Friday Flashback: 'Grace & Frankie' at PaleyFest in 2019
Five years ago, I moderated a panel with Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Martin Sheen and more for the Paley Center for Media's Pride Celebration
It was 2019 and Netflix’s situation comedy Grace and Frankie was going strong having just aired its fifth season following best friends Grace Hanson (Jane Fonda) and Frankie Bergstein (Lily Tomlin) as they rediscovered life, love, big business and friendship in their twilight years.
The set up for the show found the unsuspecting Grace and Frankie being told in the pilot episode by their husbands Robert (Martin Sheen) and Sol (Sam Waterston) that they had fallen in love and were leaving them for each other. Turns out, that big dramatic turn ended up being a good thing for the quartet, who found more happiness and love and, for viewers, comedy that would go through seven seasons before ending in 2022.
But Los Angeles in the spring means one thing for television fans - PaleyFest when the Paley Center for Media annually celebrates the best of television with panels at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood. I had moderated several panels for the Paley Center over my years living in Los Angeles but I not only was a fan of Grace and Frankie but of Fonda, Tomlin, Sheen, Waterston as well as the show creators Marta Kaufmann (one of the creators of Friends if you didn’t know) and Howard J. Morris, who was also a sitcom vet having worked on shows like Home Improvement and According to Jim.
The panel was celebrating Grace and Frankie but, since the show had just aired its fifth season, there was less to preview since the sixth season wouldn’t come until the following year which opened up to talk about the origins of the show coming together, on Sheen and Waterston playing a gay couple and more from the entire cast including June Diane Raphael, Baron Vaughn and Ethan Embry. The panel was a lot of laughs and ranks up there with some of my favorite moderating gigs in my career.
The Paley Center for Media released the video of the panel in June, 2019 as part of their panels celebrating Pride. Watch the entire video here:
This wasn’t the first or last panel I would do with Fonda and Tomlin as I did three other panels following this one and they were always so gracious, kind and, of course, funny. As a moderator, my job couldn’t be easier because I could ask a question and they’d answer it as well as riff and make the audiences laugh. They are both the epitome of class acts!
For more on my love for moderating panels, see my recent post on why I love it so much here.
Grace and Frankie is still streaming on Netflix in the event you never got around to watching the show or want to watch again.