What I’m Watching: Will and Grace

Will and Grace: Season 9, Episode 7 “A Gay Olde Christmas” (C-)

I’m not sure why a Christmas episode of this show airing on an early December night that it doesn’t usually air on was at all necessary, and it demonstrates that this show isn’t entirely ready for a modern-day comeback. This felt like an infantile exercise, having each of the actors portray other characters in a story about how the immigrant experience is valuable. This show is capable of much subtler, or at least cleverer ways of conveying its desired political and social commentary than this. Grace having to pee so badly that they needed to pay for the four of them to take a tour is exaggerated enough as it is, and I don’t think there was anything accomplished from this entire half-hour. A show like this doesn’t need to have a Christmas episode, and there certainly isn’t much place for this kind of storytelling in current comedies. We’re past the age of clip shows that serve as exciting reminders of what’s come before since DVR and on-demand streaming, and this is only slightly better than that. Casting Karen as the one who had to experience poverty was moderately interesting, but otherwise there’s nothing to be gleaned from this tale. I’m happy to go on pretending that this show isn’t airing any episodes between its last November installment and its January return, hoping that this show being brought back is still a positive experience that indulges in these kind of poor experiments very rarely. I’m optimistic given how the other episodes have been so far.