Grace and Frankie

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.