Revisionist History - When Will Met Grace

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

You thought the antics of Will, Grace, Jack and Karen were just harmless fun. Oh please. Revisionist History dives deep into a television sitcom that you may not have realized even had a deep end.  If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts, be sure to sign up for our email list at Pushkin.fm.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, hello, Revisionist History listeners. I'm excited to announce that this season I'm offering a bunch of perks from my most loyal listeners, the ones who subscribe to Pushkin Plus. For those who just can't get enough, we're giving every episode to our subscribers one week early. Plus, we've created many episodes, released weekly, and I'm calling them tangents. And of course, you'll never hear any ads. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus on the Revisionist History Show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm. Oh, wait. Do we need to do this?

Yeah. Put that in your left ear. Hi, Malcolm. You're Max. I'm Max. Max is Max Muchnick. The other voice is that of David Cohan. They're two old friends and screenwriting partners who got on a Zoom call with me

with only one set of earphones between them. Can you hear him? I'm not kidding. Because we're connected. Is it going through your ear? Wait, Max, can you not hear me? I can, but I'm hearing you through the wrong channel, I believe, so hold on one second.

Okay. Hey, um... You never leave him, all right? I called them up to talk about a television show they'd created together almost 30 years ago a show that over the years I've become nostalgic for

by the way they finally solved the problem of the one set of earphones by sitting on top of each other did you have an agenda when you were conceiving of this show I'm going to say no we really came at this purely from Did you have an agenda when you were conceiving of this show? I'm going to say no. We really came at this purely from a writing standpoint.

And specifically, Sidney Pollack, who was a mentor of David, taught us a lot about writing and writing a love story. Writing love stories. Yeah. And we were in his office one day, and he knew we were writing sitcoms at this point, and he said, you know, a love story is over after the boy and the girl kiss, so if you can figure out a way to tell a love story where they don't kiss, you can have a show that would run for a very long time. Sidney Pollack was one of the greatest film directors of his generation.

His point was that love stories require friction. It's only as good as the obstacles that prevent them from getting together. I remember him saying, boy, you know, race isn't the obstacle anymore. Class isn't an obstacle anymore. You know, you couldn't make, like, guess who's coming to dinner in 1990. Where are the obstacles? And then when Max and I started working together. I was like, I got one.

Yeah. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about obstacles and their value. And about whether stories and storytellers do more good in the world when they are faced with barriers

that they're forced to overcome. David really was the one who was way more comfortable with the idea of exploring the relationship that I had with my high school girlfriend, you know, quote unquote. The quote unquote girlfriend was named Janet Eisenberg. Oddly, a little sidebar story. Her father was the surgeon who amputated my diabetic grandfather's legs. And so we had a very bizarre connection to each other, but we were instantly friends. He would break it. He would walk into her house and say to her

father, where are the legs? Where do you keep, what have you done with them? Dr. Eisenberg never liked that too much, but it was, you know, an undeniable thing. She was very, very committed and interested in me. And I adored her, you know, and I wasn't ready to deal with my truth at that time. It was the big secret. And in fact, you know, in those days when you were gay and closeted, you actually thought, okay, how am I going to figure this out where I'm going to live a double life. When I told her I was gay, she said, I have to rethink everything about what I have been thinking and what I think I love and how I love. Every screenwriter knows that story always ends the same way on television. When the gay guy reveals to the female that this is what he is

and he loves what he loves. He is banished and punished and she is the victim. But Janet wasn't the victim. They all became best friends again. And David and Max realized there was another way to do the story of the gay man and the straight woman who loved each other very much. The result was... Oh my God! I'm so excited! It's just me and you! You and me? We're the perfect team! Perfect team! Will and Grace.

Uh... Sounds weird. Grace and Will. Now that sounds like a thing. Will and Will. Now that sounds like a thing. Will and Grace. It ran on NBC for 11 seasons, starting in 1998, as part of NBC's vaunted must-see TV on Thursday nights. The character Will in Will and Grace was a lawyer.

