Dave and John Chernin’s Incoming sends four ninth-graders to their first real high school party and bets that an R-rated teen comedy built on very old rules still has an audience on Netflix.

Incoming follows four friends in the first days of their freshman year of high school: Benji Nielsen, played by Mason Thames, and his friends Koosh, Eddie and Connor, played by Bardia Seiri, Ramon Reed and Raphael Alejandro. Netflix sums up the story in a single line: four freshmen navigating the terrors of adolescence at their first-ever party. Everything else in the premise follows from that night, from the insecurities the boys carry into the building to the hormones that make every decision feel urgent and every mistake feel permanent.

Around them is an ensemble that mixes young actors with seasoned comedians. Isabella Ferreira plays Bailey, Ali Gallo plays Alyssa Nielsen and Loren Gray plays Katrina Aurienna, while the adult side of the cast brings in Bobby Cannavale as Mr. Studebaker, a teacher, Kaitlin Olson as Ms. Nielsen and Scott MacArthur. Brothers Dave Chernin and John Chernin wrote and directed the film, which Netflix released worldwide on 23 August 2024.

A genre that never really goes away

If anyone ever counted the films produced over the last century and set quality aside entirely, the teen comedy would sit near the top of the pile. These are cheap films to make, they find a reliable audience, they tend to pay for themselves and they ask for very little artistic risk. A studio can make one that looks a lot like the last and a lot like the next, because the audience they are aimed at changes every few years and rarely holds one up against another.

Incoming belongs squarely to that tradition. It is another story about teenagers trying to survive their first year of high school: raging hormones, the urge to get closer to the girls they like, and the frustration of being treated as children by a world that does not take them seriously. The R rating, given for drug use, drinking, sexual content, pervasive language and some violence, places it in the raunchy branch of the family rather than the gentler, PG-13 school dramedy.

From The Mick to a feature

The Chernin brothers come from television comedy. They are the creators of The Mick, the Fox sitcom starring Kaitlin Olson as a freewheeling aunt suddenly put in charge of her wealthy sister’s children, which ran for two seasons from 2017. Olson’s presence in Incoming is, in that sense, a reunion, and it hints at the kind of humour the brothers are comfortable with: adults behaving badly next to children who are not much worse.

Incoming was made independently. It was shot in Los Angeles between July and October 2022, with Spyglass Media Group and Artists Road among the companies behind it, and it only found its home once it was finished: Netflix acquired the film, and the deal became public in November 2023. The producers include Nicholas Stoller and Conor Welch for Stoller Global Solutions, and Todd Garner, Peter Principato, Ben Silverman and Mark Korshak for Artists Road, with Peter Oillataguerre also producing and Caroline James and Noah Nusinow as executive producers.

Stoller’s name is not a random one in this context. As the director of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Neighbors, he spent the late 2000s and the 2010s inside exactly the kind of mainstream, adult-rated American comedy that Incoming is reaching back to. The Chernins themselves have described the project as an attempt to make the sort of silly, laughter-first movie that used to come along about once per generation and had not appeared for a while.

A cast split between rising teens and comedy veterans

Mason Thames leads the film after his breakout in The Black Phone, the horror film directed by Scott Derrickson, and before taking on the role of Hiccup in the live-action How to Train Your Dragon in 2025. Incoming catches him at the point where he was moving from genre roles into leading-man territory, which makes it an interesting stop in a young career even for viewers who would not normally pick a teen sex comedy.

The other three friends come from television. Ramon Reed is known for 9-1-1: Lone Star, Raphael Alejandro for Once Upon a Time and Bardia Seiri for Grey’s Anatomy. Isabella Ferreira has been seen in Love, Victor and Gray Matter, and Loren Gray arrives with an audience of her own as a singer and one of the most-followed personalities to emerge from social media.

The adult roles are where the casting leans on experience. Bobby Cannavale, a two-time Emmy winner for Will & Grace and Boardwalk Empire and a familiar face from Mr. Robot and The Watcher, plays the teacher Mr. Studebaker. Kaitlin Olson brings almost two decades of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, plus Hacks and Champions, and Scott MacArthur arrives from The Righteous Gemstones. It is a classic arrangement in the genre: the grown-ups are supposed to set the limits, and the comedy usually comes from how badly they manage it.

What it sets out to do

Within the framework of four friends, freshman year and one life-changing party, the variables are well known. A film can be more or less daring, more or less funny, more or less excessive. American Pie, Superbad, Good Boys and Booksmart all worked inside some version of that structure and found their own balance between embarrassment, friendship and outright vulgarity. Incoming does not pretend to reinvent it; its pitch is precisely that the formula still works and that there is no reason to change it.

That honesty is also its limit. A comedy built on the most familiar rules of the genre will be judged on how many laughs it lands within them, and on whether its young cast can make clichés feel lived-in, because the surprise has to come from somewhere other than the story. For the audience it is aimed at, a first-party comedy about freshmen is less a genre exercise than a mirror, and that has always been the engine of these films.

So Incoming is, above all, one more teen comedy, and it knows it. These films have been made for decades and will very likely keep being made for decades, with each generation getting its own version of the same night. None of them may earn a place in film history for their artistic ambition, but the numbers explain why studios and streamers keep returning to them, and for viewers at a certain age, or nostalgic for it, they remain good company. Whether the teen comedies our grandchildren watch will be written by people or by software is a question for another day. Incoming is streaming on Netflix.

Tags: Netflix, Kaitlin Olson, Bobby Cannavale, Mason Thames, Dave Chernin, Incoming