NBC Makes 'Will & Grace' and Other Headlines at TCA
Beverly Hills, CA -- NBC entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt began his network's marquee panel with a bang Thursday at the Television Critics Association "press tour."
Will & Grace, returning on Sept. 28 with all four members of the original cast, has just been picked up for a Season 2 of 13 episodes, he announced. That makes a grand total of 25 new episodes spread over two years after a one-hour "finale" aired on May 18, 2006. Broadcast television's first comedy series with two featured gay characters had an eight-season run.
"We're a very grateful network," Greenblatt (right) said before Eric McCormack (Will), Debra Messing (Grace), Megan Mullally (Karen) and Sean Hayes (Jack, top right) took the stage with co-creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan.
Production on the 12-episode Season 1 return has just begun with a "table read" preceding the first taping before a "live studio audience." That was the norm back when Will & Grace first flourished. Now it's the exception on NBC, with all of the network's other fall comedy series filmed in the prevalent "single-cam" format without either a studio audience or extra juice from a laugh track.
"It's a cliche, but it's like riding a bike," Hayes said of the extended Will & Grace reunion. "It's just a gift of a lifetime to be able to do this again."
"I think of comedy as music," Messing added. "And when we play together, we're at our best."
The foursome last appeared at the TCA press tour in the summer of 2006, where their banter was notably freer than on Thursday afternoon.
When director Jim Burrows (who will return for all the reboot episodes) praised Will & Grace as a "seminal show in the history of sitcoms," McCormack (with Messing, right) cracked, "You mean 'seminal' in a gay way? Because in eight years, my character's not got any 'seminal.' "
He turned more serious at the time when recalling the show's first season in 1998 and the skittishness with which NBC approached it.
"Don't play up the 'gay' too much," McCormack said the cast and writers were told. "This is a show about friendship."
TVWorthWatching repeated that quote to McCormack and asked him if it seemed impossibly quaint by today's standards.
"Now the message is completely the opposite," he said. "Now the message is we are us, and we represent a lot of different people, gay and straight, in this country. And we're not apologizing or underselling what the show is.
"Yes, that first season we were careful. We made sure everybody was happy. By the second season, we were all making out with anybody all the time . . . So we did our part a long time ago. And I feel like we can show up with our heads held high and be the show that we came to be."
Messing said the primary objective of Will & Grace is the same -- "making people laugh out loud." But the show also is expected to "make people aware of what's going on today," she said.
Asked about how President Trump might figure into all of this, Hayes sniffed, "I think our show is not a news show. I think our show is a situation comedy."
Mutchnick then got more real. A 9 minute, 30 second "Get Out & Vote" mini-episode of Will & Grace, shown on YouTube before the 2016 elections, made a point of pitting Hillary Clinton supporters Will and Grace against Trumpeteer Karen (Mullally, right), who brandished a Trump sign while waving an American flag.
Mutchnick said this provides a built-in conflict between those characters, and it won't be ignored.
"A bunch of like-minded people hammering away at the same person, there's not a story there," Kohan said.
McCormack said it's true in real life, and also on Will & Grace, that "one of the hardest things we all have to deal with is realizing that some of the people around us didn't vote for who we voted for. And they might have been friends. And they might still be friends . . . It's about the politics of friendship and how you navigate that. And it can be quite hysterical how we're all navigating it."
What originally was meant to be the Will & Grace finale ended by fast-forwarding 20 years to a scene where the two title characters met by happenstance while helping their children move into a college dorm. Pretend that never happened.
"That was more or less a fantasy," co-creator Kohan said. "It was a projection."
"We would never have gone in that direction if we weren't ending the show," Mutchnick said.
It turns out they weren't, but who knew? So the Will & Grace reboot will acknowledge that time has passed while having the principals share an apartment as before. The circumstances that again brought this about will be quickly explained.
"My joke is they all look exactly the same as they did 10 years ago, except there's a little hair coloring involved," Greenblatt said at his opening morning session.
Ageless or not, "I don't think you want to see them with aging children," he said about the decision to ignore what happened in the 2006 series "finale." "We just sort of wanted the old show and didn't want to take the chance or the risk . . . There's only one episode -- that final episode out of 197 -- that's kind of atypical. We didn't want to then suddenly do 'Will & Grace: The Atypical Show' . . . We're going to try to carve back in and do some of the classic Will & Grace."
