The 'Will & Grace' Revival on NBC: Everything We Know So Far
Debra Messing says she hasn’t had much to laugh about since election night, but that’s about to change soon: NBC just announced that the Will & Grace revival has already been picked up for a second season. What else do you need to know about the Emmy-winning sitcom’s return? Here, everything we know…so far.
The series will return on Thursday, September 28. You can watch Will & Grace at 9:00 P.M. ET/PT, sandwiched between The Good Place at 8:30 and Great News at 9:30 P.M. Season two will presumably air in the fall of 2018, but no official date has been set.
NBC will air a new special to commemorate the original series a week before the premiere. The network and The Paley Center for Media are collaborating on the hourlong special The Paley Center Salutes the Best of Will & Grace, scheduled to air Tuesday, September 19 at 10 P.M. ET/PT. It will feature the best moments from the show’s original eight seasons as well as new and exclusive interviews with the cast and creators. Also included is never-seen-before behind-the-scenes footage.
Legendary director Jimmy Burrows is back to direct. Burrows directed every original Will & Grace episode and will do the same for the 16-episode revival.
You might be able to stream the series soon. Currently, old episodes of Will & Grace aren’t available online (shocking, we know), but cocreator Max Mutchnick said at the Television Critics Association summer press tour that they’re working on making the show available on streaming. The most likely place would be Hulu, which works closely with Universal Television, the studio behind Will & Grace.
The comedy will address politics, sex, social issues, and pop culture. “We’ll be shining a light on what’s happening today in our culture,” Messing revealed at the TCAs. “My hope is that now we can finish the alphabet” in terms of LGBTQ issues, storylines, and characters, noting that the original series mainly covered only lesbian and gay issues.
And don’t forget relationship drama! “They’ve always been successful at life and living,” the producers told EW. “It’s relationships that Will and Grace have always had the trouble with, and they still do.”
Forget the series finale from 2006. If you don’t remember what happened when the show went off the air 11 years ago, well, don’t worry about it. “It was more or less a fantasy, a projection into the future,” note the creators. (But in case you were wondering, Grace had a daughter named Laila with husband Leo, while Will and husband Vincent were raising a son, Ben.) In the revival Will and Grace will be single, without kids, and still living in their New York City apartment. Cocreator David Kohan told EW that “if [we wrote them with] children [now], then it has to be about them being parents, ’cause presumably it would be a priority in their lives. And if it wasn’t a priority in their lives, then they’re just bad parents, right? We frankly did not want to see them being either good parents or bad parents. We wanted them to be Will and Grace.”
But Grace’s love interest, Leo, will return. Harry Connick, Jr. will be back, but it remains to be seen if he’ll be playing Grace’s ex-husband or ex-boyfriend.
We’ll find out why Will and Grace are still living together. “Circumstances bring them together again,” cocreator David Kohan reveals. “They’ve lived their lives. However healthy or unhealthy [their living situation is], that will be addressed.” Joked Debra Messing: “We don’t care about being healthy!”
It’s back in time for Jack and Karen as well. The producers also told EW that Jack will return as Will and Grace’s neighbor, and Karen will “still get her drink on and live in that mansion. Will’s and Grace’s careers (Will is a lawyer; Grace an interior designer) will be the same, and Jack the actor will be teaching his own craft called ‘Jackting.'”
Check out the trailer, below:
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Stay tuned—we’ll update this post as more information becomes available.