Grace was an interior designer. They shared an apartment in New York City with constant interruptions from Grace's assistant, the irrepressible Karen. So, uh, what can I do? How can I help? What are we drinking? And Will's friend, Jack, who functioned as the id to Will's superego. Can't stay for lunch. I'm just going to grab some money out of your wallet so I can grab a sandwich and a new sweater later. Together they argued, started relationships, ended relationships, kissed each other in endless comedic combinations.

The whole merry-go-round set in motion by the premise laid down in the very first episode. Grace is about to get married, and her best friend Will talks her out of it. With her groom waiting at the altar, she and Will go to a bar to drown her sorrows. She's still in her wedding dress, and the patrons at the bar start egging them on. Will and Grace look at each other, make up vows in the moment, and think, maybe this could work. Will gets caught up in the moment and think, maybe this could work. Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss.

Will gets caught up in the moment, tries kissing Grace, hoping sparks will fly. Sparks do not fly. And with an obstacle like that, a love story can go on forever. David Cohan came from a showbiz family. His father, Alan Buzz Cohan, was a writer and producer on The Carol Burnett Show. His métier was variety specials throughout the 70s and 80s and 90s.

That was any variety special that was on, there was a good chance he was the writer on it. But you should know, the night that David and I won the Emmy for Best Show, and we got on the phone with Buzz from the back of the limo, Buzz said to us, you know, all you have to do is win 24 more, and then you have my record beat. There ended up being multiple Cohans in television, including David's sister Jenji,

who wrote for shows like Sex and the City and The Gilmore Girls before going on to create the Showtime series Weeds and the Netflix show Orange is the New Black. Look at you, blondie. What'd you do? Aren't you not supposed to ask that question? I read that you're not supposed to ask that. You read that? Well, you studied for prison? When people refer to the current era of television as the golden age, they're referring to shows like Orange is the New Black. It could only be made by streamers like Netflix or HBO or Apple TV.

It was edgy and unflinching. It had the first major transgender character on television, played by Laverne Cox. Multiple realistic lesbian relationships. Tell us what's different about, or what was different about pitching for Netflix. What's awesome about Netflix is they not only say yes, they say yes and shoot a whole season. Jenji Cohen was invited to speak on a panel at a Vanity Fair conference. Normally in television, the people with an idea for a show make a test episode first, a pilot, which is then critiqued and massaged and shown to focus groups while the network figures out whether it wants to say yes to a full season. Netflix just listened to Jenji Cohen's pitch for Orange is the New Black

and said, go for it. Give the story as much time as it needs. You're not limited to everything in the kitchen sink in one hour. And when you go into a room and say, yeah, go make 13 hours of that, that's a dream come true. Jenji Kohan's show represents the new paradigm in prestige TV. Give the creator what they want. Now, compare Jenji's experience with what her brother David went through back in the

1990s, when the show that would become Will & Grace was still in development. In the late 1990s, Netflix was just a little startup sending out DVDs by mail. Television was dominated by the old-line broadcast networks, NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox. Max and David first had to sell their show idea to Warren Littlefield, the head of the entertainment division at NBC. And they hedged their bets. Max and David come in with a pitch, and their pitch was a large ensemble comedy. And then at the very end,

there were like the Will and Grace characters over here in the corner. And I was like, stop. Wait a second. That's the show. Like, that's the core of the show. Put that relationship front and center. That's what I want to see. Of course, Max and David said, well, look, we'd love to do that show, but are you going to put that on television? Good question, because this was NBC, a very staid, old school television network. And one step up from Warren Littlefield was his very staid boss, Don Holmeyer. Then we get to Don Holmeyer going, you did what? And I said, yeah, it's a script. Most scripts don't work.

You know, it's just, it's development. And I just brushed him off. I wouldn't engage in the discussion of the right or wrong. Did he think this is not a good idea because it's not commercial? Or did he think I, Don Allmire, have a personal objection to that kind of a show? I think his primary concern was we will never get advertisers to go into this. We are a broadcast network. Our revenue is based upon advertising. And advertisers historically are not groundbreakers. And advertisers will reject this. And this is bad, a bad idea.

