Eric McCormack on the Return of “Will & Grace”

On July 20, 1998, Eric McCormack, Debra Messing, Megan Mullally and Sean Hayes all stepped onto the stage at the Television Critics Association Annual Press tour to present a new NBC show -- Will & Grace. Along with the show’s creative team, the new cast fielded questions during a hilarious session with the press. The biggest question of all was, “Will we see a gay kiss on network television this season?” Over the course of the next eight years, viewers would indeed see a gay kiss (or two), witness the sitcom’s huge societal impact and, following a move to Thursdays, become one of NBC’s Must-See TV staples. The series return to the network this week (11 years after it officially “ended”) made for a very different TCA panel last month. Gone were the pre-show nerves that come with debuting a new show; in their place was feeling of welcomed familiarity by its stars. “I remember it well,” Eric McCormack told me of that first TCA panel. “But I am dressed much better now than I was then, that I do know. I was 34 and wasn’t a kid but I was new to having my name in the title of a network show and making sure I was doing everything right. Now we have the freedom to be ourselves and to know what we are delivering.”

Since its 2006 finale, Will & Grace has continued to amass generations of new fans in syndication. So when the cast and creative team got together late last year to create a short pre-election social commentary video, they almost broke the Internet and inadvertently opened a massive can of worms. “We felt like we’d done a finale that not only answered the questions, but made it impossible [to return],” admitted McCormack (pictured at top with Messing). “All it took was people seeing that election video; what people responded to was not how funny it was, but that the show looked and felt the same. We all went, ‘That’s true, so why are we stuck with this ending that we gave it when we don’t have to be?’ When [NBC Entertainment Chairman] Bob Greenblatt asked, ‘Do you want to do more of these?’ all of a sudden it was easier to answer that question differently.”

In fact Greenblatt has such high hopes for the reboot that the initial twelve-episode order was upped to 16 with an additional 13-episode second season ordered, and all before a single second of new footage was shot. “It’s a strange thing to have someone announce that there is a second season of a show no one has even seen yet, even [before we] shot the first episode,” McCormack said of the announcement.

Eric McCormack on the Return of “Will & Grace”

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Steve Gidlow