This September marks 25 years since Will & Grace first aired. Being two years old at the time, I wasn’t fully aware of the significance of a primetime network comedy with two gay male leads. Then, growing up, I often heard it referenced as a hack job when it came to gay rights and queer representation, so I set Will & Grace aside as something old-fashioned and made for my parents’ generation, like Frasier or financial security.
Then I recently took Will & Grace on as a comfort watch and was shocked. Not by it being outdated, but quite the contrary. In 2023, Will & Grace feels like a more honest, self-aware look at gay life in a city than almost any other show I can remember on TV in the last couple of decades.
The show, which originally ran on NBC for eight seasons, follows the amusing and messy personal and romantic escapades of Will (Eric McCormack), a thirty-something gay lawyer, and his straight best friend Grace (Debra Messing), an interior designer, alongside their eccentric sidekicks Jack (Sean Hayes) and Karen (Megan Mullally), whose full-time jobs seem to be being the bane of Will and Grace’s respective lives.
I went into watching it expecting my political correctness twitch—firmly embedded in my hippocampus since attending university during the Trump administration—to be on high alert. I was anticipating a guilty pleasure at best. But, the occasional misjudged joke aside, it’s not only a pleasure, but an artifact people should examine and learn from in how to present minorities with depth and heart, rather than with a superficial brush.
Will is a more nuanced, complex queer character than any from this century and I think more queer men today might feel themselves represented in him. He’s really annoying and really endearing, and as a result, really recognizable. He and Jack casually reference their sex lives, but the show is not preoccupied with the minutiae of gay sex, nor with coming out, like almost everything else we see in film and TV these days. Will carries an anxiety, a hopelessness, and a dryness that feel very real and which I think gets lost among diluted, saccharine queer representation of today.
In fact, due to the lack of emphasis on gayness as sexuality only (men having sex with men, coming out) is a relief. Heartstopper and Red, White & Royal Blue, for example, are obsessed with the closet and anxieties around gay sex, which counterproductively end up reinforcing homophobic preoccupations and fears.
After finishing the show, it dawned on me: I long for this calmness around gayness and queer people simply existing. The truth is, no one spends half their time explaining who they are in earnest monologues. We just are, especially with people we know and love. This is what Will & Grace captures that TV writers seem to struggle with nowadays. If you take away the hard fact of being gay, a character should still feel interesting and whole, like Will and—behind the pantomiming—Jack.
And what about Grace? I see her in the same vein as Carrie Bradshaw, perhaps minus the iconic fashion. A liberated 90s woman throwing herself at life and the world. She is equal parts self-aware and self destructive. She runs her own business and doesn’t settle when it comes to men, but doesn’t see herself as trailblazing or iconic. She is a breath of fresh air compared with the onslaught of girlboss narratives in 2010s TV because she just happens to be strong and smart, without her every word and move being about proving that.
In fact, despite the chatter that the show’s downfall is its old-fashioned queer representation, I would argue that Karen (the wealthy-by-marriage dame played fabulously by Megan Mullally) is the main component that hasn’t aged well. Her racism isn’t always veiled by enough self-awareness or character-defining humor. She has the most lines that make me wince today and a characterization that should remain relegated to the past.
Unlike Friends, I would argue that Will & Grace bristles with a socially engaged anxiety and revolts against the way the world is. Is Will up there with Marsha P. Johnson in his efforts to forward the cause? No. Are today’s queer men in their 30s? No. But is he forthright about his worth as a modern gay man and tapped into the prejudices against him? Absolutely. The series’ notions of social justice aren’t worn on its sleeve like today’s TV, and thus Will & Grace ends up being more effective because its social justice is embedded in the DNA of the show and the characters.
These are middle class New Yorkers, and I’m not saying it’s the political front line, nor do I think it’s appropriate that there is not one mention of AIDS in a show about gay people that aired in the late 90s. But in a way, Will & Grace conjures a utopia. Will and Jack hold equal footing against Grace and Karen when they spar, and there is not a single straight male protagonist or even recurring character. The show celebrates gay men’s relationships with female friends, which I’d argue is the main source of friendship in most of our lives. And this is so rarely captured with such heart.
We won’t see the likes of Will & Grace again. But for the better. While I strongly recommend watching it, we don’t need shows doing this anymore. We need shows that normalize and amplify today’s marginalized voices. Where is the contemporary trans Will & Grace? A show that depicts ostracized people not as heroes or beacons, but as normal folks getting on with life and laughing at regular things. This irreverent display of normalcy is what actually entertains and supports queer people.
Perhaps it is not helpful to endlessly apply the dichotomy of problematic or iconic to everything we have ever enjoyed. After all, one man’s icon is another man’s problem (see: religion). I trust we have the critical thinking ability to watch shows like this and not perform shock righteousness at commonplace 90s humor/politics, and instead try to find the heart and complexities that made a show like this so impactful more than two decades later.