Don't do it. A show with a gay man at the center on national TV. Littlefield and his screenwriters had a big obstacle. Now they had to find a way around it. For the first several decades of its existence, American television was in the grip of what is commonly called mainstreaming. That's a term coined by the Hungarian-born scholar George Gerbner, who for 25 years headed the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Gerbner was fascinated by American television in the 1960s and 1970s,

when the limited number of options on television meant that a hit show could command huge audiences. Take the Western show Gunsmoke, which in the 1960s was the most popular program on television. It would routinely be watched by 40% of the households in America with a TV. You could sit next to a random person on a bus the morning after Gunsmoke came on and say, without further introduction, could you believe that part where Matt Dillon shot that guy? And the person sitting next to you would know exactly what you were talking about. George Gerbner said that kind of shared experience made television like a giant church,

where the same message was preached night after night. It is comparable to a new religion, not to another medium. It's a total symbolic environment that includes art, science, government, all parts of knowledge. And that is steady, it is consistent, it is repetitive, and it is used as a ritual. Mainstreaming was what happened to those who worshipped in TV's giant church. So, take a hot-button issue from the late 70s or early 80s, like school busing, the forced integration of public schools. Conservatives hated busing. Liberals were much more likely to be in favor of it.

Moderates were in the middle, which is what you would expect. But one of Gerbner's colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, Larry Gross, took polling data about busing and broke it down according to how much TV people watched. Gross found that among heavy TV viewers, the differences started to disappear. Conservatives became a little more in favor of busing, liberals a little less in favor. Television viewing brought Americans closer together over time. That's mainstreaming. Democrats or Republicans or people who say they're liberal, the more television they watch, the more likely they are to say they're moderate. Larry Gross says, how much TV you watch says as much about you as who you voted for.

It predicts incredibly powerfully. If you watch a lot of television, you're more likely to say you're moderate, whatever your other views are. The moderating effect of TV viewing, in turn, has a moderating effect on the people making television. Because if you are competing to be the show that the majority of the country is watching, you have to make a show that's acceptable to the majority of the country. So this is what was going on at NBC in the late 90s. When the network executive Don Ulmeier heard the pitch for Will & Grace, he heard an idea that was too far from the middle, the mainstream. It was not a television show, as people like him understood television to be at the time.

David Cohen and Max Muchnick would have to moderate it. They start with the casting choices for the pilot. They cast Eric McCormick. McCormick in real life is straight, conventionally handsome. Will, his character, is a lawyer, a corporate lawyer, not a profession, according to the stereotypes of the late 90s, that coded as gay. That was also a thing that we did very deliberately,

was to show the world in casting Eric We had to do that We had to make sure that that type of guy was playing this part That he could be, in other words, he was conceivable as a straight man This is absurd Maybe I don't wear my sexuality like a sash and a tiara the way Jack does, but I am willing to put my gayness up against anybody's. Yeah, he passed, to use a word of today.

You know, he was able to do that, and that just made it safe. The casting of Will was a moderating choice, and so too was the way the topic of sex was handled on the show. Am I allowed to use swear words? Yes. Yeah, a very famous director, Joel Schumacher, summed it up best. Naturally, we were having dinner at the foot of Joel's bed while he brushed his hair. And he was making Batman at the time.

Max's dinner companion mentioned the show that Max had pitched to NBC, Will & Grace. Quick side note. You may have noticed an explicit label on this episode. Well, we have Joel Schumacher to thank for that. Children, cover your ears. He looked up and said, just make sure whatever you do, you don't make the show too buttfucky. That's not what people want to think about. And he was really hitting something that was so real and it is so true. And we kind of knew it.

