This gradual re-graying started out, ironically, in an area of the business generally held up as forward-thinking and youthful: streaming. In 2015, Netflix debuted Grace and Frankie, in which former co-stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, then in their mid- to late-seventies, played retirees who become close after their husbands leave them to have an affair with each other. It ran for seven seasons — among the longest runs ever for a straight-to-streaming series — and served as a strong reminder that Fonda and Tomlin were just as good a team as they’d been decades earlier in the feminist film comedy 9 to 5. A few years later, Netflix debuted a male counterpart of sorts in The Kominsky Method, starring Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin as, respectively, a famous acting teacher and his longtime agent and friend; it only ran three seasons, in part because Arkin (who was 84 before the series began) didn’t return after the second. Still, the existence of both shows, and the longevity of Grace and Frankie, spoke to an unexpected side effect of the streaming revolution: With no advertisers to appease (at least not in the 2010s), demographics became meaningless. All that mattered were eyeballs, and what drove subscriptions. If someone who had loved Fonda since Barefoot in the Park and Arkin since Catch-22 wanted to sign up for Netflix to watch them, they were a data point, and dollar amount, equivalent to a Stranger Things-obsessed teen. {read}