A Guide To Firefly Lane’s Decades & Decades Of Characters

The equal parts heartwarming and heart-wrenching Netflix series Firefly Lane should be exciting for anyone who once loved Grey's Anatomy's Dr. Izzie Stevens: Katherine Heigl is back. After a tumultuous exist from Grey's Anatomy, Heigl focused on movie roles until 2014. Since then, she's been in a couple of TV shows like State of Affairs, Doubt, and Suits, but she hasn't really found led an ensemble like she once did Grey's Anatomy. Firefly Lane is based on a book, so don't count on the 17-season staying power of the ABC medical show, but the new series puts Heigl front and center.

The series follows Heigl's character Tully from childhood as she meets her best friend Kate (Sarah Chalke). The pair enjoy a decades-long friendship, so the series spans from the '60s and '70s through Kate and Tully's early journalism careers in the '80s, and up through the early to mid 2000s, when they find that adulthood is just as much of a struggle as being a teenager was.

Firefly Lane is mostly about Kate and Tully, but as their world expands to include difficult bosses, complicated boyfriends, and even more complex family members, the cast of characters gets more and more sprawling. That's where we come in: Here's a guide to keep all these intertwining stories straight.