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GRACE AND FRANKIE
May 8, 2015  | By David Bianculli

Netflix, 3:00 a.m. ET

 

SERIES PREMIERE: Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin star in this new Netflix comedy series, co-created by Marta Kauffmann of Friends. The entirety of Season 1 is available today. They play wives of long-standing law partners, played by Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston, who surprise their respective spouses at dinner with the joint announcement that a) they're asking for a divorce, b) they're gay, and c) they're in love with one another and intend to get married as a male couple. Both families have grown children, and breaking the news to the kids, as well as the wives, is what propels this series -- much as it did with Amazon's Transparent. Tomlin and Fonda, in the first handful of episodes, are better in scenes with their spouses and kids than with each other, but Sheen and Waterston together are subtle and terrific where the ladies play a bit broadly. And give Sheen credit for career symmetry: In 1972, he starred with Hal Holbrook in a wonderful, groundbreaking dramatic telemovie called That Certain Summer, in which he played a long-married man who surprised his wife by announcing he wanted a divorce because he had come to the realization that he loved someone else. Another man...

 
 
 
 
 
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