The Four Seasons is back for a second go-around but with one major difference — no Steve Carell.

The Netflix comedy — co-created by Tina Fey, Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher — premiered last year as a star-studded series adaptation of Alan Alda’s 1981 rom-com, following three couples as they go on vacations in spring, summer, fall and winter while navigating marital and friendship troubles along the way. Carell’s character Nick shook up the group when he suddenly divorced his wife Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) and began dating the much younger Ginny (Erika Henningsen); then, at the end of season one, Nick died in a car crash and Ginny discovered she was pregnant.

That means in season two the friends are in a much different place, with “this big hole in the group and how is everyone responding to that and how are people filling that hole?” Wigfield explained at the Los Angeles premiere on Tuesday. “New character dynamics are coming out because of that, and how does Ginny fit into the group?”

On top of Kenney-Silver and Henningsen’s characters, the rest of the gang is made up of married couples Kate and Jack (Fey and Will Forte) and Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani), who are all dealing with their own set of issues as explored through the quarterly trips. Carell’s character was, as Fisher pointed out, “the connector of the group — he has that personality that makes everybody do stuff and feels like he is the one driving some of these vacations — but when you take that guy out, does the group survive?”

That dynamic also made its way off screen, as the tight-knit cast shot the season without him. “It sucks! He’s the best. You create this family unit and he’s gone,” Forte emphasized of Carell’s absence. “We all gelled pretty quickly last season so to have such an integral part of this puzzle be gone, we kind of reacted in the same way that our characters in the show reacted. It’s a huge loss.”

Henningsen, though, did her best to keep Carell in the loop, sending him photos of the babies that played their characters’ child. “I was like, ‘Hey just in case you wanted to know, this is our characters’ babies.’ He was like, ‘They look good!'” she laughed.

Fey also acknowledged that “we have our original group chat [with Carell] and we went down to a smaller group chat, but sometimes we jump back to the original” to maintain that season one communication. She added, “We definitely missed Steve,” noting that she’s gotten asked about the decision to kill off his character as it made people sad. “I was like, ‘That’s why we did it, we did it to make you sad.’ Because life is sad.”

The 30 Rock and SNL alum teased that there will be some appearances from “a few faces this season that you may recognize, some friends,” and noted she has no longterm plan for how long she wants to do the show. “We all love making it and would happily make it forever as long as we feel like people want more,” Fey said.

Fisher echoed, “This has been one of the most wonderful work experiences I think of all of our careers. We get to work with our best friends and this unbelievable cast so as long as Netflix wants to keep this going, we’ll do 100 seasons of Four Seasons.”

Season two premieres May 28 on Netflix.