‘Will & Grace’ is making a comeback
The groundbreaking sitcom is gearing up for a release 11 years after the series went off the air
When Will & Grace premiered in 1998, the biggest comedies of the year were Seinfeld, Veronica’s Closet and Friends . It was the year President Bill Clinton denied having “relations” with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The year that gave us Google. A time when the notion that young adults were spending less time with the television set was beginning to percolate.
And there were two thirtysomething writers, Max Mutchnick and David Kohan, on the verge of helping to pave the way for LGBTQ characters on TV with their prime-time sitcom that featured two openly gay characters.
Will & Grace followed the close friendship between gay lawyer Will Truman (Eric McCormack) and straight interior designer Grace Adler (Debra Messing) along with their kooky cohorts Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes) and Karen Walker (Megan Mullally).
The comedy, which packaged its then-boundary-pushing portrayal of gay men in a simple premise about friendship, ran for eight seasons, racked up 16 Emmy Awards and was one of the last ratings stalwarts of NBC’s venerated Must See TV era.
“When the show wrapped, I moved to New York City and went to a therapist,” Mutchnick, now 51, recalls. “The first thing I said to her was, ‘I’ve just finished a run of a popular television show called Will & Grace, and I’d like to figure out a way to not talk about it ever again.’” So much for that. These days, the show is all Mutchnick and Kohan find themselves talking about as the comedy gears up for its splashy return to NBC — 11 years after the series went off the air. The sitcom’s second coming — featuring its original cast — is one of the network’s top assets this season, and its return under-
scores the value networks see in bringing familiar faces back into living rooms in an age when keeping up with television’s roster of shows requires a spreadsheet.
The duo are gathered in the greenroom of the show’s new home base on the NBCUniversal back lot — here, the walls are adorned floor-to-ceiling with brightly coloured collages of Will & Grace images. (The comedy was filmed in front of a studio audience on the CBS Radford lot in Studio City during its original run.) They admit being a bit preoccupied; there are some story problems they’re trying to work out on the episode that films the following week, and they’re eager to resolve them. “We’re not complacent,” Kohan says. “It’s the same anxiety. It’s abated somewhat by experience and age, and all that sort of stuff, but still...there’s a compulsion to get it right.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mutchnick adds. “I’m sick to my stomach. I’m still operating from a place of fear, except I eat my breakfast at a much nicer table.”
The 2.0 version of Will & Grace joins the small but hard-to-overlook list of flatlined shows that have been resuscitated. Others include Arrested Development,
Gilmore Girls and the upcoming Roseanne on ABC. But only Will & Grace has a comeback story with roots in the Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton election.
A few months before last year’s election, Mutchnick rallied the troops — intent on keeping Trump out of the White House. His idea: have the core cast reprise their characters for a video urging people to vote. The 10-minute bit, known as #VoteHoney, featured a pro-Trump Karen making cringeworthy jokes and a pro-Clinton Grace trying to persuade Jack, still undecided, to vote for Clinton.
“I remember reading the script to the election video, and I emailed Max and said, ‘Why can’t we just do the show again?’” Mullally recalls. “He emailed right back: ‘We can.’ Of course...It was just wishful thinking, because when you end a show, you know that it’s forever and you’ll never come back to do it again.”
But the response was quick and overwhelming, with the YouTube video notching up millions of views. NBC came calling.
“The minute I saw [the video], I thought, ‘It’s the show.’ It felt like the show had come back together,” Robert Greenblatt, chairman of NBC Entertainment, says by phone. “The four of them were incredible. It just seemed like a nobrainer to me... [And] it seemed like the right moment to bring back a show that comments very cleverly on pop culture and politics and the world in general.”
What started as a one-off 10-episode revival season quickly evolved into a 16-episode revival season with a renewal already locked in.
It’s a turn of events all the more unexpected considering that Mutchnick and Kohan sued NBC Studios in 2003. They alleged that the studio, which produced the show, sold the rights below fair value to its sister division, the NBC network, and cheated them out of at least $65 million (Dh238.6 million) in profit. The suit was ultimately settled in 2007.
“Jeff Zucker’s NBC is very different from Robert Greenblatt’s NBC,” Mutchnick says, referring to the former network head. “The energy in the building...feels very different, and it made it easy to return.”
The cast, who ventured on to various projects to varying degrees of success after the show ended, uniformly say there was no hesitation about reviving their career-defining roles.
LAUGHING MATTER
“Part of the reason I wanted to come back was because I felt like I needed to laugh,” says Messing, who stumped for Clinton. “You’re always told: ‘You can’t go home again’,” says McCormack, who juggled his return to the comedy with the Netflix Canadian time-travel drama,
Travelers. “But we got to go home again. And the reason they say that is because it’s not going to be the same. But it was. I mean, it really was.” Not simply in spirit, either. The revived
Will & Grace has been one big family reunion of sorts. In addition to Mutchnick and Kohan, three other writers from the original series (Tracy Poust, Jon Kinnally and Alex Herschlag) have returned to fill out the 10-person writing staff. Midas touch director James Burrows, who helmed every episode of the comedy during its original run, has resumed his duties. There are also a number of returning crew members — even the original audience warm-up comedian, Roger Lundblade, is back.
When we left off, Will and Grace had both gotten married and had kids — giving things closure. Mutchnick and Kohan say figuring out how the show would start up again was something they grappled with for weeks, ultimately deciding to hit the backspace on that ending. And, yes, there will be a nod to the revision.
“I think you have to acknowledge the people who have been fans of the show, and at the very least, wink at them and say, ‘We know, we know, but...’” Kohan says.
In the 2017 version, Will and Grace are single and living together in the same apartment. Jack is still Jack and across the hall, in all his no-knocking glory — though he has created his own method of acting, naturally trademarked as “Jackting” — since we last saw him. And Karen, the high pitch of her voice intact, is as inappropriate as ever.
“I always say, we never mature past high school,” Hayes says. “We all may look a little older, but at the core, the characters are the same.”
That might be a good thing. While the show has lived on in syndication since it went off the air in 2006, up until recently it didn’t have a streaming home. Fans who don’t have time to binge-watch will have to rely on their memories.
It hasn’t proved a problem so far. That tried-and-true formula has the 300-plus audience members rapturous during a recent filming in September. To be sure, the show has its reminders that time hasn’t stopped. During the filming for Episode 5, for instance, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Orange Is the New Black and This Is Us all are mentioned. And while the revival was born out of a political idea, Mutchnick and Kohan say audiences won’t be hit over the head with politics.
“The show is as political as these characters are,” Kohan says. “It wasn’t about talking about the current administration. There are plenty of shows that do that and do that really well.”
The focus, instead, is on producing a show that will satisfy fan expectations. So don’t ask if the creators see a life for the show beyond these two seasons.
“Right now, it only feels good, and I think we should do everything we can to just try to stay in the moment of it feeling good,” Mutchnick adds. “If we started to think about a third season, it would be the fastest way to shut us down, because you would panic about ‘How am I going to think of things to say in Year 3 when I just want to say the right things in Year 1?’”
Maybe with some will and grace?
“It wasn’t about talking about the current administration. There are plenty of shows that do that.” SEAN HAYES | Actor