'Grace and Frankie': Fonda and Tomlin Fight Their Show's Cliches
Wouldn’t it be great to see more actors over the age of 40 or 50 starring in TV shows? Isn’t it a great idea to start up a series starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin?
Yes, it’s a great idea, but as it turns out, Grace and Frankie, premiering Friday, May 8 on Netflix, is a disappointing vehicle for some very good actors, including Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston. The premise: Grace (Fonda) and Frankie (Tomlin) have husbands played by Sheen and Waterston respectively. In the premiere, the men announce they’re in love, have been for 20 years, and are coming out to their families. Grace and Frankie, who’ve never liked each other much, are thrown together by their common circumstance.
I guess you could wring some laughs from this concept, but Grace and Frankie, created by Marta Kauffman (Friends) and Howard J. Morris (Home Improvement), doesn’t twist many out. Grace and Frankie are supposed to be an odd couple — Grace is an elegant lady; Frankie is a funky hippie — forced to live together. (Their husbands are talked up as wizardly divorce lawyers, and I guess Frankie and Grace have to share a beach house to retain possession in the impending divorce? Given the amount of wealth that seems to emanate from everyone on the show, it doesn’t make much sense to me, but… whatever.)
The acting is good as far as the scripts will allow. Fonda and Tomlin don’t have much chemistry but they can certainly spin their lines into something better than they are, and Sheen (as Robert) and Waterston (as Sol) have an easy rapport.
Related: ‘Grace and Frankie’ Co-Creator Marta Kauffman on Her Baby Boomer Comedy and Sex After 60
But the show plays like an overreaching network sitcom that wandered online. There’s a sitcom cliché that I particularly dislike: It’s people over 40 speaking TV-hip vulgar vernacular. In other words, I didn’t ever want to hear Fonda say (of a glass of peyote-laced tea), “What is in there — ass?” And I held out hope that we were going to get through the premiere without anyone using the most overused punchline-word in sitcoms during the past two years — that would be “vagina” — but with mere minutes to go, Tomlin was forced to say, complaining of some sand in her clothes, “I must have half the beach in my vagina.” Sigh.
Along about the fourth episode, G&F works in a few moments that capture the social awkwardness of four people for whom coming-out sometimes leaves them feeling closed-in, and the lingering longing that long-time partners, no matter that they’ve grown apart, may feel.
But the rest of the time, G&F is overloaded with anti-ageism manifestoes passing as punchlines (“I refuse to be irrelevant!”) and embarrassing you-know-what-the-gays-like yuks (Frankie: “Sol once asked me to wear a dildo”). I did laugh once, at a nice moment of physical comedy, when Tomlin did a deep knee bend while proclaiming, “My joints are supple!” If only the comedy was as limber.
Grace and Frankie is now on Netflix.
