Given the warm reception for the show’s charming first season, it should come as no surprise that Netflix has seen fit to renew comedy Grace and Frankie for a second season, to debut sometime next year.
The streaming service has a long-standing tradition of standing behind its originals – even less successful bids like Hemlock Grove and Marco Polo have earned second-season pickups, while it’s generally expected that the network will keep ordering more of its hit Orange is the New Black for as long as creator Jenji Kohan wants to keep making it (the unusually busy cast of House of Cards makes it a little less of a sure thing year after year).
Grace and Frankie was a deceptively audacious move for Netflix, however, lacking the four-quadrant hook that most of the streaming service’s other offerings have featured. The comedy centers on two aging women (Fonda and Tomlin) whose lives are thrown for a loop when their husbands (Sheen and Sam Waterston) leave them for each other. All four must find a way to coexist and discover a new meaning of family. Brooklyn Decker, Ethan Embry, Baron Vaughn and June Diane Raphael co-star.
Our own Mitchel Broussard ultimately found himself taken with the series’ “refreshing sweetness,” though he did note some weak spots in the first few episodes in his three-and-a-half-star review.
Co-creator and exec-producer Marta Kauffman revealed the renewal on an FYC panel at the Pacific Design Center, with co-creator/exec-producer Howard J. Morris and stars Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Martin Sheen also in attendance.
“Let me say, it’s so awesome to do a show on Netflix,” she said, “because two and a half weeks after we launched, Miley Cyrus does a tweet about your show, and they call and say, ‘We’d like to do a season two.’ So yes, there is a season two. We have Ted [Sarandos, Chief Content Officer for Netflix] and Miley to thank.”
Grace and Frankie will return in 2016.