Chalke’s schtick as self-doubting, endearing-until-she-cracks Kate can wear thin by mid-season, but again, she’s far better than the lines she’s given. Heigl, no stranger to the role of prickly, particular, career-dominant protagonists (see 27 Dresses, The Ugly Truth), and who serves as an executive producer on the series, delivers a tart, admittedly intriguing performance as 43-year-old Tully. The discordance is not so much a comment on either actor, whose sharp handling of the maudlin material closer to their age is one of the few anchor points to keep viewers watching through 10 50-minute episodes. The flashback costumes, sets, lighting, and bad hair of the show’s parodic depiction of the 80s are particularly shoddy more distracting is the fact that the actors playing the friends at 14 could play them at 20, but Firefly Lane posits Heigl and Chalke, both in their 40s, as plucky 22-year-olds in strange soft focus.

The space afforded to the struggles of middle-age womanhood – Tully staring down menopause and one night stand-turned-romance with much-younger Max (Jon-Michael Ecker), Kate re-entering the workforce after 14 years as an assistant to entitled Seattle Weekly editor Kimber Watts (Jenna Rosenow) – provide the stars with their best material and unfortunately cast the weaker flashback sections in even harsher light. The most coherent, best costumed, and most intriguing era are the middle years: Tully is a famous Seattle-based daytime host of the The Girlfriend Hour, a mash-up of Ellen and Oprah (she references both) who both lavishes and resents her notoriety, while Kate reels from her impending divorce to Tully’s producer, Johnny (Ben Lawson), the pair’s former boss in the 80s, and the cold shoulder from 14-year-old daughter Marah (Yael Yurman).

Speaking of, there are several others that make accounting for the setting difficult: college years upstart young 20s at a local TV network years Tully and Kate in their early 40s, navigating career stalls, divorce, and changing relationships, set in the year 2003 a brief flash forward to 2005, played for awkward, shifting cliffhangers from the third episode on. The eighth grade and early high school years, the foundational period of the girls friendship, are marked by overt costume signalling (intimidating, false-confident Tully bedecked in lip gloss and miniskirts, nerdy Kate obscured by pancake glasses), trauma, an inseparable bond and the origin of Tully’s lies about her mother’s addictions out of embarrassment, one of several themes that patchily surface in the later timelines. The first timeline begins in 1974, when 14-year-old Tully (standout Ali Skovbye), is forced by her flaky, drug-addled hippie mother Cloud (Beau Garrett) to move to Firefly Lane, somewhere near Snohomish, Washington, and befriends the mousy girl across the street, Kate (Roan Curtis).

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