The Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin comedy broke records at Netflix with its longevity, and the co-creator credits the energy of the starring duo and the bravery of their storytelling for its legacy: “The show may be ending, but they aren’t.”
Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda in Grace and Frankie (Inset: Marta Kauffman) Courtesy of Saeed Adyani/Netflix; JC Olivera/FilmMagic
[This story contains spoilers to the series finale of Netflix‘s Grace and Frankie.]
“Now, what?”
After spending seven seasons and 94 episodes with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, viewers of Netflix’s Grace and Frankie may find that question — the final line of the series — to be ringing in their ears. The comedy became the longest-running series ever on the streamer, and, somehow, it still feels like it wasn’t long enough.
But co-creator Marta Kauffman hopes viewers are inspired by that question, which was posed by Fonda’s Grace at the end of the pilot and, circling back around, is once again rhetorically asked to her best friend, Frankie (Tomlin), to close out the show.
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“The implication of ‘now what?’ is that there’s more,” Kauffman tells The Hollywood Reporter. “That the show may be ending, but they aren’t.”
The fourth-wall-breaking message is in line with the theme of the show, which at its heart has always been that it’s never too late to start over. After finding out that their husbands — played by Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston — had secretly been in love and were leaving them to be together in the pilot, Grace and Frankie have spent the last seven seasons challenging themselves to move on with their lives with touching hilarity. In their third act of life, they found new relationships, started several business ventures, subverted stereotypes about aging and, ultimately, found the soul mate they wanted to walk off into the sunset with in one another.
The finale neatly tied up storylines for the show’s entire ensemble. After a psychic predicted the date of Frankie’s death, Frankie holds a funeral for herself and when she, with a mic, and a cocktail-holding Grace collide, the pair are accidentally electrocuted and sent up to heaven early. There to greet them is an angel secretary named Agnes — played by Dolly Parton, marking a highly anticipated 9 to 5 reunion — who is so touched by the pair’s friendship that she decides it’s not yet their time, and sends them back to be among the living.
Meanwhile their ex-husbands have their own touching sendoff when Saul (Waterston) makes a romantic gesture and re-creates their first kiss for Robert (Sheen), whose memory has been slipping away. Their offspring (including Ethan Embry, Baron Vaughn and Brooklyn Decker) embark on new relationship and career ventures, with the open ending for June Diane Raphael’s Brianna being ripe for a spinoff.
Below, in a chat with THR, Kauffman reflects on the impact of Grace and Frankie, explains why it was the right time to end it (despite it being Netflix who made the call) and hopes that the end of her beloved series, co-created with Howard J. Morrison, doesn’t cap an era for long-running shows: “I think the characters that we love and the characters that we invest in, the ones we want to meet on the street and invite into our homes, are the ones who we’ve been with for a long time.”
Now that the final episodes have been released and viewers have had time to consume them, where are you in the process of saying goodbye to Grace and Frankie?
(Sigh.) You know, on the one hand, I’m very proud of what we did for these seven seasons. And on the other hand, I’m really sad that it’s over. I’m going to miss writing for these actors and working with these actors and this crew. For seven years we worked together, and I’ll miss them terribly.
You have a tendency to work with people for a long time — a feat in this business. [Note: Kauffman co-created Friends.]
Thank you, I like that. To me, that’s the best part of it.
Grace and Frankie has masterfully tackled topics around aging with wit and bravery. In this final season, the show really leaned in and confronted mortality. Particularly, with Robert’s memory fading, Frankie’s “death date,” and Grace and Frankie’s brush with death in the finale. Can you talk about why these storylines felt important, and did they spark interesting conversations with your actors?
Because the show had always been about aging, and our characters are now in their 80s, we felt like we had to deal with some of this stuff. It would have been false had we completely avoided it. People of a certain age do start thinking about their death. People of a certain age do start dealing with memory issues. And because we’ve always wanted the show to have an underpinning of being real, we’ve had to tackle some of these topics. The conversations were very interesting that we had over these topics. And the hardest thing was how to do it so it’s still funny, so you can still see it being in a comedy. Memory loss can be heartbreakingly told dramatically. And we wanted it to, yes, be heartbreaking, but still feel like it belonged in the show.
Jane Fonda recently said she’s very aware of being “closer to death,” and takes in every day. How did they inspire some of the story?
Jane, from the very beginning, talked about how she wasn’t scared of death, which I thought was such an interesting note for Grace. She had no fear of it. Lily tends to get very emotional when talking about it. She has a whole different relationship with how she views death. And there were times we pitched them stories, and they would get emotional about them. But in terms of these last couple episodes, it was a slightly different process because of COVID. It took us almost two years to shoot 16 episodes [because of the production shutdown amid the pandemic]. And when we came back and were starting to write the last few episodes, we were on Zoom for table reads, which is not as useful as one might imagine! So it made it more difficult to have a lot of those personal conversations.
Frankie (Lily Tomlin) and Grace (Jane Fonda) walk along the beach to the tune of “You’re All I Need to Get By” to end the series. Courtesy of Netflix/
You’ve said you never considered actually sending Grace or Frankie up to heaven. But were there any alternate endings you toyed with?
There’s one thing we always knew: Grace and Frankie have to end up together. That we knew. What we didn’t know was how we were going to get there. And we wanted it to be satisfying and surprising. But, to answer the question, no, we never once considered actually killing them.
I read that you have always known the last image and the last line: The two of them walking on the beach and Grace asking, “Now what?” Why did this ending always feel right?
For several reasons. One is because “now what?” is the end of the pilot. And the implication of “now what?” is that there’s more. That the show may be ending, but they aren’t. Now they have the next journey to look forward to. In terms of them on the beach, it’s just the iconic look that we have on the show that we, most of the time, end on.
The fourth wall seemed to break in a few moments, with some glances between Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, including when Dolly Parton shows up, and with that final message. What balance were you hoping to strike?