'Will & Grace' Goes Live to Open FINAL Season
(Friday, July 22 03:05 PM)

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com)
NBC's "Will & Grace" will begin its final season without a net.

The show's eighth-season premiere will air live, NBC announced Friday (July 22). The cast will perform the episode twice, once for viewers in the eastern part of the country and later for audiences out West.

"This opportunity for a challenging live platform launch for 'Will & Grace' is the perfect way to inaugurate their final season," NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly says. "On the heels of the amazing Emmy nominations that recognized the series' achievement, we think the audience is primed for a memorable first episode and an equally memorable last year."

"Will & Grace" is among the leading nominees for the 57th annual Primetime Emmys, tying ABC's "Desperate Housewives" for the lead among series with 15. The show's nominations include outstanding comedy series and acting nods for Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally.
The live episode will pick up where last season's finale left off, with Grace (Debra Messing) considering an affair with a married man (guest star Eric Stoltz, who's reprising his role). Alec Baldwin, who earned a guest-acting Emmy nod for his work on the show, will also return.

"We love the idea of a live episode," "Will & Grace" creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick say, "because we get to show the audience of 'Will & Grace' what we've known from day one -- we work with the best cast in network television."

The live episode will air at 8:30 p.m. ET Thursday, Sept. 29.

http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,271|96543|1|,00.html

thanks for posting!!

i can't wait!

A live episode somehow makes sense for "Will & Grace." But I'm kind of curious as to how this whole East/West Coast thing will work, especially on the eventual DVD release.

Wow! Should be good. I remeber it was really funny when Drew Carey Show did it's last episode live.

After this show gets cancelled, there will be no more good shows to watch on Thursday.

It was great... but I swear that Alec Baldwin swings both ways. I mean, tonight, his stint as the Boy Scout Leader on SNL, and there have been other instances I can't begin to name. Maybe that's why he and Kim Basinger got divorced.

They can't get rid of Rosario.

And Grace looked like she had a paunch. They could have picked a more flattering outfit.

And... did something really happen to Megan Mullaly? I thought it was just a write-in until she came out on crutches.

Any thoughts???

I thought it was hilarious. I love live television. Whenever the actors/actresses started laughing and then the audience started laughing, that was great.

it was a great ep if this really is the last season i hope all the eps are as good if not better than this one

it wasnt really funny, i chuckled once

I thought it was pretty good. Maybe it was just the whole live thing that I liked, but I did think it was good. Something obviously did happen to Megan, but I'm not sure what.

She said on Ellen what really happened and I can't remember now what it was. But she definitely hurt her foot. As for the live episode, I think they did a great job, and you've got to hand it to all of them for being able to handle themselves so well (particulary Eric and Megan) but it's always funny when the actors crack up like Debra Messing and Sean Hayes did. Overall a good episode. Let's hope they keep up the quality for their final year.

Yup, Megan did hurt her foot. I heard it was because she was dancing to a commercial at her home and she fell down....SOMEHOW. I'm not even sure how she managed to accomplish such a thing. :lol:

I loved the whole thing. I thought the TMYK shooting star reference was funny. :lol:

As for the live episode, I think they did a great job, and you've got to hand it to all of them for being able to handle themselves so well (particulary Eric and Megan)

I definitely commend Megan for doing such a great job. I don't know how she was able to keep such a straight face and deliver her line after first seeing Jack's eyebrow. I would have been cracking up.

Did anyone record the West Coast airing? I'd like to see this airing and compare it to the East Coast airing. When I went to a taping last summer they would totally rewrite a few scenes if the audience didn't find it funny the first time around. I am just curious if any rewriting was done. If you can help, please let me know.

Josh

I'm on the east coast so I saw the first airing. It was pretty good. Seeing it live was a treat. Notice how the picture quality was different - like the picture quality on soap operas. I was pretty impressed that the cast held up as well as they did. It really went rather well. When they film it in the normal format, the actors shoot these scenes several times so they can get the best and funniest readings when the show runners edit the episode together - going live is a little risky since you won't always get the best readings and the possibility of flubbed lines. Good for them.

Here's a "yahoo" aritcle on last nights episode for anyone interested....

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'Will & Grace' Ups Ante With Live Show
Thursday September 29 9:52 PM ET

The set didn't collapse. No one forgot his lines. Too bad. The cast of "Will & Grace," who do a pretty slick job every week on their filmed sitcom, upped the ante Thursday night by airing the season opener live.

No one fell down. No fire alarm went off in the middle of a punch line. Too bad.

Sure, Debra Messing and Sean Hayes did have fleeting attacks of the giggles. In the first of the night's two live performances (this one staged for the eastern United States), Messing, who plays Grace, got tickled by Hayes, who plays Grace's flamboyantly gay pal, Jack.

