Will & Grace is back. But has gay life on TV left it behind?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/03/will-and-grace-back-gay-life-sitcom-series

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Honey – as one Karen Walker might say – what’s this, what’s happening, what’s going on? What indeed. After testing the water with a brief reunion during the US presidential campaign, Will & Grace is to return for a new 10-part series, a decade after its conclusion. The welcome return of a sparkling and witty favourite of yesteryear? Or the desperate revival of an old sitcom designed to halt an inexorable slide in ratings and audience flight from network TV to Netflix?

While we could debate this either/or, cynic v optimist binary for ages, instead let us consider the wisdom of reviving a sitcom at all – even, or perhaps especially, one as beloved as Will & Grace. The benefits are clear – it’s an established brand. It’s the same reason that classic books are adapted time and again. But a revival also risks sullying the original. Catching a repeat of an episode by chance or browsing YouTube for clips is one thing – nostalgia is an anaesthetic against the pain of the present – but a whole new series, and a decade later? That makes even fans of the original show uneasy. (See also: The X-Files).

Never mind that the history of TV isn’t exactly awash with stories of how classic sitcoms were successfully revived to rave reviews – obviously we’ll have to wait and see how the BBC’s reheated Porridge goes down – there’s something more fundamental to any such revival. And it’s the anxiety that it will be dad-dancing embarrassing, that it will suggest that the original perhaps wasn’t as classic as we thought, that our taste wasn’t as impeccable as we imagined it to be. Because comedy occupies a different place in the heart to drama – perhaps because laughing is a treat and funny things are especially special – watching a favourite sitcom being resurrected reminds us more easily who we were, and possibly how easily pleased or naive we were, or how little attention we actually paid to it.

Will and Jack were just sitcom characters, as archetypal and larger-than-life as any straight ones

It forces us to accept either that our favourite sitcom wasn’t all that good to begin with – I had this tortured epiphany, back in the day, with Are You Being Served? – or that the passage of time is as unkind to our favourite TV shows as it is to ourselves. To every thing there is a season – and some things have seven seasons or more. So, to put it bluntly, you can worry either that you’re closer to death than you were when you last watched a new episode of Will & Grace, or that the new Will & Grace will seem outmoded, even naff.

Because I’m frightened of serious subjects, I shall be going for option two. Will & Grace will, in its new incarnation, most likely seem terribly old-fashioned – not least in that aspect that was its most groundbreaking at the time.

When it began, Will & Grace’s representation of gay life – through Will and Jack – was extraordinary, especially in a network sitcom. In straight-acting Will and camptastic Jack, two facets of gay male identity were in people’s living rooms in primetime, as if that were entirely normal. That in itself seemed like a victory. They were just sitcom characters, as archetypal and larger-than-life as any straight ones. Unapologetic and, even when they were miserable, happy. (Of course they were happy – they lived in a sitcom).

That the once-groundbreaking Will & Grace now seems like an antique in terms of gay representation is both a tribute to and a curse on the show. From Transparent to Orange Is the New Black, Modern Family to Cucumber and Banana, Last Tango in Halifax to Emmerdale, the sheer variety of gay life on the contemporary screen is impressive. It also illuminates as ridiculous the idea that depicting two metropolitan privileged white men could somehow be a victory for gay visibility. In breaking all that ground when it did, Will & Grace may just have dug a grave for itself now.