Television series' about older women are having a moment

In addition to Grace and Frankie, the popular Keshet series, It’s Got Nothing to Do with Age can be seen on Wednesdays at 10:45 p.m., in Hebrew with Hebrew titles on Channel 12.

By HANNAH BROWN
‘GRACE AND FRANKIE’ (photo credit: NETFLIX)
‘GRACE AND FRANKIE’
(photo credit: NETFLIX)
Grace and Frankie is back for its sixth season on Netflix and it is as charming and funny as ever. If you haven’t been following this show, it tells the story of two women, Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin), who are thrown together when it turns out that their husbands, Robert (Martin Sheen) and Sol (Sam Waterston), who run a law firm together, have been in love for years. The couples divorce and the husbands marry each other.
The latest season opens with Frankie grappling with the news that Grace has impulsively married her much-younger boyfriend, Nick (Peter Gallagher), and is leaving the beach house the two women share. The good news is that nothing can keep these two apart for long and soon they have come up with a new invention to add to their list of products for older people for problems that generally can’t be mentioned in public. While it’s always fun to watch the streaming era’s Lucy and Ethel making a mess of things, this season I found their children – who also have a key place on the show – to be far less interesting than the mothers.
The season ends with a setup that will lead in to what seems likely to be a very funny final season, with the main quartet reunited, kind of. No spoilers here, see it for yourself.
Series about older women are having a moment. In addition to Grace and Frankie, the popular Keshet series, It’s Got Nothing to Do with Age, starring Miri Mesika as a lawyer and mother of three in her forties who gets involved with her son’s 22-year-old friend, Yishay (Gefen Barkai), can be seen on Wednesdays at 10:45 p.m., in Hebrew with Hebrew titles on Channel 12. This series is comic, but a new drama with a similar theme, Gold Digger, has just gotten under way on YES Drama on Sundays at 10 p.m. and on Sting TV, YES VOD and YES LONDON.
Julia Ormond, who played Marie Calvet on Mad Men, is Julia, a recently divorced 60-year-old woman who gets picked up by Benjamin (Ben Barnes), a handsome copyrighter half her age at the British Museum, after her three grown children have forgotten her birthday celebration. Like It’s Got Nothing to Do with Age, much of the show examines the problems her children cause, since they are upset by her new relationship. Unlike on the Keshet show, where it’s true love, Benjamin may be what the title says he is. It’s too soon to figure out just how dark it may get, or how deluded Julia may turn out to be.
The eighth season of Homeland starts on February 10 at 5 a.m. and 10 p.m. on YES Edge and will continue running on Mondays at these times, as well as on YES VOD. If you’d like to review what happened on season six, the one set in New York, you can catch up on HOT VOD starting on February 6.
February will be an unusually rich month on YES Docu. If you’re familiar with Michael Apted’s long running and fascinating series of documentary films, the 7 Up series, which look at a cross section of Britons at seven-year intervals, starting when they were seven-year-olds, you’ll be curious to see the most recent installment, 63 Up. Yes, the series has been going on for 56 years. The new film will be broadcast on YES Docu in three parts, on February 2-4, at 9 p.m., as well as on YES VOD and Sting TV.
Rob Garver’s documentary on the influential New Yorker movie critic, Pauline Kael, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, will be broadcast on the channel on February 12 but will be available on YES VOD and Sting starting on February 7.
Now that Quentin Tarantino has become an honorary Israeli, you may want to check out a documentary about his work, QT8: The First Eight. It features dozens of interviews with those who have worked with him and will run on YES Docu on February 9 at 10 p.m., and will start on YES VOD on February 7.


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