Your Next Netflix Binge Might Not Be What You’d Expect
NB: spoilers have been denoted with spoiler warnings.
A little while ago, my partner had some classmates over at his place to study. I was heating up a leftover poke bowl (yuck, I know), listening to him and his peers debate the delicacies of obstetric medicine. One of them popped into the kitchen to grab a drink. While I picked at my brown rice and cucumbers, he peered over my shoulder at the TV show playing on my laptop: “what are you watching?,” he asked incredulously, squinting at the two older white women jabbering at each other on the screen. He and his friends had just been debating birth complications in the alien language only comprehensible to fourth-year medical students, and yet this show was seemingly strange enough to give him pause.
This same quizzical reaction is more or less the one I’ve received every time I’ve been caught in my obsession with the Netflix original Grace and Frankie. A witty, wholesome sitcom, it’s been described as a cross between Modern Family, The Good Place, and Superstore. Throughout the past 5 plus years, Grace and Frankie has been one of my favourite cozy comfort shows.
The storyline features two couples who both undergo divorce during their 70s; the wives are left by their closeted gay husbands, who decide to end their marriages in order to openly continue a decades-long affair with one another. The four main characters—the ex-husbands and wives—could not be more different: Grace, a former business executive; Frankie, an eccentric hippie; the gentle-hearted giant, Sol; and the stern law partner, Robert. Facing the prospect of spending their final years alone, Grace and Frankie team up and form an unlikely alliance in order to piece their lives back together. The rest of the cast is made up of the couples’ children—Brianna, Mallory, Bud, and Coyote—as well as an ensemble of friends, enemies, and lovers alike throughout the ensuing years.
The show, as promised, grapples with divorce, dating and coming out in your 70s; all topics that are difficult, important and commonplace, yet aren’t perceived to be sexy or widespread enough to be featured in mainstream media. I can’t think of another show or movie that doesn’t discuss divorce by older adults without running some variation of the same narrative: the ex-husband goes through a late-life crisis and galivants with his new 25-year-old gold-digger girlfriend, while the ex-wife is destined to spend her remaining years alone, broke and stewing with resentment. The resonating message is the same for both parties: the husband and wife alike are past their prime, often embarrassingly so. If you’re unlucky enough to go through a divorce or be left by your partner in your later years, this is what you have to look forward to.
I might have believed this messaging subconsciously; my grandparents played out that tired cliché almost perfectly. I spent most of my life terrified of divorce and I still am. I’m also afraid of getting older, perhaps even more so than I am of getting divorced; graying hair, slowing metabolism, shaky hands, declining health and relevancy. Many of us probably feel the same. The media isn’t kind to seniors in general, regardless of their marital status. Characters are often formulaically reduced to an endearing Santa Claus-like old man or woman, a dazed look in their bleary eyes, with little clue about any ongoings, happy to just be included. Any reference to dating is usually limited to jokes about sexcapades at the retirement home or Viagra. Harmless, bemused and befuddled, these terms describe much of the way seniors are portrayed in storytelling.
Grace and Frankie does a beautiful job of subverting all of those notions. It combats the idea that older folks are just fuzzy-eyed grandmas and grandpas with tufts of hair behind ears that can barely hear you (though to be fair, Frankie is very deaf.) In fact, it avoids defining the four main characters as grandparents as much as possible; we scarcely hear of any of the grandchildren throughout the series, with only one of the girls featured in a brief arc. This is a show where the senior characters have vibrant social lives, dating lives and work lives outside of their roles as grandparents. Grace and Frankie even begin a new business together called “Vybrant,” selling sex toys made for those with arthritis.
The way the show handles divorce is likewise special. The women are indeed bitter and angry at their husbands for having gay affairs behind their backs, but their process of grieving and healing are depicted with courage and warmth, and with a strong emphasis on female friendship. Grace and Frankie shows that no, a divorce is not the worst thing that can happen to a woman in her 70s. But even if she thinks it is, love, happiness and success in every facet of her life are still very much possible. Additionally, the writers avoid villainizing the ex-husbands for leaving relationships in which they were ultimately unhappy. They instead take a more valuable route, highlighting the men’s guilt of wrenching two families apart, while also using divorce to illustrate that life is too short to be spending it in any way except for how we truly wish.
Despite all this, Grace and Frankie has yet to achieve mainstream popularity, and predictably so. It’s no Euphoria or Riverdale. Its value doesn’t come from harrowing action sequences, sexual tension between hot actors, cheap plot twists or even well-done plot twists. It’s not about the shenanigans of 20- or 30-something year-olds like Sex and the City, Seinfield or New Girl. Many of those stories are famous because they’re about growing up and the lessons learned along the way; so many of our iconic TV shows belong squarely in the “Figuring Things Out” genre. But it’s for that reason that Grace and Frankie deserves a similar level of fame and appreciation; the show is about what happens 40 years after the final episode of Friends, when the characters were meant to have already found their Happily Ever After, working their dream jobs, in their dream marriages with their dream spouses. What happens then? It’s in this post-curtain call context that the writers gracefully wrestle with other themes such as aging and ageism, adoption, grief, addiction, medically-assisted death, sibling rivalry, estranged family ties, career changes and ableism. This is the rare show that delves into the fact that for real-life people, our problems don’t end with a pretty finale; our biggest stories might not even happen until our 70s.
I think that’s part of what makes Grace and Frankie so remarkable. By the end of the last episode, loose ends are left untied. *Spoilers Begin* It’s unclear what Grace and Frankie end up spending their last days doing. Three of the four children are unemployed, two are single into their late 30s and 40s, and the fourth is at risk of relapsing in his addiction. *Spoilers End* Amongst some viewers, this was an unsatisfactory end, but I think it was a reminder of what the show’s main message has been throughout its seven seasons: that no matter how old we are, there are still more lessons to learn and things to figure out. The show perhaps also nudges us towards another important idea—and I think the main reason why Grace and Frankie has been such a comfort to me over the years—it lets us know that the best is still yet to come.