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Thursday also brought a session with the entire cast of NBC's This Is Us, which recently became the first broadcast network entry in Emmy's best drama series contenders since 2011. The time-traveling family drama also received seven acting nominations, and will return for Season 2 on Sept. 26.
The show's principal ongoing subplot is the how, when and where of Jack Pearson's (Milo Ventimiglia) death. Executive producer/show runner Dan Fogelman (right) is a realist who acknowledges that these answers can't be left hanging for too much longer.
"If that is a question that is haunting people, in the course of the second season they will get all the answers that they need and more," he said. "The first episode (of Season 2) has a big giant piece of the puzzle that will potentially set the Internet just abuzz but also hopefully give some momentum towards that storyline."
Fogelman later dropped another sizable nugget -- a Season 2 guest appearance by Sylvester Stallone (presumably playing himself) as actor Kevin Pearson's (Justin Hartley) "co-star/father figure in a film that he's actually shooting."
After the formal session, Ventimiglia said he was the go-between after playing Rocky Balboa's son, Rocky Jr., in the 2006 film "Rocky Balboa."
They've stayed in touch, and Stallone has always kept track of his career, Ventimiglia said. "So I felt comfortable reaching out to him to do This Is Us. He was very engaged and accepting and excited."
Critics also were shown a clip that detailed how Randall Pearson (Sterling K. Brown) was chosen to be the third son after one of Rebecca Pearson's (Mandy Moore) triplets died during childbirth. It's a touching scene between the adult Randall and his aging adoptive mother. So much so, that Brown got visibly choked up after it played while co-star Chris Sullivan, who plays Toby Damon, said, "Just give us a second."
Brown (top, middle) is among the show's parade of Emmy nominees after an acclaimed turn as prosecutor Christopher Darden in FX's O. J. Simpson miniseries.
"I don't know if you guys know this, but I'm African-American," he joked. But seriously, "I feel like the perception of the country at large is that black men are absent when it comes to their families. So to be on a show that is on network television and see a man who is a black man who loves his wife to the core and his children to the core . . . it's a wonderful image to put out into the world. So it's an important role, and I don't take it lightly. I'm happy to occupy the space."
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Producer Dick Wolf does not lack for space on NBC. He has the Chicago trio of firefighters, cops and doctors, Law & Order: SVU and coming this fall, Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders.
Your genial TVWW correspondent couldn't resist telling Wolf he's "become almost a bottomless pit of programming for NBC. They keep coming to you."
"I hope so. I hope it continues," he said. "What can I say?"
His principal star is Edie Falco (top, left and right) of The Sopranos and Nurse Jackie fame as real-life prosecutor Lesli Abramson. It really doesn't matter to her that Wolf's name is behind yet another TV take on the Menendez brothers' killing of their abusive parents.
"If it's in the script and I'm reading it and it compels me to continue to see what happens next, my reservations always sort of fall by the wayside," she said. "If it's a character that I find interesting . . . I'm all in."
Affixing the title of the miniseries with a Law & Orde" enticement was a no-brainer for him, Wolf said.
In a "new normal" TV and streaming universe of myriad choices, "if I thought it would help, I'd run naked through the streets, which nobody would want to see," he said. "So yes, I would use anything I can to get the audience that does not lower the level of the (Law & Order) brand."
"This is the Dick Wolf network. Haven't you heard?" Greenblatt asked earlier after TVWW compared him to the late Aaron Spelling's onetime potentate status at ABC.
Would NBC have revisited the Menendez brothers murders without the Law & Order come-on?
"I think we could have done it either way," Greenblatt said. But Law & Order has a longstanding knack for dramatizing stories "ripped from the headlines" he added. "So we thought, 'What about true crime and wrapping the Law & Order branding around it? When you say 'Dick Wolf' to an audience, they think more highly of a show with his name on it. So it seemed like the perfect confluence of an idea and a producer that we are happy to have all over our schedule."
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Finally, NBC's coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, Korea will feature the debut of Mike Tirico as the overall prime-time host in place of Bob Costas and include former Olympic short track speed skating gold medalist Apolo Ohno (right) as an analyst for those competitions.
Ohno acknowledged that for years "I was the most hated figure in Korea. The first was Osama Bin Laden."
Koreans resented the fact that he beat all of their best skaters in the short track races, Ohno explained. Toilet paper with his face on the sheets was a popular seller, he said, but they didn't pay him any royalties.
Some of the hatred remains in place, Ohno added, but it's no longer as intense.
And now you know.