Susan Granger’s review of “Grace and Frankie: Season 7” (Netflix)
If you’re just discovering Netflix’s fresh, funny “Grace and Frankie,” you’re in for a treat. Launched in 2015, it has garnered numerous Emmy and Screen Actors Guild nominations. Concluding its seventh season, it’s the longest-running Netflix series in history with a total of 94 episodes.
The series begins with Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) waiting for their law partner husbands to join them at a fancy restaurant. When Robert (Martin Sheen) and Sol (Sam Waterson) arrive, they announce that they’ve fallen in love and are leaving their respective wives for each other.
To say that Grace and Frankie are stunned is an understatement. While they still share ownership of an ocean-front Malibu beach house and enough alimony to live comfortably, these two frenemies suddenly become single seniors, embarking on an often frustrating journey of self-discovery and transformation.
Busy, uptight Grace is a total perfectionist, having launched a successful business called Say Grace, which she gives to her two grown daughters. Always status-conscious, Grace continually fights against the aging process, mourning the loss of her youth, often drowning her sorrows in vodka.
Free-spirited, empathetic Frankie is a quirky, sassy painter with more than a passing interest in shamanism and recreational drugs.
The first season focused on how they planned to rebuild their lives. Then the show delved into issues facing marginalized women of a certain age – with brutal, hilarious honesty.
Cleverly created by Marta Kauffman and Howard J. Morris, “Grace and Frankie” makes both me and my husband laugh-out-loud. Love and sex are frequent topics for these entrepreneurial octogenarians who design vibrators. While much has changed over the years, Frankie still swears by her homemade concoction of Yam & Honey Lube.
As the final season concludes, superstitious Frankie is so convinced that she’s going to die that she throws herself a funeral, primarily to hear the laudatory eulogies. The sitcom concludes tenderly with a clever Dolly Parton cameo.
Perhaps the days of older actresses being relegated to saccharine-sweet, doting grandmothers or helpless mugging victims has finally come to an end.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Grace and Frankie” is an endearing 8, streaming on Netflix.
