I’ve been watching the Netflix show Grace and Frankie, starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. They play the wives of two men who are law partners who at the age of 70+ tell their wives that they’re in love with each other and want a divorce so they can get married. The husbands are played by Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston. It’s funny. I watched the pilot, then didn’t watch anymore for a few weeks. The first episode was just too sad: the idea of your husband of 40 years, leaving you for someone else, even if the reason was because they were gay, was just too sad. But I went back to the show and I’m glad I did. They actually deal with the rage, sadness and weirdness of the situation. Their adult kids get to be mad at their Dad’s for tearing apart their families, too.
At the beginning, the two ex-wives dislike each other. Their husbands have been law partners for decades but the two women have nothing at all in common but after the divorces, they wind up fighting over the beach house the two couples bought together. Neither wants to give up the beach house so they wind up living together, trying to out squat each other. It’s an Odd Couple situation.
Grace is an uptight, Catholic, country club type who founded and ran her own company while she was married, which she handed off to her daughter Brianna, before the divorce. She’s a cliché of the pearls and sweater set.
Frankie is a free spirited, Jewish, left wing artist who wears funky clothes and is just oh, so quirky. She’s a cliché of the artsy type, conforming rigidly to her idea of non-conformity. She’s far less open to new ideas that supposedly uptight Grace is.
Both actresses are funny, although it takes a season for Jane to find her rhythm, which is to be the straight man.
By the third season, I like Grace more and more but I dislike Frankie more and more. She works so hard at being cute that I just want to hit her in the head with a two by four. Worse than that, she’s a bully. A self-righteous, closed minded bully who uses Grace’s emotional neediness as a cudgel to beat her into submission on everything from assisted suicide to gun ownership. Frankie’s method of facing adversity is to throw a tantrum that would embarrass a three-year-old.
What Frankie needs is someone to yank her chain when she acts like a fascist but Grace is not the person. Her daughter Brianna is. When she and Frankie briefly go into business together, it’s Brianna who refuses to give in to Frankie’s emotional manipulation. She’s my favorite character but she’s not in it enough.
A few episodes bothered me because the writers blew opportunities to honestly address some issues. It was obvious that they didn’t know there are two sides to those issues and they certainly didn’t bother to find anyone who could articulate the side opposite to Frankie’s left wing nonsense. Grace is supposed to be a lifelong Catholic but has no better argument against suicide than “It’s just wrong!” as though there aren’t volumes of Catholic philosophy dealing with taking one’s own life and the reasons, beauty and dignity of facing one’s death in natural time. As though St. John Paul the Great didn’t spend the last ten years of his life demonstrating how to die with dignity.
It would not have killed the show to let Grace have a paragraph, would it? Instead we got another stupid screed from Frankie and the death cult of progressivism.
And when Frankie discovers Grace owns a gun…well, I’d have shot her.
And stolen her wardrobe, which I LOVE.
By the third season, everyone is walking on eggshells around Frankie, afraid to set her off about anything. What a tyrant.
HaHAHA! Frankie just had a stroke in the middle of one of her rants! HAHAHAHAAA!
What? She’s a fictional character. Lily Tomlin is fine.
It couldn’t have happened to a quirkier stereotype.