Diksha Sundriyal
FX’s ‘Adults’ follows the story of five friends who are trying to make it through the ups and downs of adulthood while living in Queens, New York. Each episode brings a new challenge for the characters. The first two episodes divulge a lot about who they are and what decisions they make under pressure. The first episode focuses on Billie’s workplace, News Night, while the second episode has her in the Queensboro Hospital for a colonoscopy, while she leaves it to her friends to make important medical decisions for her. Both of these places are brought to life in a way that reflects New York rather realistically. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Queensboro Hospital Does Not Exist in Real Life
‘Adults’ is set in Queens, New York, and presents a very realistic portrait of what it means to be a 20-something adult living in the Big Apple. However, like a lot of other shows, the FX series was not filmed in New York. Instead, the cast and crew set camp in Toronto, Ontario, and filmed on location and on sets to create an illusion of New York. The second episode majorly takes place in the Queensboro Hospital, which remains a fictional creation, with the episode also lensed in Hollywood North.
There used to be a real hospital named Queensboro Hospital for Communicable Diseases. However, it was absorbed by Queens General Hospital, which is currently known as Queens Hospital Center (QHC), or NYC Health + Hospitals. Given that the city is a character unto itself in ‘Adults,’ there is a possibility that the show’s writers named the fictional hospital after the real one as an homage to it and the city. Still, the fans of the show will have to visit elaborately created sets to visit the hospital where Billie goes through one medical procedure after another, after her friends, particularly Samir, fail to understand how to handle the pressure of being her proxy.
The Fictional News Night Sets the Tone for Billie’s Journey
In the fictional world of ‘Adults,’ Billie works for News Night, a news channel where she hopes to have a flourishing career. The channel is a fictional creation, concocted to serve as an important plot device for Billie’s arc, especially in the first two episodes. It is particularly prominent in the first episode, where Billie tries to use the atmosphere created by the assault story of Kyle Haberman to get a promotion for herself within the Window. Despite her hesitation to profit from the opportunity, she leans into it rather violently, and it ends up backfiring on her.
After the troubling encounter with her boss, her job remains an important plot device in the second episode as well, where the tension of being fired leads her to take so much stress that she ends up in a hospital. Things get worse when she puts Samir in charge of her medical decisions, who makes one wrong move after another as he panics to understand what is really going on with Billie’s medical situation. The situation with News Night ripples through Billie’s storyline in the eight-episode season, and each twist and turn presents a realistic struggle that makes her situation even more relatable to the audience.
Read More: Adults Episode 1 and 2 Recap
