A Gay Old Time

Since its very beginning, network broadcast television has been a distorted reflection of America. From the simplistic portrayal of trouble-free suburban life on Leave it to Beaver to the twentysomething coffee waitress who can still afford to live in a huge New York City apartment on Friends, television has always warped reality. Early on, the most glaring misrepresentation on TV was its rather narrow depiction of our grand American melting pot. In time that changed, if by taking the smallest of steps: In the ’60s, The Andy Griffith Show brought the South to viewers; the ’70s saw Good Times, arguably the first show to bring black culture to TV, and Chico & the Man, which brought Latinos to the mainstream long before Ricky Martin.

When it comes to sexuality on television, though, it’s been another story. In the ’50s, people were practically asexual, and the ’60s and ’70s didn’t really improve on things all that much (unless you consider Three’s Company some kind of touchstone). It wasn’t really until the ’80s that we started to have vivaciously sexual characters: Sam Malone on Cheers, Dan Fielding on Night Court, and the various and sundry vixens on the salacious nighttime soaps Dallas and Dynasty. In the ’90s, shows like Seinfeld, Melrose Place, and Friends broke another barrier by discussing sexual subject matter in candid terms. All of this, though, was conspicuously heterosexual.

Now the latest minority to join in on the prime-time fun is the gay community. For a while, homosexuals were largely relegated to useless supporting characters (the universal confidant Matt on Melrose Place) or jokes (Seinfeld’s “Not that there’s anything wrong with it”). When we finally got a show with a gay leading character in Ellen, everyone seemed to back away from it slowly like it was a ticking bomb. ABC quietly toned down its support, while star Ellen DeGeneres seemed to crack under the scrutiny of the spotlight. It looked as if, when it came to television, gays were always going to be America’s secret shame—a curious fate for the supposedly ultra-liberal Hollywood.

Then along came Will & Grace. After only two seasons on the air, this show about a female New Yorker and her gay best friend racked up three Emmys this year, including one for Best Comedy. And now NBC has bestowed upon it the ultimate honor: the 9 p.m. Eastern/8 p.m. Central time slot on Thursday nights. From Cheers to Seinfeld, this slot has been the hub of NBC’s TV-watching week for over 15 years. The fact that the network chose Will & Grace is a remarkable statement about the quality of the show and the size of the audience NBC believes it can have. So where is it that Will & Grace has succeeded that Ellen failed?

For starters, Will & Grace may be the first sitcom in television history whose success rests solely on the shoulders of its supporting characters—something the Emmys recognized by giving Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally both Best Supporting Actor/Actress awards this year. Jack McFarland (Hayes) is Will Truman’s (Eric McCormack) flamboyantly gay friend, and Karen Walker (Mullally) is Grace Adler’s (Debra Messing) lazy, trophy-wife assistant. Being supporting characters, Jack and Karen get the honor of delivering most of the show’s one-liners. And what an honor it is: The sharply barbed zinger is this show’s strongest comedic attribute, and Hayes and Mullally deliver them with ample aplomb.

Unfortunately, this only serves to highlight how uninteresting and at times downright annoying the show’s namesake characters are. Plots all too often revolve around Will or Grace betraying some aspect of their friendship—which is supposedly the very foundation of the program’s premise. After a while, you begin to wonder how these people became friends and manage to stay that way. More than that, though, Will and Grace are almost too normal for their own good; he’s almost a blank slate, and her only emotion at times seems to be anger.

More problematic, perhaps, is the fact that the role of Will arguably fails to bring gays into the mainstream. He’s another in a long line of television characters who are really gay in name only—a straight actor playing a gay character whom we only know is gay because it’s been written into the show’s premise. On one hand, it could be argued that NBC is avoiding stereotyping, and hence playing it safe. But as Harvey Fierstein pointed out in an interview once, watching straight people play gay can feel like watching white people in blackface. It doesn’t help that the writers hem in Will’s character by giving him no social life other than these three friends. He rarely dates, and even more frustrating is the attempt on the writers’ part to create sexual tension between him and Grace. The end of the first season saw the two characters deciding they needed to live in separate apartments and played the situation with the gravity of a romantic relationship ending. Another episode dealt with Will having a recurring sexual dream about Grace. Unrequited romantic tension between two lead characters is a sitcom standard, but here, given the show’s premise, it seems inappropriate or at least a copout.