Grace and Frankie: Season 1 (2015)

Has gay marriage rehabilitated traditional marriage or ushered in a more emergent concept of marriage? That’s the question that seems to be on everybody’s lips at the moment – a question that Grace and Frankie, the first Netflix sitcom, sets out to answer, crafting a comedy of remarriage for what increasingly feels like a post-marriage era, even or especially as marriage rights are extended to more and more parties. Set in San Diego, it’s about a pair of frenemies – Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) – whose lives are turned upside down when their husbands – Robert (Martin Sheen) and Sol (Sam Waterston) – announce that they’ve been in love for twenty years and have finally decided to move in with each other and get married. What ensues is a compellingly awkward melange of 90s style, multi-cam sitcom, 00s-style, single-cam sitcom and, of course, the Netflix model itself, which creates a quite unusual and somewhat incoherent sense of space – highly fluid at times, yet often constrained to just one or two rooms or zones per episode, as if still thinking in terms of sets rather than the live locations opened up by this more flexible filming style, trying to recover sitcom co-ordinates from a post-sitcom world. As Robert and Sol move into Grace’s house, and Grace and Frankie move into Frankie’s beach house, the comedy partakes of a similar dissonance, sometimes feeling totally independent of canned laughter and sometimes feeling painfully denuded and diminished without it, as strange voids and lapses in the comic momentum make it quite difficult, at moments, to locate yourself as a viewer, or to decide whether to consider yourself part of some putative or hypothetical studio audience. The thing is, that works incredibly well to evoke the sense of displaced fantasy that drives the foursome to find new ways of knowing each other – a displacement that is, in some sense, the main joke, the main manifesto for a truly Netflix sitcom – as they’re forced to reconfigure themselves around Robert and Sol’s upcoming nuptials, which is perhaps why the series feels quite experimental, even if its experimentation lies in splicing and selecting quite traditional ingredients for a new era and a more syncretic, flexible audience than ever before. Like most experiments, it is somewhat provisional and open in its tone, moving between a kind of apology for gay marriage, a reminder that gay couples are just like every other couple, and a more roving, restless, rambunctious queerness that finds a quite unstereotypical flamboyance in the vicissitudes and variables of late life romance. In most cases, it’s Frankie, played by Tomlin, who feels like the queer kernel of the series – the only character, pointedly, who remains unattached this season – but that’s not to discount Robert and Sol as well, who frequently provide a quite lovely vision of growing gay and old without ever falling into complacency, while not having much to prove either, even or especially as their revamped lifestyle starts to seem more and more precarious. And of course, Grace – and Fonda herself – is the energy that keeps it all going and circulating, as the odd, hyperreal backdrops – part set, part live location – starts to resemble her fitness video backdrops more and more, which is perhaps why the series finally feels so oddly aspirational and motivating as well, willing itself to sink deeper and deeper into the strange and sometimes startling comic voice of this opening season.