I'll let them suspend their beliefs while they watch this show and this fantasy. But I need them to know when that character, you know, goes off the air at 830, that actor is not going home and having anal sex. Casting, mainstreamed. Content, mainstreamed. Then comes the choice of a director. They pick Jimmy Burroughs, the famous Jimmy Burroughs, who co-created the show Cheers and who directed episodes of virtually every sitcom from the 1970s on. Phyllis, Rhoda, Third Rock, Friends, Frasier. Jimmy Burroughs is as straight down the middle as you can get. To Warren Littlefield, he was the median strip on Hollywood Boulevard. I said to Don Ulmeier, hey, you know that script that, you know, you had a problem with, whatever, you know, it's really good. We love it. It's on your desk. It's

in your infile. We're going to make it. And Jimmy Burroughs is going to direct it. And that was kind of like a wall that Don didn't quite know what to do with. So Littlefield brings in Jimmy Burroughs, Mr. Moderation, and Mr. Moderation naturally moderates the show still further. Here he is in an interview with the Television Academy. I knew how difficult homosexuality would be to middle America. So I told Max and David, I think we should try the first year to make America believe that Will's going to recant and marry Grace. Because that's what the show is. The show is a

relationship, a sexual relationship without any sex. They filmed the pilot. One final obstacle remains. Bob Wright, head of the whole NBC network. Bob Wright is a staunch Republican, grew up Catholic on Long Island, public school kid, started out as a lawyer at General Electric, later worked in their plastics division. He has a house in Palm Beach. He's president of the Palm Beach Civic Association. Bob Wright's idea of a radical act is doing a donut in his golf cart in the parking lot of the Palm Beach Country Club. In the end, it doesn't matter what anyone else at NBC thinks about Will and Grace. The only way the show is going to get on the air is if Bob Wright says yes. Bob Wright is your mainstreaming test. Bob Wright hops in the company jet

and flies out to Los Angeles from New York for a special screening of the Will & Grace pilot episode. 35, 40 people in the room. The show's future is in the balance. The lights come up after the screening. The room is quiet. Don Ulmeier's there. And Bob Wright goes,

that's the best thing we've ever had our logo on. Wait, are you kidding me? Bob Wright said that? Bob Wright said that. So I, of course, was like, game over. Don's not going to do anything. No one's going to put up a wall. We own it. We love it. And the number one guy just put his seal of approval. I'm like, that's it. We're putting it on the air. When Will and Grace first made it on the air, it was roundly criticized by gay and lesbian groups and television critics too, all pointing out the ways in which the show's depiction of gay life was compromised in order to please the Don Ulmeyers and Bob Wrights of the world. Like the

fact that this was a show about gay men in New York City in the late 1990s, and there was no mention of HIV. None. We could never quite crack a story where that was going to be genuinely funny coming from these characters. Funny was their way of staying right in the middle. I always thought that we needed to approach all of the gay stuff in the same way that I approached coming out to my family, with love and with sensitivity and with caring about the way that the people that I was giving this new information to were going to receive it. This bothered a lot of people. And I understand that, but a lot of people meaning, you know, organizations like GLAAD and, you know, activists and ACT UP, they just thought it was bullshit and we were soft peddling it. I think another thing is that, you know,

at no point were we trying to, you know, get idea or promulgate some ideology ever. It was always, what would this person that we know, what would Max do in this situation? What would Janet do in this situation? There was never, We were never thinking in terms from the outside in. We're basically from a show business background. Our families come from this. It's a trade. It was the trade and the town that we grew up in. And we understand the work aspect of it, how to survive. And because of all of that, we knew our job, our number one job was to entertain the largest number of people we could every week. That was the job. That was the job.

But what about Jenji Kohan, David's sister? She never had to ask Netflix the question, are you going to put Orange is the New Black on television? She never had to bring in Mr. Moderation. She never had to avoid taboo topics. Netflix loved that she explored taboo topics. Now, the obvious response here is to say, why would we want to go back from Jenji's world to her brother's? To the compromises and sacrifices?

