Netflix has released the first Friends from College Season 2 trailer, offering a first look at the new season of the comedy/drama series. The show hails from Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five-Year Engagement filmmaker Nicholas Stoller, who directs and co-showruns the series with his wife Francesca Delbanco, based on their own personal experiences. The conceit basically follows a close-knit group of Harvard alumni as they navigate their messy lives in New York City, complete with complicated romantic entanglements and age-old drama.

The show’s first season received harsh criticism for basically making its characters too unpleasant, and in an interesting move, Stoller and Delbanco aimed to address and rectify those concerns with Season 2. Speaking with Indiewire, Delbanco notes that most people’s issues had to do with an affair at the center of the series:

“It was very clear from the critical response that people were really unhappy and uncomfortable about the affair between Sam (Annie Parisse) and Ethan (Keegan-Michael Key),” Delbanco said. “And the fact that the show didn’t take them to task or punish them for it. We felt like we really heard it. And we put an end to that affair. It was an idea we were interested in playing around with, grownups behaving badly and making a mess in their lives. But we heard critics feeling like it was too much and it was too unpleasant to be implicated in it by just watching and enjoying it.”

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Image via Netflix

Stoller says they’ve since ended that specific storyline, and Season 2 picks up a year after the events of Season 1:

“We were planning on adjusting it anyway because doing more affair stories would have just been repetitive, but that is not a part of the second season,” Stoller said. “Which I think will be a relief for a lot of people.”

While I’m a big fan of Stoller’s work, I didn’t check out Season 1 specifically because of the criticisms of the unlikable characters, so I’m considering jumping into Season 2 cold. This trailer is certainly an intriguing mix of comedy and drama, and the cast is stacked. What say you, folks? Are you in?

Check out the Friends from College Season 2 trailer below. The series returns on January 11th with the eight-episode second season and also stars Cobie Smulders, Nat Faxon, Fred Savage, Jae Suh Park, Billy Eichner, and Sarah Chalke.

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Image via Netflix
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Image via Netflix