"When an opportunity comes," Jack declared on the subject of his dating married men, "I don't question it! I grab it, drop its ring on the nightstand, and swing on it till dawn!"

Hearing that, Messing snickered a bit too long before coaxing out her response.

And in a later scene, when Hayes removed the eye patch he had been wearing to reveal a singed-off eyebrow (it looked funnier than it sounds), he and Messing nearly lost control.

Perhaps the night's biggest surprise presumably scripted was a juicy lip-lock between Eric McCormack (who stars as Will) and guest star Alec Baldwin (playing Will's peculiar boss). Not bad.

The zany half-hour centered on the discovery that the long-lost husband of Karen (Megan Mullally) isn't dead, after all, but alive and well and hiding from the mob.

"But we were at the funeral. We scattered a trash bag full of his ashes!" said a shocked Grace when she heard the news from Will.

"Apparently that was just dirt and Rice Krispies," he explained.

Thus did the NBC sitcom begin its eighth and final season on a fun, and attention-grabbing, note.

Live "stunt" telecasts aren't unknown for established TV series, of course.

In November 1999, "The Drew Carey Show" staged a live improv-laced episode. Two years before that, "ER" produced an ambitious live hour of that medical drama. And for the entire 1992-93 season, the Fox sitcom "Roc," which starred Charles S. Dutton as a city garbage collector, produced all of its weekly half-hours live.

Next week, "Will & Grace" returns to its usual filmed format. And Jack's eye patch should be gone.

Why, you may ask, was he wearing it?

He told his friends he had suffered a mishap the night before on the set of his new talk show: "I tripped making my entrance, knocked over the light and caught the set on fire."

Just for laughs, why couldn't that have happened on Thursday's "Will & Grace"?

http://tv.yahoo.com/news/ap/20050929/112805592000.html

Also, for laughs, here is a picture of the big smooch.

http://tv.yahoo.com/tvpdb?d=ap&id=1807763769&cf=pg&photoid=590832&pid=8

CSI Roars, Chris Dips


By Joel Meyer -- Broadcasting & Cable, 9/30/2005 11:45:00 AM



The season premieres on last night’s prime time schedule took a back seat to Thursday-night favorite CSI. The forensics drama led CBS to victory among advertisers’ coveted 18-to-49-year-old viewers.

CSI notched a 9.1 rating/22 share in the demo and drew 27.2 million viewers, according to Nielsen fast national data. (That’s off just slightly from the show’s thunderous debut—10.2/25 and 29 million viewers.)

All told,

CBS won the night with a 7.0/18 in prime time. The only challenger to its usual Thursday dominance was second-place NBC (4.9/13), which eked out a slim victory in the 10 o’clock hour. The Peacock's ER posted a 6.6/17, edging out the night’s highest-rated season premiere, CBS’ Without a Trace (6.4/7).

The biggest surprise on Thursday may have been Everybody Loves Chris at 8 p.m. UPN’s heavily promoted critics’ favorite weighed in at 2.3/7, down 28% from last week’s 3.2-rated premiere.

ABC’s series debut of Night Stalker (2.6/6) was lost in the crowd at 9 o’clock, but NBC’s The Apprentice posted a respectable 4.7/12 in the same slot, one that CSI essentially owns.

The season premiere of Will & Grace, directed by comedy vet James Burrows, weighed in with a 4.2/11 at 8:30-9 p.m. The 8 p.m. season premiere of Smallville’s 2.6/7 was a good performance for The WB, but ABC’s Alias (2.4/7) and UPN’s Everwood (1.4/3) were less remarkable in their fall debuts.

fantastic episode!!

plenty of laugh out loud moments!!

kudos to the cast and crew.

Did anyone record the West Coast airing? I'd like to see this airing and compare it to the East Coast airing. When I went to a taping last summer they would totally rewrite a few scenes if the audience didn't find it funny the first time around. I am just curious if any rewriting was done. If you can help, please let me know.

Josh

I taped the East Coast episode and watched the west, here:

Will & Grace LIVE Show: East & West Coast (http://www.nbc.com/nbc/Will_&_Grace/live/)

I thought it was much funnier than the show has been in awhile. Karen in particular seemed like her old self. The 'live' aspect wasn't worth much more than to see the cast silently crack up in a few parts, but it and the odd lighting didn't detract much.

Here's hoping the rest of the season holds up.

It was hard but I got to see both I called my cable compie and talked and talked and talked and Have have 1 of those things were you can send shows to so they sent (after it was done rec.) the west coast 1 I live east coast