An appearance by the creators and stars of Will & Grace was the feature attraction of NBC’s day with the TV press, and they made a grand entrance: Prior to the panel, Peacock chair Robert Greenblatt announced that the sitcom revival has already been picked up for a second season. (Or, if you’re looking at the series as a whole, a 10th season.) That’s in addition to the four episodes that have been added to the first season’s (or ninth season’s) now 16-episode run, which begins on Thursday, September 28.
In their discussion with the Television Critics Association, co-creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick addressed the decision to hit the reset button on their characters’ lives, returning Will Truman and Grace Adler to the apartment where they lived and bantered from 1998 to 2006 and putting aside the children and the husbands they had in Will & Grace’s original finale. “We never would’ve gone in that direction if we weren’t ending the show,” Mutchnick said. Kohan mentioned that what they’d really missed about the show was the dynamic between Eric McCormack and Debra Messing and their co-stars Megan Mullally and Sean Hayes, and that, more than their existence as spouses and parents, was what they were interested in reviving. It’s a fantasy that, according to McCormack, doesn’t have much comedic energy. “Happy endings aren’t funny,” he said.