I just found out that it returned for a whole season, a full fledged Season 9 (2017-2018), with Season 10 to start in October. Curious, I dipped into a few episodes.
It's not awful.
Eleven years have passed, and the characters are pushing through middle age (Jack is 49 years old, Grace 51, Will is 52, and Karen 59).
They have been rebooted: the relationships they had at the end of the last series have been dissolved, and there are no children to grow up and get married to each other. Will and Grace are living together again.
Jack and Karen are still shrill and theatrical.
But Will and Grace are not quite as self-possessed. Remember: "We don't believe in anything?" Now they believe in things. I guess you could get by with complacency in the Clinton 1990s, but in the alt-right era, it's time to march.And the Fab Four no longer seem to hate each other. The undertow of hostility is absent. There are few barbs and put-downs, except for the ubiquitous ones about Will being too feminine and Grace being too masculine.
The plotlnes are different. They face ethical dilemmas.
They face their mortality. Grace has a cancer scare. Karen's beloved housemaid Rosario dies. Jack has a grandson.
They are actually affected by current events, although sometimes with a weird twist. Instead of a bakery refusing to bake a cake for gay people, it's refusing to bake a cake for the President).
Now gay men are still "girls," but they rarely express any heterosexual desire.
In the earlier series, gay men (or rather, transgender bisexuals) faced no homophobia. Even the ubiquitous "You're really a woman!" wasn't actually homophobic, since they agreed with the evaluation. There was no discrimination, no prejudice, no homophobic rage. There was no coming out: everybody always knew, everyone was always out (except no kissing). Now there is homophobic bias. There are guys on the downlow. You have to come out to friends and family.
Ryan Pinkston (left), one of my long-time favorite actors, as a closeted cop who dates Jack.
I'm actually not hating it.
At least there's kissing.
See also: Ryan Pinkston; Will and Grace
I remember when it was on, the femmy camp bugged me. No gay man I knew was like that.
ReplyDeleteIn a lot of ways, the Clinton era presaged the Trump era. As far to the right as Clinton went, and frankly, he made Goldwater and Reagan look like Marx, often adapting the GOP's own racist politics and language and going that extra mile where even they weren't willing to go, but still, "He has a D after his name! That's all you need!", it was never enough for them. It also created an army of 90s nostalgic who became "men with strange ideas" (in the 1964 LBJ ad sense of the phrase) surrounding Hillary Clinton. You know, the people who made her lose because, if your state doesn't touch the ocean, they were basically promising another Holodomor.
And that's the reason we're stuck with forced nostalgia for stupid garbage that was toxic the first time around like this and the abominable FULL HOUSE.
DeleteOnly sellouts like this crappy show. I can't wait until they cancel it again and never, ever, ever show it in reruns EVER. I wish they'd ban white people shows instead of AMOS 'N' ANDY.
One of the worst sitcoms EVER. I wish it had never aired, and I honestly think gay people would be better off without it.
ReplyDeleteIt's awful. What happened to your well-deserved evisceration of the vile beyond belief original?
I still didn't like it, but it wasn't nearly as awful as the original. Like many 1990s sitcoms, it was about people who were friends but hated each other (we still see this on "Family Guy"). In the reboot, they're nicer. Gay men are still "women," but the undertow of ridicule is nearly absent.
DeleteAny show predicated on the idea that gay men are not really men is both anti-gay and anti-male. Seriously, if a man who only likes men isn't really a man, then who is? The logic is circular, fallacious, sexist, and homophobic, and it seems even more homophobic nowadays than it did 20 years ago when it was retrograde even compared to the small smattering of gay inclusion we got on network TV the 1970s and 1980s. Imagine being a child and being used as the excuse not to show gays on TV only to turn out gay yourself! I was 15 in 1998; I came out of the closet that year (and this month, no less) without ever having watched an episode, and when I tried to watch it, I made it through exactly 10 minutes before I gave up in disgust, not only not having laughed so much as once, but almost getting sick to my stomach at the embarrassing spectacle of unfunny self-loathing stereotyping I saw before us. To see it rewarded by the same industry that in my lifetime (I'm 35) used to limit us to appearing after 9 PM and during Sweeps just hurt me to the core, especially after all my years of trying to break into show business from a very early age. Any other minority group being depicted this badly would have protested it off the air, like African-Americans did to UPN's THE SECRET DIARY OF DESMOND PFEIFFER (think BENSON set during the Civil War) at the same time and like GLAAD, back when it actually cared about gays and lesbians, did to Dr. Laura Schlesinger's TV show. Most of the shows from the 1990s that I actually liked were either cartoons or cable shows.
DeleteAll the characters' faults I could forgive if the show were funny, but it is not. Honestly, I would rather watch FAMILY GUY simply to see what network television in this day and age will and will not allow in order to compete with cable and streaming (and frankly, it's one of the least ugly modern-day cartoons). They have (or had) one of the same writers in common: Gary Janetti. He also wrote for Bette Midler's short-lived CBS sitcom, which wasn't terrible and had a gay character who wasn't a total embarrassment. I watched it every week and it still was cancelled, proving TV doesn't care what you watch if you aren't a Nielsen family. So it's this show that's uniquely bad even for his résumé.
Can't we see gay men on TV who are neither sluts nor prudes and who don't treat the men we love as dispensable? Can't we see gay couples on TV who actually look like they enjoy being together? Can't we show lesbians on TV without having them physically sacrifice their womanhood to an "ideal" of masculinity not all men are comfortable with?