Gay then vs. gay now: Will and Grace clashes with a world it helped change

Where the revival gets vital and interesting is when it deals — with honesty and humor — with the passage of time and the show's own place in it

Will and Grace, the sitcom about an uptight gay lawyer named Will, his best friend and interior designer Grace, and their vaguely sociopathic friends Jack and Karen, comes back to America's TV screens Thursday night after 11 years away. The first three episodes ignore the sitcom's finale, reset to its defaults, and prove that the series is (fittingly, given its amusingly self-involved characters) more interested in itself than in modernizing to better fit contemporary comedic sensibilities.

In its original run, Will and Grace used its wacky foursome to make much that was outrageous not just sayable but funny. It pushed the boundaries of what sitcoms could show and discuss and — because sitcoms are structured to reassure — it rendered the result pretty anodyne. That in no way diminishes the show's achievement; quite the opposite. Will and Grace excelled at using the safety of its genre as a kind of Trojan horse for the radical idea that gay people are just people, flaws and all. It achieved that largely by jokingly pushing some of the slippery slope thinking that characterized the moral majority's opposition to gay marriage ("What's next? Bestiality?") to its raucously amoral conclusions.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.