September 21, 1998: “Will & Grace” Premieres

Debra Messing and Eric McCormack

September 21, 1998: Will & Grace premieres on NBC. The sitcom runs for 8 seasons, until 2006. Then it got revived in 2017, ignoring what had previously been the final episode, and runs for 3 more seasons.

Debra Messing played Grace Adler, an interior designer in New York. She had previously been on Ned & Stacey, but this show made her a bigger star. I loved her, and we're almost the same age. But it would never have worked between us, on the show or in real life. Because of the religious difference. Not that she's Jewish (we would have had some common ground there, at least by ancestry), but that she's a Mets fan.

Eric McCormack played Will Truman, a lawyer. A flashback episode showed that Will and Grace had dated in college, but it didn't work. It took another student at that school, Jack McFarland, played by Sean Hayes, to get Will to realize he was gay. Will and Grace stayed best friends, while Jack became Will's other best friend.

Jack became an actor, and was such a stereotypical gay man that Will once called him "Swishburger" to his face. Some people say the show moved gay rights forward. I'm not so sure: With the characters of Will and Jack, it seemed to me to be, respectively, two steps forward, one step back. (Not that I had a personal stake in it.)

There was one other main character. Megan Mullally played Grace's assistant Karen Walker. She didn't need the job: She had a rich husband, Stan, one of Will's clients; and took the job because she was bored.

Karen was a nasty person, always making jokes about Grace's designs, Grace's clothes, Grace's hair, Grace's breasts (they're hardly small, but Karen's are huge), Will's gayness, Stan's weight, their maid Rosario Salazar's immigrant status, the troubles of nonrich people, and her own excessive consumption of booze and pills.

Rosario was played by Shelley Morrison. She was a Sephardic Jew, but her dark complexion allowed her to play everything from Mexicans and Native Americans on 1960s Westerns to a Puerto Rican nun on The Flying Nun to the Costa Rican Rosario.

Being (Cliché Alert) a flamboyant gay man by his own choice, Jack would have seemed to be an easy target for Karen. But they were kindred spirits, and got along great: Jack was always mocking both Will and Grace for being "fat" (neither was), and for their troubled love-lives -- as if his wasn't at least equally pathetic. At one point, Jack objected to homophobes by saying, "They think our lifestyle is repulsive!" And Will said, "Jack, your lifestyle is repulsive." (Hayes is gay in real life, while McCormack is only, in the words of Modern Family's Jesse Tyler Ferguson, "gay for pay," having played gay characters before.)

The Jack-and-Karen banter threatened to take over the show, a la Steve Urkel on Family Matters. MADtv had a great parody of the show, focusing on Jack and Karen and their interactions, closing with, "And boring old Will and Grace are hardly even in it!" To confuse things even further, Karen was given a gay arch-nemesis, Beverly Leslie (Leslie Jordan).

Each of the main characters had established stars playing their parents: Will, Sydney Pollack and Blythe Danner; Grace, Debbie Reynolds and Alan Arkin, who was replaced by Robert Klein, who would later play Messing's father again on The Mysteries of Laura; Jack's mother was Veronica Cartwright, while his out-of-the-picture father was eventually played by Beau Bridges; while Karen's father was dead, and her mother was played by Suzanne Pleshette. Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds' daughter, never appeared on the show; but Carrie's daughter, Billie Lourd, played Grace's sister Fiona.

Notable actors playing love interests included: For Will, Patrick Dempsey, Taye Diggs and Bobby Cannavale; for Grace, Gregory Hines (a lawyer and, complicating things, Will's boss for a time), Eric Stoltz, Woody Harrelson, Edward Burns, Harry Connick Jr. and David Schwimmer; for Jack, Dave Foley and Kevin Bacon; and for Karen, after Stan faked his death, Rip Torn and Alec Baldwin.

The final episode, airing on May 18, 2006, had a flash-forward: Will and Grace "broke up," don't see each other for 20 years, and are reunited when Ben, the son Will and his husband Vince (Cannavale), and Laila, the daughter Grace had with Leo (Connick), meet in college, fall in love, and get married.