Netflix and all the other streamers have brought us an explosion of quality and choice. Television has never been better. But this is why we do thought experiments. To consider the possibility that what we think of as obvious might be wrong. Television, like any medium, has a set of implicit storytelling rules. It is the case generally that television chooses to introduce controversial issues, for instance, through comedy. That's Bonnie Dow, who teaches at Vanderbilt University and who many years ago, back in the glory days of broadcast television dominance,

wrote a brilliant paper about the norms of television. The same thing is true with depictions of gay characters, is that they show up in sitcoms, right? Which are these 30 minute vehicles in which a problem is introduced and then the problem is solved by the end of the episode. And it's a very comforting form. It's very funny. And it allows for something to be treated lightly. Dow identified four rules. Let's call them Dow's rules. Rule one, a gay character cannot be the lead in any story. They can only be secondary characters whose gayness is an issue that creates resolution.

The narratives tend to be about how their revelation about their sexuality affects their relationships with straight characters, friends and family, co-workers, and how they become a sort of problem that has to be solved. Rule number two, it's all about the straight people. Rule number three, gay characters don't associate with other gay people. So they tend not to have gay friends. They tend not to go to gay events. Their gayness becomes this solely personal thing, right? And then finally, which is related to the thing that I just said, you rarely ever

see or saw back in the day depictions of gay desire or gay sex, right? So these were people for whom the whole point really was, you know, the whole point of their identity, the way it was depicted, was that they were sexually interested in their same gender. But yet you actually didn't see that being enacted. In her essay, Dow talks a lot about the sitcom Ellen. Starring the comedian Ellen DeGeneres, in the show's fourth season, Ellen comes out as gay, which was considered to be this epic moment in social progress. When you put one of these taboo topics in, you know, onto prime time, people act as though the entire difficulty has been solved. Like we used to be homophobic. We used to not represent GLBTQ characters. Now we have Ellen and everything's

fine, right? It's sort of the narrative have Ellen and everything's fine, right? It's sort of the narrative. And that's not true, right? That's just not true. There's a lot more work to be done. The film historian Vito Russo once surveyed 32 Hollywood movies from the 60s and 70s that had major gay characters. 18 of those characters were murdered, 13 committed suicide, and one was castrated. Ellen was definitely a step up from that. But Ellen left all the other rules intact. Her identity, a problem to be solved. I mean, just listen to Ellen struggle as she comes out to her friend Susan. I mean, why can't I just say the truth? I mean, be who I am. I'm 35 years old. I'm so afraid to tell people. I mean, I just... Susan, I'm gay.

Ellen was just baby steps. But do you know what show wasn't baby steps? Will & Grace. That's the truth that so many critics missed. Yes, getting Will & Grace. That's the truth that so many critics missed. Yes, getting Will and Grace greenlit at NBC meant that the character Will had to be essentially a straight guy who just claimed to be gay. And the screenwriters had to spend a full season pretending that Will and Grace might eventually get together. Gay characters could kiss, but not much else. And HIV could

never come up at all, even though HIV was the central issue in gay life in the 1990s. Will and Grace drove activists crazy, but they missed the point. Beneath that moderate exterior, Will and Grace was deeply subversive because it broke every one of Dow's rules. Gay characters central to the narrative. Check. FYI folks, most people that meet me do not know that I am gay. Jack, blind and deaf people know you're gay.

Homosexuality, not a problem to be solved. Check. Am I a bad gay man? Yes. How can you answer that so easily? Because yesterday when I saw that you didn't leave me any milk for my coffee, I remember saying, bad gay man. Bad gay man. Gay people hanging out with other gay people. Check.

Have you asked anyone to dance? Have you talked to anybody? Have you done anything? I can't. I feel like everyone's judging me. Well, of course they are. It's a gay bar. Acknowledgement of gay desire? Check. Especially when Jack gets going.

Here he is with Grace. Oh, you want to be useful? Hope the man standing behind you with the big package. Grace, don't tease me. Hello. Grace Ad don't tease me. Hello. Grace Adler Design? I'll sign for it. Just your name, sir. I don't need your phone number.

