How much comedy does a comedy need? I ask because, with its half-hour format and Marta Kauffman pedigree, the new Netflix series Grace and Frankie is, technically, a comedy series. And yet there aren’t many laughs on the show, which unfolds at a gentle, quirky pace, and has the glowing, soft lighting of an Oprah interview. The series, about two women (Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin) whose business-partner husbands (Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston) leave their wives for each other, finds an easy analog in the Amazon series Transparent. Both shows are about a family dealing with a late-in-life coming out, and both have the irregular feel of series that don’t need to shape themselves to fit a traditional network.

But where Transparent has sharp spikes of Angeleno anger and self-involvement jutting out of its thoughtful, serious center, Grace and Frankie has wheezy old-timer jokes, about hippies and hip surgery. Fonda plays the uptight Type A half of the odd couple, while Tomlin is the dope-smoking spiritualist. It’s that kind of comedy, chuckling about marijuana and martinis as Grace (Fonda) and Frankie (Tomlin) turn to each other in their moment of crisis and need. Blindsided by their husbands’ admission, the two scorned women move into a shared Malibu beach house and struggle to navigate their lives as newly single women in their 70s. They also, of course, have to reconcile themselves with the fact that their husbands were carrying on a secret affair for 20 years and now want to at last be together, out in the open, so they can finally be happy. Their happiness comes at the expense of their wives’, and the series does an interesting job of juggling that painful reality—we’re rooting for the guys to live their best lives, but also acutely feel Grace and Frankie’s jiltedness.

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There’s not a lot of room for straight-up belly laughs in there, as this is pretty serious stuff. Fonda and Tomlin are both game and limber, and have the snappy rapport one would expect of Nine to Five co-stars. (A Dolly Parton cameo has to be in the offing, right??) But they’re given uneven ground to stand on. In the five episodes I’ve seen, Grace and Frankiehas trouble figuring itself out, the tone shifting episode to episode, from light screwball to bruised and melancholy. Sometimes it’s a rambling family saga; in certain episodes, Sheen and Waterston get almost as much focus as Fonda and Tomlin, and there are not infrequent interludes involving the couples’ grown children, including a cleaned-up drug addict played by Ethan Embry, sassy June Diane Raphael, and a pinchedBrooklyn Decker. But other episodes focus much more on just Grace and Frankie and ignore other characters entirely, a lopsidedness that hints that the writers are having some trouble finding the right balance.

Still, I eagerly watched all five episodes made available to me, because there’s something cozy and engaging about Grace and Frankie. Certainly a large part of the show’s appeal is the performances. Tomlin is saddled with an abundance of creaky hippie jokes—she goes on peyote vision quests, she meditates, she’s serious about recycling!—but she manages to transcend them, showing us the humanity behind the shtick. Frankie has used all this flowery, woo-woo stuff as an escape from the grimmer truths in her life—a gay husband, a troubled son. But now she has to confront them, just as Grace has to contend with a life that is suddenly not tidy and ordered and presentable. Unshockingly, Fonda, still toned and impeccably maintained, plays an imperious alpha Wasp quite well—it’s a pleasure watching her maneuver a crumbling world in killer outfits.

Waterston and Sheen, both survivors of blustery Aaron Sorkin roles, here seem to revel in playing things smaller and more human-scale. They make a nice couple, actually, even if we don’t quite sense any sexual chemistry. Embry makes a welcome return from the wild here; his character is a sad sack, but Embry doesn’t play him as a loser. He’s got something of a love interest in Decker’s character, who so far hasn’t been fleshed out much beyond “mom” and “love interest.” Raphael is stuck playing what’s become a cable-TV stock character, the sardonic, kinda mean woman who’s blunt and likes a glass of wine. It’s not the most original of creations, but Raphael finds some new notes to play.

Beyond the performances, there is something more innate but elusive that Grace and Frankie uses to draw us in. It might be its off-brand Nancy Meyers-ness, every room immaculately, but less expensively, appointed. (Mary Kay Place even shows up in one episode.) Or maybe it’s the intriguing central conceit—how many real-life older people are coming out now that the cultural climate has so drastically changed? Whatever the hook of the show is, it’s working on me. I haven’t laughed all that much yet, but that’s O.K. MaybeGrace and Frankie is more a comedy in the classical sense: everyone’s happy in the end, and then there’s a wedding. That is legal now, after all.
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