The show seemed to grow in public admiration, as gay rights advanced to the point where same-sex marriage became legal in more States, and finally the whole country in 2015. Then-Vice President Joe Biden said Will & Grace "probably did more to educate the American public" on LGBT issues "than almost anything anybody has ever done so far."

Eric McCormack had main roles on Trust Me, Perception and Travelers; and recurring roles on The New Adventures of Old Christine and Full Circle. Debra Messing starred on The Starter Wife, Smash, and as a New York police lieutenant on The Mysteries of Laura, with McCormack playing a doctor in an episode. Sean Hayes played Jerry Lewis in a film about Lewis' partnership with Dean Martin and Larry Fine in a film about the Three Stooges; and starred in Sean Saves the World and The Millers. Megan Mullally hosted the talk show The Megan Mullally Show, did commercials for Old Navy; starred in Childrens Hospital and Breaking In, and had recurring roles in a few other series.

None of these succeeded. Nobody spoke of a "curse" on the show the way they did of a "Seinfeld Curse," but none of the actors seemed to get anywhere, although Leslie Jordan, not one of the main cast, kept his career going as "one of those actors who's on every show."

Finally, in 2017, Will & Grace was revived. Cliché Alert: The revival's pilot explained that the original finale was Karen's dream. Things picked up with Grace divorcing Leo after 11 years of marriage, and moving in with Will.

The true finale -- so far -- aired on April 23, 2020, early in the COVID shutdown, with the title characters moving Upstate, out of the City, in order to raise their children together, in a house with two master bedrooms, allowing room for Will to rekindle his relationship with McCoy (Matt Bomer) and a future partner for Grace.

Series co-creator Matt Mutchnick said, "We were making stuff up the first time around. And this felt like, the world had changed, we had changed, and the characters therefore were going to change... Now, we’re a little bit more evolved and we realized: No, this is how they would actually do it." Messing agreed: "It’s time to say goodbye to Will & Grace and put it back into that time that it originally lived in and sort of leave it there."

Shelley Morrison did not appear in the revival, having turned 80 and retired from acting. She died in 2019, during the show's last season. As of September 21, 2022, every other main cast member is still alive.

UPDATE: Leslie Jordan died on October 24, 2022.

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September 21, 1998 was a Monday. If you were watching ABC Monday Night Football instead of Will & Grace, you saw the Dallas Cowboys beat the New York Giants, 31-7 at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands.

These Major League Baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Cleveland Indians, 4-1 at Yankee Stadium. Charles Nagy outpitched Andy Pettitte. Enrique Wilson, a future Yankee, hit a home run for the Tribe. Derek Jeter went 2-for-3 with a walk. These teams would meet again in the American League Championship Series, with the Yankees winning.

* A doubleheader was split at Fenway Park in Boston. The Boston Red Sox won the opener, 4-3. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays won the nightcap, 8-4.

* The Toronto Blue Jays beat the Baltimore Orioles, 3-1 at the SkyDome (now the Rogers Centre) in Toronto. Cal Ripken, having ended his streak against the Yankees the day before, at 2,632 games, was back in the lineup, and went 2-for-4.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 8-5 at Cinergy Field (formerly Riverfront Stadium) in Cincinnati.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Minnesota Twins, 7-1 at the Metrodome in Minneapolis.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Kansas City Royals, 7-5 at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City.

* The Texas Rangers beat the Anaheim Angels, 9-1 at Edison International Field of Anaheim (now Angel Stadium of Anaheim).

* The San Francisco Giants beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 8-1 at Candlestick Park (then known as 3Com Park) in San Francisco. Barry Bonds went 1-for-3 with a walk. Joe Carter hit his 393rd career home run. He would hit 3 more and retire.

* The Seattle Mariners beat the Oakland Athletics, 5-2 at the Kingdome in Seattle. Ken Griffey Jr. went 0-for-4. Alex Rodriguez went 2-for-4 with an RBI. Rickey Henderson went 0-for-3 with a walk.

* And the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Atlanta Braves, the Chicago Cubs (whose Sammy Sosa had 63 home runs), the Colorado Rockies, the Florida Marlins, the Houston Astros, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Milwaukee Brewers, the Montreal Expos, the New York Mets, the St. Louis Cardinals (whose Mark McGwire had 65 home runs) and the San Diego Padres were not scheduled.