Starring: Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen, Sam Waterston, June Diane Raphael, Baron Vaughn, Brooklyn Decker, Ethan Embry
Into the sixth season, Grace and Frankie has established its rhythm; truth and touching honesty mixed with lighter sitcom material. Just when you think you're going to lose the show to the sitcom fluff, the clear moments of human nature swoop in to pull you back in. The show not only allows us to watch the uneasy pairing of Grace (Fonda) and Frankie (Tomlin) to blossom into friendship and love, but also to see how Robert (Sheen) and Sol (Waterston) learn to finally be a couple after spending twenty years in the closet. Grace and Frankie is balanced, and allows for the natural hiccups that occur in any relationship worth a damn.
The show begins with two long married couples splitting apart. Grace and Frankie, whose husbands have been law partners for the past twenty years, sit at dinner uneasily shooting small talk while awaiting for their husbands to arrive. Grace and Frankie know each other, but are not really friends.
Soon, Robert (Grace's husband) and Sol (Frankie's husband) sit down and deliver a whopper of a bulletin. Both Robert and Sol want a divorce, because they are in love...with each other. Frankie and Grace are naturally devastated. Not only are their marriages ending, but their husbands have left them for each other. It's a lot to process.
Fortunately, this isn't the type of dramedy in which the jokes write themselves. Grace and Frankie move out of their respective homes and into the beach house they co-own. Grace is a type A businesswoman who recently bequeathed her successful cosmetics company to her cynical daughter Brionna (Raphael). Frankie is a hippie to whom the 60's were just yesterday. The jilted wives are forced to live together. Grace's other daughter is Mallory (Decker), a doctor's wife, and Frankie's two children Bud (Vaughn) and Coyote (Embry) are both adopted. The children are gobsmacked by these developments as well, except for Brionna, who watches with detached bemusement.
A lot happens to not just Grace and Frankie, but the other cast members as well. It is refreshing to see that, even in a thirty-minute episode, plenty of quality time is donated to not just Grace and Frankie. Plenty of guest stars drop by, some for just an episode, and others staking a larger claim in the lives of the regulars. Grace and Frankie doesn't simply dwell on the changing lives of its main characters, but further delves into aging, being an older woman in today's technology-driven society, and the ever-shifting nature of their relationships with their children and their exes.
Could I do without a scene in which Grace backs up a scooter into a pile of items in a home improvement store? Or the numerous scenes of different characters getting high with each other?
Watching people get high is not funny, never was, and never will be. Fonda and Tomlin, of course, were in 9 to 5 (1980) together, and they had a famous pot-smoking scene in which they fantasized about how they would punish their sexist, egomaniac jerk of a male chauvinist boss. The fantasies themselves were fun, but not watching them inhale a joint. But, Grace and Frankie provides enough heart to keep me glued to their lives.
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