Here’s a thought: “What if there are two women who don't like each other and their husbands get married?” When Marta Kauffman (she / her) heard her daughter, Hannah K.S. Canter, pitch that idea for their latest sitcom, she knew they landed on something good. That car conversation led to Grace and Frankie, which is releasing its final episodes today. (Can you hear our sobs?)

Ahead of the drop, we chatted with showrunner extraordinaire Marta about building our fav comfort series, the best episodes from another little comedy she created called Friends, and what goes into writing the perfect series finale.

How did you get a show about 60-something women smoking, fighting, and (gasp!) dating picked up?
A) We had Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, and who wouldn’t be excited about that? The other thing is that it was at the point when—because of streaming services—people were starting to do “niche television.” But what ended up happening is that all sorts of people started watching our show, not just older women, which was a big surprise to both us and Netflix.

How did you get Jane and Lily to sign on?
I had lunch with someone who was working at Skydance who said that she’d heard Jane and Lily wanted to do TV. I thought she meant together, so I called my agent and said, “Is it true Jane and Lily want to do a show?” She said, “I don’t know, I’ll call you back.” Twenty minutes later, she called and said, “They do now.”

And what was it like working with them?
When I first met them, I was incredibly intimidated and nervous. You’d think that would wear off as we got to the 90th episode, and yet every day we would have a table read and I’d sit across from Jane, Lily, Martin Sheen, and Sam Waterston—I would just go, “Oh my God, this is incredible.”

You also worked on Friends. What was your favorite episode to write?
Oh, that’s tough. It’s more like I have completed episodes that stick out to me as my favorites. The Carol giving birth one was really fun to write, but probably my favorite episode is the one with the embryos, which has the game in it where the girls lose their apartment.

What do you consider when wrapping up a series?
The 2 hardest things about doing a series are the first episode and the last episode. In some ways, the last episode is even harder because you want to end in a place where people feel satisfied with where the characters end up. But at the same time, you want it to be surprising. It’s really hard, and out of all 94 episodes that we did for Grace and Frankie, it definitely took us the longest to come up with the story.

Have you learned anything about female friendship from working on these shows?
I have very close female friends in my life, and they sustain me—hopefully, I do the same for them. I can’t say I learned as much about myself during this process, but I did learn that there are a lot of TV viewers out there who want the warmth of friendship, and really want to watch TV that’s cozy. That’s something that both Grace and Frankie and Friends had the ability to do.