FAMILIAR FACES

‘Will & Grace’ back on NBC — 11 years later

OUR appetite for nostalgia may persuade people to watch “Will & Grace” — but star Eric McCormack, whose easygoing portrayal of lawyer Will Truman helped make gay characters acceptable on mainstream TV, knows there’s only thing that will keep them coming back for more.

“The show’s got to be funny,” says McCormick, 54, about the show’s reboot, premiering Thursday night on NBC — 11 years after its original series finale in May 2006.

McCormack, his co-stars and their bosses — series co-creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick — answered questions recently about how the once-cutting-edge sitcom will fare in a time when considerations of political correctness would suppress the irrepressible insult humor traded by Will, Grace Adler (Debra Messing), Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes) and especially Karen Walker (Megan Mullally).

The question of reviving “Will & Grace” first arose when the cast made a 2016 election spot that went viral on social media. “I put the script down, and I e-mailed Max, and said, & ‘Why can’t we do the show again?’ ” says Mullally, 58. “And he e-mailed right back, ‘We can.’ ”

NBC brass were so encouraged by the social-media response to the announcement of the show’s return that they renewed “Will & Grace” for a second season.

“When we sat down together, it just came to life in a way that I had never experienced with anything else,” says Messing whose last series, “The Mysteries of Laura,” fizzled after two seasons. She came back to the show “because I wanted to laugh again,” she says.

Hayes, 47, has gone on to have a prolific career as producer of scripted shows (“Grimm”), documentaries (“The History of

Comedy”) and lighter fare such as “Hollywood Game Night.” He says that playing the needy Jack again gives him“the challenge to jump back in the skin and find the point of view of this guy, since I do other things all day long. But I remember this guy. Everyone will be remembered for one thing in their life and this is mine.”

With the creators having trashed the corny series finale — which saw Will and Grace meet again when their respective children are assigned to the same college dorm — the cast can almost pretend that nothing has changed since 2006. Early episodes show them much as the way they were when they were young. Will and Jack still dance to Madonna’s “Borderline” but fret about how they will score with mil- lennials with daddy fantasies. Karen n still does nothing except pop pills and imbibe, and Grace flails about in her own neurotic world.

For her part, Messing, 49, wants to “do what we did before, which was, first, make people laugh out loud and maybe make them pee a little bit on the couch,” she says. “And, No. 2, shine a light on what’s happening today in our culture.”

If the writers ever felt pressure to o soften the characters in a nod to our ur p.c. times, you would never know it.t. “The template of the [first] episode will show how seriously or not seriiously we’re going to take politics,” says McCormack, who has another r series, “Travelers,” on Netflix. “It’s s going to be ‘Will & Grace.’ That’s the main thing. We’re not trying to create a new show.”