The Season 11 premiere finds Grace revealing life-changing news, and Will and Jack weathering relationship changes. Now we won’t have to wait until 2020 to start saying our goodbyes to Will, Grace, Jack, and Karen in the farewell season of the revival - and the series.
Will and grace season 1 ep 1 series#
Unfortunately, NBC’s new series Sunnyside faced the dreaded cancellation ax, but fortunately for Will & Grace fans, that left a hole in the Thursday night comedy block. Surprise! Will & Grace is back sooner than expected. In the final season premiere of Will & Grace, Grace returns from Europe with shocking news, Karen teaches Will phone sex, and Jack adapts to married life. It’s these acknowledgments of the passage of time that make the Will & Grace revival charming, since its characters, and the still brilliant physical comedy of Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally, lend themselves more easily to displacement than they do trendiness.By Reed Gaudens 2 years ago Follow Tweet
Jack also wears a titanium girdle (gifted to him by none other than Karen, who also offers him “scrotox”) to a gay bar as he fights to preserve his physique in a city overrun by younger, more slender “twinks”. Platt replies: “I don’t mean to be rude, but my boner has already called a Lyft.” Jack, in the episode’s best line, suggests the young naif be “beaten with a VHS copy of Evita”.
“You realize the happy life you have is because we made a big deal about things,” Will says. Naturally, he’s subjected to a bona fide Will Truman lecture about how growing up gay isn’t a “bubble of happiness” but rather a fight for basic human rights. When he’s invited back to Will’s apartment, their age gap only seems to widen: he doesn’t like Madonna, mentions Goop and The Bachelor, and was thrown a coming out party by his parents. In the first three episodes, the highlight is a cameo by Dear Evan Hansen’s Ben Platt, who plays a caricature-like millennial gay guy, unable to differentiate between Stonewall and Stonehenge, wondering how long he’ll be holed up in a small Manhattan apartment with his best girl friend (“You’d be surprised,” Will says). Where the Will & Grace revival does succeed is in mining the changes that have taken place during those 11 lost years. But that renders the discussions that do take place rather witless and misplaced, like jocular dog-whistles to the “resistance”.Įric McCormack as Will Truman and Debra Messing as Grace Adler. There’s no real politics-speak of any substance, and on a show this airy and fun, there probably shouldn’t be. We should probably get used to Trump-centric comedy – after all, we’re only eight months in – but that doesn’t make the Will & Grace pseudo-premiere any less tiresome.
There’s even a “Make America gay again” hat, which Grace leaves in the Oval Office after a potential interior design gig brings the whole gang to the White House. Karen, of course, is old pals with Donald and Melania, and Grace mentions a pink pussy hat, and Jack’s on Grindr, and Will’s redirected that righteous lawyerly indignation towards the 45th president. To solve this problem, Will & Grace – in its first episode, at least, which fully negates the events of the season eight finale – tries to be mind-numbingly current. Of course, what was radical in 1998 may now not even qualify as “woke”. In the lead-up to its premiere, many people wondered how a show so integral to the advancement of LGBT causes in pop culture might deal with a social climate that’s now considerably more welcoming to the portrayal of queer lives onscreen. The first episode of the new Will & Grace, though, is a mess.