On the Thursday night lineup, just before Will and Grace, was Friends. Friends didn't break any rules. Nor did another stalwart of NBC's famous Thursday night, Seinfeld. Friends and Seinfeld are just variations on the theme of eccentric young white people implausibly living in vast New York City apartments. Will and Grace had eccentric people in a New York City apartment where something radical is happening below the surface. We knew that we had a win in the fact that there was an out gay man at the center of our show. And we were going to eventually,

over time, show a very, very full life. Yeah, that people were choosing to identify with. To answer your question, I mean, that is how we slowly fed this gay conspiracy to the American public. Max is joking about gay conspiracy, of course, but only slightly. Because what happens during the very same period that Will and Grace is breaking all four rules? Something shifts in the culture. The idea that gay people are normal and that we shouldn't be afraid of them starts to spread. In the mid-90s, before Will and Grace, only a quarter of Americans were in favor of gay marriage.

By the time the show was over, the percentage of those in favor of gay marriage had doubled. Now it's up to more than 70%. And everyone moved in that direction. Young and old, black and white. A shift in public opinion almost without parallel in American history. The idea of gay marriage is mainstreamed. I think Will and Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody's ever done so far. Do you remember Joe Biden's famous comment on Meet the Press back in 2012 when he was vice president?

And I think people fear that which is different. Now they're beginning to understand. He was right. Even people on the other side of the gay marriage issue agreed. And I think people fear that which is different. Now they're beginning to understand. He was right. Even people on the other side of the gay marriage issue agreed. Listen to the former Republican Senator Rick Santorum, a longtime opponent of gay rights. Politics does not shape those issues. Popular culture shapes those issues.

Particularly the issue of marriage, look at it. The sexual revolution caused a big change in sexual mores in this country. But when it came to the issue of marriage and changing the definition of marriage, there was no change. None. Zero. For 30 years. And then a television show came on the air called Will & Grace started in the late 1990s, right at the tail end of the big church era in broadcast television. It had an audience. Will & Grace, at its peak, had about 17.5 million viewers, which translates to a rating of about 12. I watched Will & Grace all the time. So did everyone I knew. If you were in your late 20s or 30s in the early 2000s, you could sit down next to another young stranger on a bus on a Friday morning and say, can you believe that thing that Jack said to Karen last night? That was the bargain you made in the old television paradigm. You allowed Don Omeyer to

scale back your ambitions and push you into the middle. But in return, you got to change the world to reach people. I called up Brian Fuhrer to find out what rating for a sitcom would make a network executive happy today. Fuhrer is a senior vice president at the Nielsen Company, which has been providing ratings for the television industry for decades. I think if you get anything above a five or three or four, that would be wildly successful. Oh, wow. So like a network executive today having a conversation with a network executive in 1975 about what would make them happy, they wouldn't even be speaking the same language.

No, totally different. There's a funny thing. The guy who creates Will & Grace, his sister is the person who created Orange is the New Black. And so it's a wonderful little comparison point. So I'm curious, can we estimate the viewership of something like Orange is the New Black? It would have done about a one rating for all the episodes, you know, across Netflix, maybe across the first week after a new season was released. At best, Orange is the New Black could have had a rating of 1. And that made it a hit for its time.

The peak rating for Will & Grace was 12. David got a 12. His sister got a 1. And if you're Netflix, and the stakes for each of your shows are so small, why bother trying to play the mainstreaming game at all? Now, there is no suit in the corporate office who pushes you to the middle. No big boss who has to fly out from New York to give the okay. Instead you get told, go and make art. And when you come back with your little bit of unfettered

creative genius, Netflix throws it on their platform along with its thousands of other offerings where it is recommended to those Netflix subscribers who, on the basis of their previous viewing choices are guaranteed to agree with every edgy thing your show has to say We have redeemed television's soul at the price of its impact Do me a favor Go back and watch a few episodes of Will and Grace. We will never see anything like that again.

Revisionist History is produced by Eloise Linton, Lehman Gistu, and Jacob Smith, with Tali Emlin and Harrison Vijay Choy. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is Mia Lobel. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Flan Williams, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact-checking by Keisha Williams. I'm Malcolm Glaber.