But soon, it sinks in that this is a very specific shock hitting very specific people. “I’m feeling like the last 40 years have been a fraud,” Grace says as she maniacally brushes her hair, to which Robert expresses mystification that she doesn’t take the breakup as a relief: She never loved him in the first place. Frankie and Sol, on the other hand, really did have a deep bond; for them and their kids, the end of the marriage might mean the end of blissful times spent at farmer’s markets, movie nights, and “Jewish Christmas.” Meanwhile, the men excitedly start a new life together. Sol at one point tells Robert he feels guilty for leaving Frankie, saying, “You know what makes it worse? I’m so fucking happy.” But Robert refuses to agonize; he did enough of that when he was playing straight.

Grace and Frankie joins a pop-culture boomlet of stories about people coming out as something other than what their loved ones thought they were, late in life. In the most recent season of Girls, Hannah Horvath’s father abruptly exits the closet; Amazon’s Transparent tells of a family’s patriarch who starts living as a woman; in the non-fiction realm, Olympian and reality-TV dad Bruce Jenner has transfixed the nation by revealing that he’s transgender. As queer acceptance rises, the frequency of tales like these in real life and on screen is bound to rise as well; in Grace and Frankie, the uncloseting happens as the direct result of same-sex marriage becoming legal (“I hosted that fundraiser,” Grace moans). Often, the people affected by the coming-out receive as much or more attention than the person who’s actually coming out: Loreen Horvath rages bitterly against her gay husband; the Transparent kids shift the drama from “moppa”—mother and papa, in one—to themselves; the Kardashians’ reactions to Jenner’s announcement get their own TV segments. This focus on how LGBT liberation affects everyone else might strike some as insensitive, but it’s probably necessary when society has led so many relationships to be built on repressed truths.

In Grace and Frankie, the emphasis on the title characters allows the show to be somewhat radical on yet another front: portraying the tough position that single older women can find themselves in. Boomer icons Fonda and Tomlin play into some grandmotherly stereotypes—there are ongoing gags about hearing loss, bad backs, and the difficulties of text messaging—but also fiercely defy toward how circumstances and society treats them. At one point, they flip out at a supermarket employee who ignores them to instead help a younger woman, with Fonda roaring “What kind of animal treats people like this?” The moment is hammy but also poignant, well-earned after the show has methodically chronicled the stages of the women's nightmare: First, they face emotional shock; then, financial and legal indignities; then, boredom, lack of purpose, and invisibility. How will they overcome? The question feels fresh, even if not all the jokes do.

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