to feel like a friend group that predates the show took some creative effort. Shaw described shooting the pilot as "30% writing, 30% producing, and 40% camp counselor." The most memorable team-building exercise: Kronengold and Shaw gave the cast fifty dollars each and sent them to Toronto thrift stores with instructions to find the ugliest outfits they could, because several of them had mentioned they'd never been to prom. "They all bought each other corsages and danced the night away," Shaw said. "It was so cute."

The show's tendency to give Owen an ever-expanding social circle wasn't invented in the writers' room, either. It came directly from watching Thiele on set. "He was befriending background performers to such an extent that he was saying, 'I'll see you at your concert — oh, it's tomorrow night? Okay, but she has a recital,'" Kronengold recalled. "And we were like, you're overbooked! We're shooting tomorrow." The "friend slut" character trait went straight into the show.

The pilot was shot in a real house, with a different Queens home serving as the show's exterior, which was rebuilt on a set when FX picked up the series. The transition is visible, Shaw said, if you know what to look for: subtle shifts in lighting and texture between the pilot and the rest of the season. She imagined the homeowners watching the show and noticing every small difference.

The distinction between exterior location and interior set has apparently not stopped fans from making pilgrimages. "We've had a few fans show up at the real house," Shaw said. Day zero of the pilot also yielded one of the panel's most telling anecdotes. Before the cast had their own trailers, they shared a single green room — and Kronengold and Shaw walked in expecting nerves or awkwardness and found something else entirely. The actor playing the subway commuter in the cold open, a classically trained Shakespearean performer, was holding court in the center of the room, with the five leads seated in a semicircle asking him questions about stage acting and being on a set. "We were just so proud," Shaw said. "They were acutely aware that they were the hosts. That set the bar for the whole shoot."

Season 1 found its audience in a notably modern way: clips. The Paul Baker gun shop scene, the season-ending kiss, and the Zoom interview meltdown all circulated widely on social media and drew viewers in before they'd seen a full episode. "A lot of our viewership for Season 1 came from clips going viral," Shaw said. "That feels endemic to the way this generation watches."

The house rules conceit, in which the roommates can unilaterally decree behavioral expectations for one another, generated its own fan ecosystem. Shaw said her favorite form of audience engagement is when viewers tag the show in real house rules they've created for their own apartments. "We see things like 'Don't text him back,' people's names on the board, 'Clean your dishes,'" she said. One recent post just said "Vote" — a house rule that apparently required the full institutional weight of the system to get across the line.

The response that meant the most, though, was simpler. "Seeing people on Twitter saying, 'That's my family,'" Shaw said. "That's all we wanted for the show."

Regarding Season 2, the first piece of news came with an episode order confirmation. While Season 1 was limited to just six episodes, Season 2 will run for at least eight episodes."Or maybe a little more," Shaw hinted, hinting that FX may be looking to expand the order as streamers see more value in shows with a higher episode count.

Kronengold and Shaw made clear that the new season will dig deeper into each character. "Now that we know them and we understand them," Kronengold said, "how can we surprise ourselves? Because so much of your twenties, and friendship in general, is learning how many contradictions people have inside of them, and how the bluster you think is their personality is just a veneer hiding something else."

That means new sides of characters who already feel fully formed. Anton, Kronengold teased, gets an episode centered on his work life — specifically, the kind of crisis that hits when you think you have everything under control and then you don't. "Feeling so confident until it's revealed how incompetent you are," he said. "A lot of our writers were like, oh, I relate to that." Shaw added that Issa, who spent most of Season 1 coasting on confidence — rent-free living, great boyfriend, beloved by all — is finally going to get knocked off her pedestal. "Seeing those vulnerabilities is going to reveal a very different side of her," she said.

And then there's Paul Baker. Fans will finally learn why the group started referring to him exclusively by his full name. "In this next season, we learn the secret origin story of why they started calling him Paul Baker," Kronengold confirmed.

The love triangle that closed out Season 1 — Issa, Anton, and the newly arrived Paul Baker — will be the emotional engine driving much of Season 2. "What happens when you drop a bomb in the middle of a friend group?" Kronengold asked. "How do they deal with complicated feelings and overlapping feelings?" The complication, Shaw noted, is that Paul Baker entered the group through Issa. "She has a little bit of an 'I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it' energy," Shaw said. "But navigating how to still be there for someone when you know they're perhaps crushing on your boyfriend, it's complicated. And always funny first."

There's also an unannounced guest star the creators were keeping close to the chest, promising only that it's someone the audience won't see coming.

When asked whether they have a complete story mapped out for the series, Shaw was direct about her ambitions. "If we have our way," she said, "we'll be doing this for a million years." The gift of a show so low-concept at its core, she explained, is that it's a refillable bucket: as long as these characters are in their twenties doing stupid things for good reasons, there are stories to tell.

The Season 2 writers' room, Kronengold said, showed up armed. "The worst dating stories and job stories and friendship stories you could imagine. They were like, 'We get the gambit now. The bar is mooning a Zoom interview. Let's go.'"

Adults Season 2 is coming soon, premiering June 11th at Tribeca ahead of a broadcast and streaming release (dates not yet announced). Season 1 is streaming now on Hulu.