Kerri Kenney-Silver has always known that comedy has a musicality to it. One quick glance at her extensive body of work and anyone can see that in each performance, there’s a unique, vibrant, and exciting rhythm to the characters she plays… and she’s just getting started.

In Netflix’s The Four Seasons, that theme of musicality holds up, as her character, Anne, moves from scene to scene and season to season with a flittering (almost melodic) approach to each moment in time. It’s the kind of skill and technicality you only notice when you rewind an episode to hear a line like “I put the binder in the freezer to punish it,” as you’re too busy laughing the first time to catch it.

“I think sort of musically when I am acting. I will have playlists — it’s so actor-y and silly to say, but it’s true — so I’ll look at the script and think, ‘Okay, this is the tone.’ That way I don’t predetermine how I’m going to say something or the rhythm that I’m going to say it, but I’ll walk into the room with what I think the musical tone is in my head of that part of the story,” she tells me in a sitdown over Zoom to discuss her performance in Season 2 and the show writ large.

Off the top of her head, Kenney-Silver rattles off songs like “Bless the Telephone” by Labi Siffre — one she notes Anne feels uniquely connected to in the second season as an empty nester and divorcee with a deceased ex-husband (yeesh, pick a struggle, am I right?!) — as well as “I Get Along Without You Very Well” by Chet Baker. That second song, a hauntingly beautiful ballad about a person smiling through the pain of a lost love and the fear of loneliness, felt like an anthem for her character in Season 1, she shares.

Perhaps it’s that unrelenting commitment to character study or perhaps it’s her sketch comedy upbringing, but there’s something undeniable in the way that Kenney-Silver brings Anne to life on the small screen. The Reno 911! star and her Four Seasons co-stars all have big shoes to fill, taking over the reins from Alan Alda’s eponymous 1981 film and modernizing it for TV; it’s especially impressive for the character of Anne, who slowly fades into the background after her divorce in the original film.

The show — which is co-created by Tina Fey, Tracey Wigfield, and Lang Fisher — chooses to take things in a different, more nuanced direction than the film, keeping Anne in the friend group and tossing out the lousy, cheating husband (Steve Carell) who knocked up his girlfriend before his death. To be frank, it’s hard not to look at what Kenney-Silver brings to the screen as Anne and wonder if the pure magic she creates for the series is the whole reason for the shakeup in the first place. It’s that razor’s edge balance between her moments of utter wackiness and the scenes where she is putting on a smile when you can tell she’s hurting that makes her the undisputed MVP of the series. It’s also what makes the job so rich for Kenney-Silver.

“I keep saying it’s like a stripping away. I don’t have to step into this character. I don’t have to step into some sort of boss’s high heels and a posture that isn’t mine, and a mindset that I have to figure out how to relate to. It’s more of a stripping away of who I really am and my most vulnerable, raw moments, so that there is no thinking about how this is coming across? It really is just, ‘How do I feel in this moment with this actor?’” she says of getting to play an animated, yet deeply realistic, character.

She adds, “You could say you should be doing that at all times as an actor, but when you’re doing sketch or you’re doing a bigger character like Trudy Wiegel on Reno 911!, you also are thinking of what’s going to be funny here. And as a show creator, you’re thinking, ‘Can we cut this? Can I cut from here to there? Oh, is this person’s shoulder in the shot?’ So it’s very freeing to be there as an actor. That’s my job, to be present with these other actors, with these beautiful words and just strip away. Don’t predetermine — that’s sometimes harder than it should be — But when it’s in the pocket, it feels freeing.”

That freedom is not only seen, but felt, in both the powerhouse comedic moments of the show — i.e. anything and everything pertaining to La Befana, an Italian Christmas witch, in the final two episodes of Season 2 — as well as the emotionally moving moments Anne experiences. As the show’s resident single lady, she often has to contend with her meddling friends attempting to set her up, which leads to a confrontation with her own loneliness and expectations for herself. Fully taking in her ex-husband’s girlfriend, Ginny (Erika Henningsen), after her baby is born, Anne embodies the concept of always taking care of others and never taking a moment for yourself. It’s a type of frenetic energy that moms around the world can relate to all too well and it’s what makes Kenney-Silver’s ability to shine on both sides endearing.

