Will & Grace

By Tison Pugh

The sitcom Will & Grace (1998–2006, 2017–20) shifted the media landscape and its treatment of queer themes by starring an openly gay protagonist, Will Truman, on primetime network television. Will, along with his best friend Grace Adler and their constant companions Jack McFarland and Karen Walker, engaged in many stereotypical sitcom shenanigans imbued with decidedly queer twists. Despite the series’ groundbreaking nature, its accuracy and responsibility in representing gay men—and of queer culture in general—has been questioned throughout its initial run and reboot. Author Tison Pugh places the sitcom in its historical context of the late 1990s and early 2000s, considering how it contributed to contemporary debates concerning queer life.
Will & Grace returned in the Trump era, offering viewers another chance to enjoy the companionship of these quirky yet relatable characters as they grappled with seismic shifts in the nation’s political climate. Pugh demonstrates that while heralding a new age of queer representation, characters across the series were homogenized through upper-class whiteness to normalize queerness for a mainstream US audience. In negotiating protocols of network television and the desires of audiences both gay and straight, this trailblazing series remains simultaneously haunted by and liberated from longstanding queer stereotypes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9780814349076

Tison Pugh

Tison Pugh is Pegasus Professor of English at the University of Central Florida. He is author or editor of over twenty books, including Harry Potter and Beyond: On J. K. Rowling’s Fantasies and Other Fictions; The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom; and Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature.

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Cover Page for Will & Grace

Will & Grace

TV Milestones

Series Editor

Barry Keith Grant, Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series.

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu.

Will & Grace

Tison Pugh

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2023 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan, 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

ISBN 9780814349069 (paperback)

ISBN 9780814349076 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022951622

Cover photo © Spiroview Inc / Shutterstock.com

Published with the assistance of a fund established by Thelma Gray James of Wayne State University for the publication of folklore and English studies.

Wayne State University Press rests on Waawiyaataanong, also referred to as Detroit, the ancestral and contemporary homeland of the Three Fires Confederacy. These sovereign lands were granted by the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot Nations, in 1807, through the Treaty of Detroit. Wayne State University Press affirms Indigenous sovereignty and honors all tribes with a connection to Detroit. With our Native neighbors, the press works to advance educational equity and promote a better future for the earth and all people.

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References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Wayne State University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To Nandini Sinha,

For over thirty years of friendship, but most of all, for the memories of Fall 1990 at Purchase College, when I was your Gay of the Semester.

Contents

Introduction: A Queer Television Milestone

1. A Queer Primer for Grandmothers in Kansas

2. Gay Stereotypes and the Limits of Utopian Queerness

3. Visualizing Queerness and the Quest for a Gay Kiss

4. The Reboot: Will & Grace Reborn in the Trump Era

Conclusion: The Queer Legacy of Will & Grace

Episodes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

A Queer Television Milestone

Afastidious neat freak with dustbuster often in hand, a bit of a narcissist occasionally found preening before a mirror, Will Truman (Eric McCormack) of Will & Grace represented a milestone in television history: the first gay male lead character in a prime-time network program. An Ivy League–educated corporate lawyer and Connecticut WASP, Will lives in New York City with his best friend, Grace Adler (Debra Messing). Her laughs collapse into snorts, and she eagerly bursts into song—loudly and always off-key. A nice Jewish girl from Schenectady with a penchant for gay porn, Grace is anything but graceful and frequently falls, flails, and flounders. An interior designer by occupation, she employs as her assistant Karen Walker (Megan Mullally), alias Anastasia Beaverhausen, a socialite married to morbidly obese but never seen and mega-rich Stanley. Karen pops pills and guzzles booze and wages a long-standing (but undepicted) frenemy relationship with Marlo Thomas, and in a particularly memorable episode, another such long-simmering battle with Candice Bergen (6-9).¹ Will’s other best friend and Karen’s new sidekick, Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes), pursues his dream of an acting career—notably in his cabaret show flashily titled Just Jack!—while otherwise employed in a range of odd jobs including massage therapist, acting instructor, and nurse. Gay, flamboyant, and fabulous, this obsessive Cher fan radiates queer excess: There are no straight men. Only men who haven’t met Jack (2-20). Most episodes of Will & Grace focus on the comic antics of these four primary characters, with Rosario Salazar (Shelley Morrison), Karen’s stoic maid, contributing regular appearances as well. Clad in sunglasses, a gray maid’s uniform, and a maroon Members Only jacket, Rosario more often observes than participates in an episode’s shenanigans, during which she tolerates Karen’s abuse until snapping back with acid retorts (e.g., Lady, don’t be surprised if your martini smells of Clorox tonight [6-22]).

