It’s easy to get down on a sitcom.
| Last week, 21-year-old Edmonds resident Brianna Varela again stayed out of the spotlight, easing through her tribe’s first visit to tribal council, where Morgan, a magician’s assistant from Decatur, Ill., was voted off.
Tonight’s episode promises contestants swimming with the crocodiles to try to cool off in the scorching heat, while others take to a termite nest for good. Check it out at 8 tonight on KIRO-TV, Channel 7, and look for Victor Balta’s recap, “The Scoop on ‘Survivor,’” where we’re following Brianna’s adventure each week on Page A2 in Friday’s Herald. |
The majority of them are cast aside long before anyone even realizes they were around to begin with.
A select few reach the point where anyone really cares about them at all, and those are usually the ones that eventually develop the most passionate cries when things start to turn south, when the jokes don’t seem fresh anymore and when the characters start to become caricatures.
That’s precisely the time when the audience needs to step back, put aside its current frustrations and pay tribute to a television show that reached the rare level of success that made us care in the first place.
That starts tonight, with the eighth and final season premiere of “Will &Grace.”
I’ve been as down on this show as anyone for the past couple of years as most of the characters just became whiny, unlikable little goofs. But as the final season opens with a special live premiere at 8:30 p.m. on KING-TV, Channel 5, we should all settle in for one last season to send off a show that went much further and accomplished far more than anyone believed it could.
In September 1998, Will Truman, Grace Adler, Jack McFarland and Karen Walker entered our lives as nothing more than another cast of sitcom hopefuls. “Will &Grace,” which originally aired on Monday nights, moved to Tuesday nights and within two years landed in NBC’s once-coveted “Must See TV” Thursday night rotation, where it stayed for four seasons.
In the beginning, “Will &Grace” was edgy, with its gay main characters and unabashed gay references and sneaky double entendres.
In recent years, it’s become quaint, at best, as it ironically became the first victim of the trail that it blazed. “Will &Grace,” picking up the torch that was clumsily left by “Ellen,” made it OK to have openly gay characters on TV.
Seven years later, that’s exactly why we’re now bored by “Will &Grace.”
But this season, we’ll hope the show gets back to what it does best.
Some of the show’s greatest moments, including Jack’s unwitting face-to-face meeting with his greatest obsession, Cher, in a coffee shop, have come at the hands of the show’s guest stars and you can bet there will be plenty on board for the sendoff.
“Mostly, I think, it’s actually really joyful,” star Eric McCormack said this summer at the TV Critics Association press tour. “It was a decision that we made, and we made it together. And so we’re going into this thing knowing that we’re not going to overstay our welcome and we’re going to take it out in a big way.”
“I think we may see a lot of the old characters come back.”
The significance of the show has yet to be determined, but we should all know that heading into this final season, we’re witnessing a part of television history.
“I think (the show’s legacy) will be nothing but positive, I really do,” McCormack said. “Time will tell that we … stuck to our guns and did a great show week after week, and just allowed the characters to be the characters.
“We didn’t make a lot of political statements. The political statement was just the fact that we existed for eight years and we existed early. We’re just going to make it easier for other shows to have gay characters without having to put a spotlight on them as gay characters.”
Victor Balta’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays on the A&E page. Reach him at 425-339-3455, or vbalta@heraldnet.com.
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