Watching the actress play a concerned mom, honest friend, terrified divorcee, and an overall chaotically good human being is exactly what it’s all about and it ends up elevating Kenney-Silver from the status of scene stealer into the territory of a show-making performance. We root for her because we know her, we are her, and we love her. So much of that has to do with what Kenney-Silver does while donning the delightfully colorful attire of her character. She doesn’t just deliver a line, she feels it in her soul, hears it in her head, and lets it out with the care of a musician playing a song to a sold-out crowd. It makes me yearn for more characters like her and more actors to play them.

Just weeks ago, before the untimely cancellation of The Boroughs — Netflix’s latest sci-fi drama set in a desert retirement community and starring the likes of Alfred Molina and Geena Davis — social media was abuzz with conversations of how refreshing it is to see adults of a certain age on screens and not delegated to background roles. The New York Times pointed to shows like Hacks and Only Murders in the Building as examples of the so-called “silver renaissance” in TV, while Forbes said The Boroughs made aging “TV’s most exciting super power yet.” But what about the group in the middle?

It’s my belief that TV will always hold space for the youngins sorting out their life after high school or college and the oldies who are figuring out how to occupy their time post-retirement or face their impending mortality head on, but where does that leave a 50-something who is somewhere in between? They may have no idea why their elbow is hurting today, but they at least know how to post something to Instagram. It’s a part of life that is so often breezed over in shows and movies, and it’s one that Kenney-Silver is both honored and grateful to get to play on TV.

“I can’t even tell you what it’s meant to me as a human, let alone as an actor. You know, ten, 15 years ago, this stage of my life, a 56-year-old woman in television and film, I would be an incidental character. It’s just the way it was and it was accepted and it was understood, ‘Well, who wants to see somebody who’s going through menopause, who’s questioning themselves, who’s kind of lonely, who’s kind of scared, who kind of, you know, the kids are gone now. Who wants to see that?’ Well, guess what, there are so many of us out there,” she says. “I think there is a beauty in the fact that what I found from these characters and what I’ve found for myself living in this world, not only as an actor playing this part, but as the character, is that I don’t see this as the middle. I’m feeling like this is the second launch, this is the second launch.”

She adds, “Just because it’s maybe not as flawless looking from the outside as the initial launch in our 20s, out of college with perfect skin and bouncy hair and tons of energy, doesn’t mean that it’s not a launch. It’s a launch into, what does life look like now that if you have children, they are launching and they’re not in your nest anymore? What does it look like when all of a sudden you have free time to do maybe help your community in ways you didn’t have before? All of these choices when, for years, as a parent especially, you didn’t necessarily have a whole lot of choices because you were so happily in the lane of parenting. This feels to me like a second launch with all of its beautiful parts and with all of its limitations.”

There is still much to be done in the way of moving the needle on representation in Hollywood across the board, but it’s a jumping-off point that Kenney-Silver is more than happy to be burdened with. Especially as that burden pivots to an upcoming third season that is set to feature David Tennant, possibly playing a love interest for her character, who ends Season 2 by staying in Italy as the rest of the friend group heads back to the U.S. While Kenney-Silver says they are still months out from filming and that she really doesn’t know what’s in store for her character, she is already in prep and finding the right musical notes that will carry Anne through Season 3, and spoiler alert, she is adding some more upbeat music to serve as the soundtrack.

“This summer is really about just kind of taking the next indicated step and doing what feels right for the for my family. Really, each season before is about being as healthy as I can be,” the comedian and actress shares, “Having my mind as uncluttered as it can be and making my playlist, which I think is going to have a lot more optimism and a lot less songs will have the word ‘blue’ in them.”

Even if it does end up containing a lot of “blue,” Kenney-Silver says she’s ready and excited to get back to playing the character that has not only found her commercial success and a family in her Four Seasons co-stars, but the right notes to play out over her own musical interlude. She’ll be humming in the meantime.

The Four Seasons Season 1 and Season 2 are now streaming on Netflix.