From these five memorable characters blossomed Will & Grace, which by various measures, including its groundbreaking subject matter, its enduring popularity, and the critical accolades bestowed upon it, stands as a television milestone for depicting openly gay protagonists in a prime-time network sitcom. As discussed in greater detail in chapter 1, gay characters had previously appeared mostly in the margins of network fare until Billy Crystal’s casting in Soap (1977–81) as gay, or possibly trans, Jodie Dallas, in the late 1970s. Viewers first saw a gay Black man in a supporting role in Spin City (1996–2002), and Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian, as did her character Ellen Morgan in Ellen (1994–98), in 1997, although the show was canceled soon after. Gay representation was increasing and improving in the years before Will & Grace, but the show stands as a true television milestone for foregrounding gay characters. Through the antics of Will, Grace, Karen, Jack, and Rosario, Will & Grace introduced American viewers to a comic vision of gay metropolitan life, one that irrevocably altered the landscape of network television and its representations of queer people.

As a general rule, sitcoms are a more character-based than plot-based narrative genre; in other words, the characters’ personalities matter more than the zany circumstances of a given episode. Writer/producer Max Mutchnick, in his analysis of the show’s success, emphasized the essential dynamic created by the characters of Will, Grace, Karen, Jack, and Rosario: It’s this dynamic of these friends. You don’t get bored of your friends in your life, so why would you get bored of just these people doing the same thing every week?² Certainly, audiences embraced these characters. Will & Grace enjoyed strong ratings from its beginning and at its height, its fourth season, was the ninth-most popular program in network prime time. Each of the four leading stars—McCormack, Messing, Mullally, and Hayes—won Emmys for their performances, as did the program itself, which notched a total of eighty-three nominations.³ Following its initial eight-season run from 1998 to 2006, Will & Grace was revived eleven years later for three more seasons (2017–20), testifying to the enduring appeal of its humorous spin on modern queer life.

Among writers one of the most tried and true of maxims is to write what you know, advice that the creative team of Mutchnick and David Kohan followed in formulating Will & Grace from their personal experiences. Their partnership began in a Beverly Hills High School drama class: Kohan is straight, Mutchnick is gay, and as Mutchnick explains, [I] had a big falling out [with my high school girlfriend] when I told her that I was gay; we stopped talking for some time. David was always close with her, and he ended up being the person who kept us in contact. There were highs and lows and [a] great day-to-day lifestyle that we had shared, and we thought, This is a really interesting thing to write about.⁴ Mutchnick and Kohan receive writing credit for all of Will & Grace’s episodes, with a string of additional writers on their team, notably Jon Kinnally, Tracy Poust, Alex Herschlag, Adam Barr, Steve Gabriel, Jhoni Marchinko, Ryan O’Connell, Jeff Greenstein, Sally Bradford, and Kari Lizer—with forty other writers participating on at least one or many more episodes. Commenting on this creative team, Mutchnick wisecracked: "Writing rooms really take on the personality of the show. . . . Will & Grace is a room full of fag hags and homosexuals."⁵ In a virtually unparalleled accomplishment, veteran television director James Burrows, whose credits include such classic sitcoms as The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77), The Bob Newhart Show (1972–78), Laverne & Shirley (1976–83), Taxi (1978–83), Cheers (1982–93), Night Court (1984–92), Frasier (1993–2004), and Friends (1994–2004), oversaw every episode of the series, of both its original run and its reboot.

Throughout its years of production, and notwithstanding its milestone status in the history of queer television, Will & Grace has long been dogged by questions about the accuracy and responsibility of its representation of gay men in particular and of queer culture in general. As the two most familiar gay characters on network television for eight years, Will and Jack bore an enormous burden of representation—a demand that no two characters could possibly meet. More so, the program was first envisioned with one gay male character, but as Mutchnick recalls, trying to show all the colors of the gay culture in one man was overwhelming for us, and it was overwhelming for the character.⁶ In a key paradox, although its gay characters represented breakthroughs in television history, Will & Grace simultaneously repressed the queerness that it was called on to represent by downplaying Will’s and Jack’s romantic lives, thereby leaving homosexuality as an inflection of their personalities rather than as a core, defining aspect of their interior identities. In this way the program teeters between the representational poles central to the television industry, in that the progressivism of certain themes is often counterbalanced by the conservatism of the network’s capitalistic imperative: that is to say, Will & Grace advanced a new vision of queer life in the United States of America, but at times only hesitantly so. Given these conditions, the status of Will & Grace itself as a gay sitcom raises issues. As Jane Feuer suggests, we can distinguish between ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ sitcoms according to the relative specificity of the jokes and according to how much of an attempt the writers make to reach a heterosexual audience with their jokes.⁷ Will & Grace alludes to the likelihood of some members of its audience not understanding its references when a somewhat bewildered character says to Grace, Oh, darlin’, whatever I don’t get, I just figure is gay (1-4). Seeking to win both queer audiences and audiences unfamiliar with queer culture, Will & Grace faced a virtually irresolvable conundrum, in that it was tasked with representing an expansive view of queer life rather than simply depicting a purposefully unrepresentative slice of it, and to do so while speaking to audiences both versed and unversed