This post contains SPOILERT ALERT about the opening episode of ‘Will & Grace’.
I am au courant enough with pop culture to draw a parallel between the way Karen Walker, the character played by Megan Mullally in ‘Will & Grace’, and Bernadette Rostenkowski, played by Melissa Rauch in ‘The Big Bang Theory’ speak. They both sound as if they had had a light dose of helium and their speech patterns can be phonetically interchanged without making much difference.
I arrived in America almost around the same time as when ‘Will & Grace’ premiered in September, 1998. I remembered having watched the first episodes with mild amusement without paying any particular attention to the sociological consequence of its gay characters. I have a tendency to dismiss how pop culture foreshadows sociological shifts mainly because I have never been judgmental about lifestyle choices of the human race. “Meh” is my most interested response to any human behavior.
I watched ‘Will & Grace’ from the standpoint of its humor quotient and it scored very high. Whether the hit series transformed America’s acceptance of homosexuality and did more to educate the people is a subject I am only marginally interested in. As I said, that is because I treat all human behavior as normal as in meh. Let us just say I was born far ahead of the curve.
Watching ‘Will & Grace’s return last night after 11 years I looked yet again for its humor and found it largely intact. The first episode was an elaborate slam of President Donald Trump and pressed all the predictable pressure points, including a bag of Cheetos. I will not go into the plot details because what would be the point of that? The four protagonists Debra Messing, Eric McCormack, Megan Mullally and Sean Hayes all looked utterly refreshed and subtly refashioned.Their comfort level with one another was clearly evident. It was as if they never left the set in the past eleven years.
The episode ended (SPOILERT ALERT) with a red hat on the computer monitor on the presidential desk in the Oval Office with the inscription “Make America Gay Again.” I thought that was lamely predictable. America is at a stage where sociocultural and political positions have become so entrenched that any attempt to extricate them only pushes them deeper. I don’t know if the episode’s writers believe that by doing what they did they would change any minds on the other side of their beliefs, namely Trump supporters. In my experience of having lived in America since 1998 I think the intransigence is at its most intense.
As an unabashed liberal myself whose default temperament is one of enlightened detachment from life, I keep my distance. The trick is to be superficial by focusing on useless things such as the similarly high-pitch way of talking by Karen Walker and Bernadette Rostenkowski and leaving it at that.
The only reason I have written this post is because I suspect ‘Will & Grace’ might be trending, with the cheap hope that it may get me some extra readership.