In the good news/bad news category, Netflix announces today that Grace And Frankie has been renewed for a seventh season, which will also be its last. But, those final 16 episodes will make the Jane Fonda/Lily Tomlin sitcom the longest running Netflix show ever, with 94 episodes total.
The series kicked off in 2015 with real-life best friends Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as two wives whose husbands (Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston, respectively), leave them for each other. The now-single senior citizens become odd-couple roommates in a beachhouse and start to build their lives back together, eventually creating an ergonomic vibrator company and finding their own new relationships: Fonda’s Grace even married younger man Nick (Peter Gallagher) in season five, which dropped in January. Meanwhile, now-spouses Robert and Sol work on their marriage while their various offspring deal with relationship troubles and career hurdles of their own.
Even after season five, there still seems like a lot of territory left to mine, especially since a genuinely funny sitcom about life’s later decades hasn’t really been in the mix since Golden Girls. But 94 episodes will be the final tally, the most for any Netflix show so far, comedy or drama. Confirming their awesomeness, Fonda and Tomlin said in a joint statement: “We’ll miss these two old gals, Grace and Frankie, as much as many of their fans will, but we’ll still be around. We’ve outlasted so many things—just hope we don’t outlast the planet.” Show co-creators and showrunners Marta Kauffman and Howard J. Morris added, “It’s thrilling and somehow fitting, that our show about the challenges, as well as the beauty and dignity of aging, will be the oldest show on Netflix.”
Fortunately there are still a lot of Grace And Frankie adventures ahead, as season six hasn’t even dropped yet, but will arrive in 2020. We’ll just have to watch these new episodes verrrry slooowly. Or, just binge yet another rewatch.