Grace and Frankie looks at many sides of aging
Now streaming, Netflix
Marta Kauffman, the co-creator of Friends, is in the midst of her newest TV venture.
Trading the angst of 20-somethings for the angst of 70-somethings, Grace and Frankie centres on two women who are shaken when their husbands announce they’re gay and intend to marry each other. The first 13 episodes are now streaming on Netflix.
It’s an all-star cast — Jane Fonda! Lily Tomlin! Sam Waterston! Martin Sheen! — and the characters’ three-quarter-life crises skew decidedly more dramatic and taboo than those on Friends.
“The disadvantage of doing a multi-camera show (like Friends) is you don’t get to explore in 21 minutes any subject matter deeply. I love comedy — it’s what I do. But I also really wanted to get into subject matter with more heart and depth,” Kauffman says.
“This was the perfect opportunity. First of all, you get 30 minutes instead of 20-whatever, and you don’t have any limits on what stories have to be based on, or what advertisers are worried about.”
Another advantage? Netflix is notorious for withholding information about how many viewers watch its programs. Thus, the online streaming service unchains itself from the tyranny of ratings, which tend to determine a show’s future on conventional TV.
“Ratings are a tricky game, and I am so happy not to be worrying about that on Grace and Frankie,” she says. “Ratings are fickle and they’re not a real judge of how good a show is. I can do nothing about it at this point except do the show that I wanted to do and the show I’m proud of.”
During Friends’ 10-season run, Kauffman branched out with other comedies, co-creating Veronica’s Closet and executive-producing the Christina Applegate series Jesse and the short-lived WB show Related. By the time Friends ended in 2004, she found herself redefining her focus.
“(Co-creator) David Crane and I had been partners for 27 years. We’re still very good friends and we talk all the time, but we both wanted to go in slightly different directions. At that point, I wasn’t even convinced that I still wanted to do comedy,” she says.
Documentaries offered an opportunity to stretch: She produced Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, about a Hungarian poet captured by the Nazis; and Mimi and Dona, about a 94-year-old mom caring for a disabled daughter.
She also did two short-film anthologies — one on breast cancer (Five) and one on mental illness (Call Me Crazy: A Five Film) — and wrote and directed three short films for Jon Avnet and Rodrigo Garcia’s YouTube channel.
“Through all of this, the two things I wanted to do were to see if I could go deeper, and to see if I could write alone,” she says. “I’d been writing with a partner for 27 years. David was always the one at the computer. I had to learn to be two people — the person writing the idea down and the person saying, ‘That’s a stupid idea.’”
With Grace and Frankie, Kauffman has found a happy medium between dealing with weightier subjects and finding the funny. The show joins other current TV series that ponder aging: HBO’s Getting On will air a third season, HBO Canada’s Sensitive Skin is on deck for a second go-round, and Netflix aired a special series-ending episode of Derek last month.
“Because we wanted this show to be real, we knew we had to stay away from the stereotypes. At least to do them in a fresh way. It’s things like vaginal dryness, which it’s a real thing, but you say it and people laugh. So that’s one of the funny things about aging,” she says.
“But there’s also plenty of other things about aging that are less funny — it’s not just about the physical things about aging — it’s about the emotional ones. It’s about being marginalized. It’s about not being seen. It’s about these things that are much, much realer than, like, prune juice.”
As for her own impending stretch as a septuagenarian, the 58-year-old Kauffman has a clear vision. “I want to have the energy that Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin have and the body that Jane has. And their talent and their fortitude,” she says.
“I love what I do. I don’t want to ever say I’m done. I may slow down, but I certainly don’t want to say I’m done with this because I just love what I do. And I want to be physically, health-wise strong. And look less old than my mother did at that age.”