Resist if you can the temptation to dismiss Grace and Frankie (Netflix) as a spinoff of The Golden Girls. Admittedly, it does look a bit like that on paper: two angsty old women forced to live together and hilarious one-liners follow as they whine and bitch at each other. But if it's an antecedent you're after, I'd suggest the Neil Simon play, The Odd Couple.Not so much a sitcom as a series that is at times achingly, bitterly funny, Grace and Frankie is a welcome if acerbic rejoinder to the whining about the lack of credible roles in Hollywood for actresses of a certain age. Here, brittle Grace, a vodka-swilling retired cosmetics executive played with understated vulnerability by Jane Fonda, and Frankie, a loopy, pot-smoking artist of hippyish mien handled by Lily Tomlin, are frenemies who've grudgingly endured their relationship - feigning affection with exaggerated air kisses and the like at dinner parties - because their husbands are law partners.It is at one such dinner party that their husbands, Robert and Sol (Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston), announce they have for 20 years been lovers and now plan to divorce their wives. The women are stunned. Asked why they waited so long to come out, Robert replies that they now can get married because, in California, they finally can. "I know," Grace says bitterly. "I hosted the fundraiser."Just like that, the two seventysomethings' lives are seemingly shattered. There is a lot of panic and anger - especially at their husbands, who totter off to a life of some happiness with each other. For Grace and Frankie, though, it's a different scene altogether. Without their husbands, they find they're nobodies. Old friends don't call, they're invisible to strangers, they're brushed aside. They disappear.But a certain arch camaraderie emerges when the two flee their marital homes and move into a beach house. There they ponder their messy lives and self-medicate their heartbreak with alcohol, psychedelic drugs and hilariously foul-mouthed outbursts. Given the subtext - Grumpy Old Women, anyone? - some of the jokes about loss of hearing, frustration with modern technology, bad vision, plastic surgery and sex after 70 do seem a bit mandatory. Grace's daughter, for example, advises her to lie on an online dating site and enter her age as 64.But mostly it works, and the one-liners serve to leaven the show's "heavier", more serious themes about relationships. Some of the quips are brilliant. "Why don't we have a therapist here?" a daughter suggests. "There was one when the dog died." Another time, Frankie snaps: "Ride the clock, stay miserable. I've got news for you: the next chapter [in the story of our lives] is not that long."What makes the series so watchable, though, is the extraordinary rapport between Fonda and Tomlin. It seems wrong, somehow, that these two were last seen together in Nine to Five, along with Dolly Parton, way back in 1980. A waste of chemistry, you could say. But welcome now that it's back...