The burden of sole representation led many viewers to be too hard on Will & Grace

[TMC]

http://www.avclub.com/article/the-bu...viewers-105193

It’s become a somewhat common occurrence for TV series to be cited as breaking ground for minority groups, be it The Cosby Show or Norman Lear’s socially conscious comedies. But few of those TV shows are as maligned by the groups for which they ostensibly broke that ground as Will & Grace. This is a show that got name-dropped by the vice president of the United States as a contributing factor to forming his opinion on gay rights, gay marriage in particular. Still, mentioning Will & Grace in mixed company can elicit any number of reactions about the show’s depiction of gay characters and whether it was “good” for the gay community. That’s a lot of pressure to put on any TV show, much less a traditional-in-tone, three-camera network sitcom that debuted in 1998, but that’s the plight for the only network show with gay lead characters in an entire era of network TV.

Creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan produced the show for Warren Littlefield-era NBC, a network that was sitting pretty, particularly when it came to sitcoms, and could afford to take a chance on a show about a straight-woman/gay-man friendship (one based on Mutchnick’s own relationship with his best friend). Will and Grace were best friends since college, dated before Will came out of the closet, and have remained remarkably, often unhealthily, close. The tagline to the pre-premiere ad campaign was “They’re not a couple. They’re a couple of best friends,” so clearly, the idea from the beginning was that Will’s sexual orientation was going to be this show’s twist on the relationship-sitcom formula.

As the only gay lead character on network TV at the time (Ellen had just ended when Will & Grace debuted), Will Truman was both revolutionary and yet decidedly not. Eric McCormack was a straight actor, and despite the bulk of the jokes on Will & Grace being about gayness, Will’s defining characteristic was how unthreatening he was. Will was rebounding from heartbreak as the series began, and the show would often lean on this “unlucky in love” crutch with Will, which added up to a noticeably chaste lead character, certainly when compared to his straight sitcom contemporaries at the time. For as much as Will & Grace made it safe for “regular” Americans to be around gay men, at least in the fictional realm, the Will character grew to be a symbol for the neutering of gay TV characters for public consumption.

The flip side of that coin was Sean Hayes’ Jack McFarland, who came screaming into the American consciousness all bitchy quips and flailing arms. The femme yang to Will’s yin, Jack was about as over-the-top a TV character as existed at the time, and with his primary counterpart, Megan Mullally’s Karen Walker, he provided the show with its campy soul. But Jack was also a very easy target, and one that the show had no trouble making a very frequent butt of the joke. This marks a tough balance: Sitcom characters were meant to be laughed at, but the frequency with which Will & Grace returned to the well of nelly—usually Jack flailing about—for its (predominantly mainstream and straight) audience had a touch of the minstrel to it.

This leaves one gay lead who’s a eunuch and one who’s a dancing fairy. As the series itself suffered a drop in quality about halfway through its eight-season run, the program became far more frequently an object of ridicule than of revolution. And that’s not even getting into its latter-season addiction to high-profile guest stars, from Madonna to Janet Jackson to Jennifer Lopez, each one less essential than the last. (That Martina Navratilova cameo, though. That one’s gold.) If Will & Grace was groundbreaking for anything, it was the idea that gays could lead middlebrow, unchallenging, past-its-prime sitcoms just as well as straight characters.

But now, seven years after its final episode, it becomes easier to wonder if the burden of sole representation didn’t lead many viewers to be too hard on Will & Grace, Will and Jack in particular. Contrasted with a current media landscape that sometimes attempts to maintain that gayness doesn’t matter (the “Max on Happy Endings is a gay who doesn’t even seem gay!” school of thought, for example), Will & Grace wasn’t going to let viewers forget they were watching a gay sitcom, whether it was via Cher cameos or Fire Island inside jokes or Karen Walker being America’s next drag superstar long before RuPaul’s Drag Race.

More importantly, this was a show that was well aware of the character types it was sending out into the world and would often interrogate those characteristics within the series. The best episodes of Will & Grace had a sense of the characters’ place in the entertainment landscape and would wrestle with how the show wanted to portray them. Will’s tendency to tone himself down, Jack’s friends being embarrassed by him, Will and Grace’s unhealthy attachment to each other—these “flaws” in the fabric of the show were often complications that seemed to want to address something bigger. The realities of a 22-episode network TV schedule meant that those moments of self-critique were lost amid a show that was not afraid to rest on its screwball laurels, but in picking the 10 episodes that represented Will & Grace at its absolute most essential, those qualities are a bit more apparent.

[Ant-Lox]

It did address the issues well, and they had a lot of fun. It was a sitcom after all.