Gen Z TikTok star Jack Innanen tackles generational tension head on in Adults

After achieving astronomical online fame for his TikTok sketches, Toronto's Jack Innanen did what so many rising entertainers do. He moved to New York to pursue new acting opportunities. And success quickly followed, with Innanen scoring a starring role in FX's Adults, the latest evolution in the hangout sitcom about a bunch of 20-something New Yorkers stuck in arrested development. Ironically, the show landed Innanen right back in Toronto, where the city's busy streets and brunch spots approximate New York's vibe.

"It was really funny," says Innanen during an interview with CBC Arts, "to work so hard to get that visa, move out immediately and then get shipped right back home."

Innanen is once again on home turf, making the most of a local press day talking about going from social media to sitcom star in Adults, which is essentially the Gen Z and extremely online answer to Friends.

It's the day before Adults premieres. Innanen started his morning flaunting the per diem he received in colourful Canadian cash on Instagram (making things extra local by playing Drake tracks over each story). Not long after, he's throwing those dollars around on a breakfast TV show. 

In the TikTok sketches that earned him more than three million followers, Innanen is usually performing two types of characters — school teachers, desperately single men and unsuspectingly horrible people among them — who engage in conversations that go from casual to extremely twisted. The actor started making those videos when he was attending the University of Toronto and credits the environment around him as inspiration for those sketches that got him global recognition.

"I would just walk to class and look at the characters of Toronto," he says. "I see someone and would be like, 'I wonder what this person would be like stuck in an elevator' or something. Just living in Toronto, you kind of get punched in the face with cool stuff or funny, interesting people."

In Adults, Innanen plays Paul Baker, a spacey hearthrob who was originally written as being from Colorado but rewritten as a Canadian. Innanen suspects the rewrite was made to accommodate his "sorrys" and "abouts." Paul Baker, who is always addressed and referred to by first and last name, is the newcomer to an extremely tight, verging on co-dependent friend group who all crowd around the same Queens, NY home. The show, which was at one point titled Snowflakes, also stars Amita Rao, Owen Thiele, Lucy Freyer and Canadian stand-up Malik Elassal as the various members of Friends 2.0. But unlike Ross, Rachel and Chandler, these titular adults are raunchy, diverse, extremely versed in global and social issues, and are often too disillusioned by the state of the world to have ambitions. In the pilot episode, the gang speaks enviously of an old classmate who achieved viral victim status, just to give you an idea of the bar they aspire to.

A lot of the show's comedy is premised on how unprepared Gen Z is in today's world, to the point that Adulting 101 programs are being offered to help a generation raised with Uber and Venmo learn basic functions like changing a tire or filing their taxes. In the first episode, Elassal, playing Samir, steps into a bank in need of a cheque to pay for a furnace repair. The scene's a riot because of how utterly lost Samir is when it comes to finding the words to request such a thing.

"I just got my cheque book the other day," says Innanen, at 26, relating so hard to that bit in particular. "Can I not just e-transfer my landlord? Now I have to get cheques! I have to mail a check to pay my taxes. A lot of paper bureaucracy is a big thing for me. What are we doing? Why can't I just text my vote in."

Innanen also speaks to the generational tension that makes for so much of the show's most hilarious gags, especially when it feels like these characters are on completely different wavelengths, making basic comprehension impossible. Older characters tend to speak in practical or cancellable vernacular, to which Gen Z, and Innanen's Paul Baker in particular, might respond with a compilation of words so random and chaotic that it verges on poetry. When Innanen's Baker asks a gun shop owner, "what is the spectrum of your language?" it feels like he's capturing the essence of the show.

"There's not only a language crisis but just an understanding crisis," says Innanen, elaborating on how Adults speaks to the zeitgeist. "There's a difference in just our understanding of the world. You talk about the job crisis or something, and your parents say, 'go in and just give the CEO a hard handshake and give him your resume and you'll get the job.' It's like, no. I've applied to 600 jobs on Indeed and heard nothing back. My job doesn't exist anymore because AI took it last week. It's just gone now."

In speaking on a near-molecular level to a whole new generation weaned on social media discourse, Adults is also part of a wave of new shows made by studios going online to tap talent. Innanen references English Teacher, a brilliant sitcom about the culture wars created by TikTok star Brian Jordan Alvarez, and Overcompensating, the new Prime Video comedy (also shot in Toronto) from Benito Skinner, aka BennyDrama on social media.

Innanen isn't even the only online star involved with Adults. The show's creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw first earned notoriety for a speech they delivered in front of Hillary Clinton at their Yale graduation. They performed a bit as a couple breaking up as a metaphor for moving on, and made the former secretary of state laugh out loud at a double entendre involving the word "endowed."

"You're given the format of a speech —we're going to kill that," says Innanen, about what his generation can achieve. "You give us the format of a TV show — we're going to kill that. Someone who makes TikToks: they're a talent there, and they can also be a talent in this field."

Of course, Innanen acknowledges that there's a huge adjustment from making content for the smallest screen (our phones), where instant gratification is king, to working on collaborative projects on the more traditional small screen.

"You get to live in a scene with other people," he says, "and you have call backs, an actual narrative, an actual character, build an actual world, instead of a joke I'm trying to get off in like 45 seconds. Totally different.

"Also, the waiting for over a year for [the show] to come out, that's really tough," Innanen adds, reminding us that the instant gratification when it comes to TikTok content goes both ways. "I'm used to, like, filming it. I edit it for a few hours. And it's out. And then, I never think about it again."

"[Adults is] coming out tomorrow. Finally. I've just been waiting."

The first two episodes of Adults is now streaming on Disney+ Canada, with new episodes arriving every Thursday.