How the Political ‘Will & Grace’ Revival Threatened the Show’s Syndication Rights
The “Will & Grace” reboot’s political focus almost cost the hit NBC sitcom its syndication rights, co-creator Max Mutchnick revealed during a 25th anniversary panel discussion at the Paley Center for Media on Monday night.
“What was built into the architecture of the show was that we had Karen who was obviously going to be a Trump supporter. And it’s like, ‘Oh, this will be such a good, fertile place to write.’ And we shot this thing and I sent it to our lawyer and he said, ‘Just get ready to lose all of your syndication,'” Mutchnick said. “There’s a thing that if you change the essence of the show, that it no longer stands for what it originally stood for, then you tamper with the possibility of its earning potential.”
He came up with the idea for the revival while on a trip to London with his husband.
“The 2016 election was taking place and I thought ‘Oh God, if we had a show, I would love to see Karen working out Rosario on a rock climbing wall to get out of America,’ he said. “The set was on its way back from Emerson, my alma mater, and we stopped the set, we did a detour and went to Radford, the studio where we shot all the episodes. I said, ‘you want to do this?’ and then we shot an episode and they all showed up.”
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Co-creator David Kohan revealed that filming for the pilot episode was done in secret.
“Legally you’re in strange waters there because technically NBC owns the characters and we were making a political statement,” Kohn said.
After filming the episode, a secret meeting was set up with former NBC president Bob Greenblatt.
“They said, ‘He’s always been a big fan of the show,’ and they put me on the phone with him. I had never met him and I just began to weep and said, ‘I beg of you. I have this thing, we made an episode of the show,'” Mutchnick explained. “He said, ‘What do you mean you made an episode of the show? Where?’ ‘On the set.’ And we sent it to him and it was supposed to be eight minutes and we shot like 42 minutes and we put it on the air.”
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Though “Will & Grace” remains in syndication, there’s one episode that fans will never get to see.
“You guys wrote, I think the second season, an episode about Jack joining my gym and he was being particularly gay,” actor Eric McCormack said. “And I called him the f-word and they didn’t repeat that episode. They never aired it again.”
Mutchnick noted that it was the only episode where the show lost sponsors.
“Will & Grace,” which earned 18 Primetime Emmy Awards and 83 nominations, ran on the network from 1998 to 2006. The revival returned to primetime in 2017 and ran until 2020.
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