You only need mention the two names - Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin - and expectations of the new Netflix comedy Grace and Frankie are shaped.
These two women are, after all, two thirds of 9 to 5, the 1980 comedy blockbuster which easily lays claim to being the original workplace comedy. But if you are tuning into Grace and Frankie expecting rebellious secretaries and malfunctioning copying machines, then you're going to be disappointed. But in a very, very good way.
Though Grace and Frankie is pitched as a comedy, at times the laughs are outweighed by the poignancy. It's a fine line to walk, but the show's two leads, Fonda and Tomlin, seem to carry it off effortlessly, lurching from bittersweet hilarity to sucker-punching emotion.
It was, Fonda says, "our challenge and our gift that they presented us with a project that could be funny and very, very real."
Fonda and Tomlin play two women who are not really friends.
Their husbands - Robert (Martin Sheen) and Sol (Sam Waterston) - are law partners, and the wives have been simply that, two women whose lives are knitted for no actual reason beyond the working relationship shared by their husbands. But the rug is pulled out from under them when Robert and Sol reveal they are now a gay couple, and plan to marry. "Because we can," Sol says. "I know," snaps back Frankie. "I hosted that fundraiser."
"The women are confronted by a tragedy," Fonda says candidly. "I mean, for someone to suddenly lose a relationship of 40 years and for the reasons they do is shattering. It's absolutely shattering and shattering especially for Grace, for her identity. And so we had to play that reality but not get so deep we couldn't come back up for comedic air and it was a fun challenge. A number of people have said it's much more real than they ever expected and I was happy to hear that."
The two women, Fonda says, are also fundamentally different. And, revealingly, have fundamentally different marriages. While Fonda's Grace is listless and struggles for focus and purpose, Tomlin's Frankie is genuinely devastated by the loss.
"Why, ultimately, the relationship between Grace and Frankie will be a good and a healing one, although there will always be tensions, is that Frankie is strong where Grace is weak and vice versa," Fonda says.
"Grace never really had a good marriage. Frankie and her husband had a real relationship. Grace knows it's over immediately. Frankie takes the entire season to realise it's over."
This is not actually a gay comedy, or indeed a comedy about marriage and sexuality, though for many that will be the way into the narrative. Grace and Frankie is ultimately a story about relevance and the fear that in a world of reinvention, in which people are free to change and evolve, others are left behind, the collateral damage of liberation, struggling to find a footing while everyone else applauds.
"I know many women who are in this kind of a situation, not the exact same situation, but who are afraid they're going to be left behind," Fonda says. "One of the things that I like about the series is I think it's going to be a series about hope. Something really horrible like this can happen and it doesn't have to be the end of you. You think you've been broken but in fact you've been broken open and now it's up to you to see that and try to find out who you are."
Fonda and Tomlin met when Fonda was producing 9 to 5, then a drama about women in the workplace. She saw Tomlin's one-woman show and wanted her for the film. Later, when Fonda cast Dolly Parton in the film's third lead role, it became a comedy. "It took me a year to convince the two of them and it turned into what it was," Fonda recalls. "We've remained friends ever since and Dolly, too."
The rhythm of working with Tomlin, she has, has never changed. "If it's at all different it's because of the nature of episodic television where you have much less time and you have a different director every episode and so forth but, other than that, it's basically the same," Fonda says of her friend and co-star. "She knows generally what she wants to do and she knows her lines but it has to be very instinctual with her and she likes to try it many, many different ways. It was true then and it's true now."
In many respects they are quite different. Tomlin prefers many takes. Fonda does it in one. Tomlin does not like to look at "dailies" - playback of the scenes filmed that day - but Fonda does.
"I report back from the minefield and tell her how it was and where it worked and maybe where it didn't," Fonda says. "She's just really, really, really special and I saw it back then and I see it now and not much has changed."
Fonda acknowledges that fans would love a Dolly Parton guest appearance, but says it was important not to throw the show's dynamic off kilter while it was still trying to find its feet in the first season. "It's very important to all of us that Grace and Frankie has its own unique identity," she says. "It is a very specific kind of show with a certain kind of style that's not like 9 to 5. Maybe when we're all in adult diapers and Grace and Frankie have established themselves, then maybe in a cameo."
Powerfully, the show explodes television's traditional portrayal of older women. Therein, says Fonda, lies its heart.
"Television is the most democratic form," she says. "It's also forgiving to older women. So if there's something you want to say that's important to you, television is where you want to go and that's also where a lot of the good writing goes." Older women, Fonda says, are the fastest growing demographic in the world. "And we are not what people think we are.
"There's a stereotype of what it means to get older, especially for women and it ain't true on average and so I want to get into that. I want to get into the sex of it, the muscles and joints, the dry vagina, grandchildren and what happens when you try to pick them up, the problems with adult children. What do I have to lose by being brave now? I can be brave."
Grace and Frankie, Netflix.com.au
