Grace and Frankie’s Golden Years End on an Emotional Note
glamour.comThis post contains spoilers for the final season of .Grace and Frankie, starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, was never going to end Thelma & Louise–style. “No, no, no, no, never,” cocreator Marta Kauffman assures me during a recent call. “That would be so depressing.
And I think there would be a rebellion by some of our fans. Frankie and Grace wouldn’t die.”Still, the realities of aging are at the center of the show’s final episodes, which dropped on Netflix April 29.
Grace wrestles with existential panic attacks, Frankie’s arthritis impedes her painting, and Martin Sheen’s Robert experiences worsening memory loss—story lines that are interwoven with the crew’s lighthearted martini- and marijuana-fueled adventures.
Cocreator Howard J. Morris says that striking this tonal balance while crafting a fulfilling conclusion for a series about starting over proved especially difficult. “We had to figure out how to end a show satisfyingly that’s about beginnings,” he says. “You want to feel like something happened that made it feel like an ending, but also don’t want to sell out the show and have some horrible thing happen.”Instead, the show flirts with the idea of something terrible befalling Tomlin’s New Age Frankie when her psychic predicts she has three months to live.
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