Grace and Frankie

It's hard to classify Grace and Frankie except to say it’s splendid television.

Grace and Frankie is funny and even touching.

Ms.Tomlin and Ms. Fonda make an immensely potent comedy team. Together, and also separately, they’re the source of most of the ebullience, style and assorted other pleasures of Grace and Frankie, and those are considerable.

Viewers are advised to stay with Grace and Frankie and watch it both blossom and bear fruit. It’s not a great, game-changing series by any means. At least not yet.

The writing, which delivers humor and heartbreak in near equal measure, contains enough observational shrewdness to keep the endeavor engaging. And the performances by this all-star cast don't hurt, either.

The 13-episode series, created by Marta Kauffman and Howard J. Morris, is simply irresistible, mostly because Fonda and Tomlin are irresistible.

The leads each fare better when her character is a little off base--Fonda's when she defrosts a little, Tomlin's when she toughens up--and the show is more fun when they're in a mood to cooperate than when they're trading barbs.

By episode three, Tomlin and Fonda find their comedic voices and cement Grace and Frankie as the candid and humorous series it truly is.

The character-based stuff is so strong that the situational stuff feels even more forced. Luckily, the cast and writing gets better as the show goes along, discarding some of the easy set-ups of the first couple episodes.

Grace And Frankie works better as Emmy-bait than as a well-tuned dramedy, and it’s not built for binge-watching.

On the whole, however, the show simultaneously feels like it has too much going on--in that there are eight regulars to service, all with their own season-long story arcs--and too little--in that there's rarely any real conflict between the characters.

Unlike Amazon’s Transparent, which deals compassionately with a late-in-life revelation about sexuality, Grace and Frankie is mostly content to recycle old jokes in a new context.

Paired together, Grace and Frankie doesn’t exactly work. But paired together, Fonda and Tomlin are brilliant.

They're clearly going for a raffish "Thelma & Louise" charm here, but the wind-up is strictly "Golden Girls."

To be sure, Grace and Frankie is better than CBS’s recent “Odd Couple” reboot but Grace and Frankie does feel like a network sitcom (minus the laugh track), maybe “Friends: The Golden Years” if the focus was on Monica and Phoebe (and if Chandler and Joey became a couple).

This is a show that takes a very long while to find a stable tone and settle in. It veers recklessly and off-puttingly between brash one-liners and angst drama, between kooky times and personal tragedy, like a nervous guest doing stand-up at a shiva.

The setup is stagey, the dialogue slack (or--worse--obvious).... [Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin] effortlessly know how to elevate even average material--and pretty much do so here.

Grace and Frankie strains very hard for laughter of any sort.

The true goal of Grace and Frankie is laughs, gained sometimes at the expense of genuine feeling but, hey, funny is funny.

In part, the series feels handcuffed by its format, having chosen to work at being funny and still address the sense of loss the women face. So the narrative keeps playing off the disconnection between Frankie as the meditating Earth goddess and Grace as the buttoned-up WASP, with the familiar and emotional theme of two disparate people united through grief offset by predictable one-liners and showier interludes.

The acting is good as far as the scripts will allow. Fonda and Tomlin don’t have much chemistry but they can certainly spin their lines into something better than they are, and Sheen (as Robert) and Waterston (as Sol) have an easy rapport. But the show plays like an overreaching network sitcom that wandered online.

It's mostly bawdy, with Fonda and Tomlin turning in to-11 performances with lots of big takes and broad physical choices.

The show dawdles in a long and empty corridor that separates edgier, topical character studies such as Amazon’s brilliant “Transparent” from a traditional comedy series such as “Friends.”

Their characters still do not feel particularly novel or real or interesting--or funny, sadly, which wastes both Fonda’s talent for physical comedy and Tomlin’s deadpan wit--but their friendship does eventually become real, which is something.

The two stars are a delight together.... But they play like sitcom characters plopped down in a cable-dramedy world, delivering dialogue is full of one-liners that feel like they’re setting up studio audience laughter that never comes.