Speaker 1: Pushkin Hello, Hello, Revisionist History listeners. I'm excited to announce
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Speaker 1: need to do this? Yeah? Put on your left ear Hi, Malcolm,
Speaker 1: you're Max. I'm Max? Max? Is Max Muchnick. The other
Speaker 1: voice is that of David Cohen. They're two old friends
Speaker 1: and screenwriting partners who got on a zoom call with
Speaker 1: me with only one set of earphones between them. Can
Speaker 1: you hear him? I'm not kidding, because we're we're connected.
Speaker 1: Is he going through your ear? Wait? Max? Can you
Speaker 1: not hear me? I can, but I'm hearing you through
Speaker 1: the wrong channel, I believe, So hold on one second. Okay, Hey,
Speaker 1: you never leave them, all right? I called them up
Speaker 1: to talk about a television show that created together almost
Speaker 1: thirty years ago, a show that over the years I've
Speaker 1: become nostalgic for by the way they finally solved the
Speaker 1: problem of the one set of earphones by sitting on
Speaker 1: top of each other. Did you have an agenda when
Speaker 1: you were conceiving of this show? I'm saying we really
Speaker 1: came at this purely from a writing standpoint, and specifically,
Speaker 1: Sidney Pollack, who was a mentor of David, taught us
Speaker 1: a lot about writing and writing a lot of stories. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we were in his office one day and he
Speaker 1: knew we were writing, you know, sitcoms at this point,
Speaker 1: and he said, you know, a love story is over
Speaker 1: after the boy and the girl kiss. So if you
Speaker 1: can figure out a way to tell a love story
Speaker 1: where they don't kiss, you can have a show that
Speaker 1: would run for a very long time. Sidney Pollock was
Speaker 1: one of the greatest film directors of his generation. His
Speaker 1: point was that love stories require friction. It's only as
Speaker 1: good as the obstacles that prevent them from getting together.
Speaker 1: I remember him saying, boy, you know, race isn't the
Speaker 1: obstacle anymore. Class isn't an obstacle anymore. You know, you
Speaker 1: couldn't make guess who's coming to dinner in nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: Where are the obstacles? Ma's nice story to work together
Speaker 1: like I got one? Yeah, my name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about Things Overlooked
Speaker 1: and Misunderstood. This episode is about obstacles and their value,
Speaker 1: and about whether stories and storytellers do more good in
Speaker 1: the world when they are faced with barriers that they're
Speaker 1: forced to overcome. David really was the one who was
Speaker 1: way more comfortable with the idea of exploring the relationship
Speaker 1: that I had with my high school girlfriend. You know,
Speaker 1: quote unquote, the quote unquote girlfriend was named Janet Eisenberg.
Speaker 1: Oddly a little sidebar story, her father was the surgeon
Speaker 1: who amputated my diabetic grandfather's legs, and so we had
Speaker 1: a very bizarre connection to each other, but we were
Speaker 1: instantly friends. He would break into He would walk into
Speaker 1: her house and say to her father, where the legs you, Keith?
Speaker 1: What have you done with them? Doctor Eisenberg never liked
Speaker 1: that too much, but it was an undeniable thing. She
Speaker 1: was very, very committed and interested in me, and I
Speaker 1: adored her. You know, and I wasn't ready to deal
Speaker 1: with my truth at that time. It was the big secret.
Speaker 1: And in fact, you know, in those days when you
Speaker 1: were gay and closeted, you actually thought, Okay, how am
Speaker 1: I going to figure this out? Where I'm going to
Speaker 1: live a double life. When I told her I was gay,
Speaker 1: she said, I I have to rethink everything about what
Speaker 1: I have been thinking and what I think I love
Speaker 1: and how I love. Every screenwriter knows that story always
Speaker 1: ends the same way on television. When the gay guy
Speaker 1: reveals to the female that he's that this is what
Speaker 1: he is and he loves what he loves. He is
Speaker 1: banished and punished and she is the victim. But Janet
Speaker 1: wasn't the victim. They all became best friends again, and
Speaker 1: David and Max realized there was another way to do
Speaker 1: the story of the gay man and the straight woman
Speaker 1: who loved each other very much. The result was what
Speaker 1: You and Be With, The Perfect Day team Will and Grace.
Speaker 1: It sounds weird, Grace and Will, Now that sounds like
Speaker 1: a thing. Will and Grace. It ran on NBC for
Speaker 1: eleven seasons starting in nineteen ninety eight, as part of
Speaker 1: NBC's vaunted Must see TV on Thursday nights. The character
Speaker 1: Will in Will and Grace was a lawyer. Grace was
Speaker 1: an interior designer. They shared an apartment in New York City,
Speaker 1: with constant interruptions from Grace's assistant, the irrepressible Karen, what
Speaker 1: can I do? How can we help? What are we drinking?
Speaker 1: And Will's friend Jack, who functioned as the id to
Speaker 1: Will's superego can't stay for lunch. I'm just gonna grab
Speaker 1: some money out of your wallet so I can grab
Speaker 1: a sandwich and a new sweater. Lady Together, they argued,
Speaker 1: started relationships, ended relationships, kissed each other in endless comedic combinations.
Speaker 1: The whole Merry Go Round set in motion by the
Speaker 1: premise laid down in the very first episode. Grace is
Speaker 1: about to get married and her best friend Will talks
Speaker 1: her out of it. With her groom waiting at the altar,
Speaker 1: she and Will go to a bar to drown her sorrows.
Speaker 1: She's still in her wedding dress and the patrons at
Speaker 1: the bar start egging them on your lovely new braun.
Speaker 1: Will and Grace look at each other make up vows
Speaker 1: in the moment and think maybe this could work. Will
Speaker 1: gets caught up in the moment, tries kissing grace, hoping
Speaker 1: sparks will fly, sparks do not fly, and with an
Speaker 1: obstacle like that, love story can go on forever. David
Speaker 1: Cohen came from a showbiz family. His father, Alan Buzz Coohan,
Speaker 1: was a writer and producer on The Carol Burnett Show.
Speaker 1: His mitier was variety specials throughout the seventies and eighties
Speaker 1: and nineties. That was any variety special that was on
Speaker 1: those a good chance he was the writer on it.
Speaker 1: But you should know the night that David and I
Speaker 1: won the Emmy for Best Show and we got on
Speaker 1: the phone with Buzz from the back of the limo,
Speaker 1: Buzz said to us, you know, all you have to
Speaker 1: do is win twenty four more and then you have
Speaker 1: my record being there. Ended up being multiple Cohens in television,
Speaker 1: including David's sister Genji, who wrote for shows like Sex
Speaker 1: in the City and The Gilmore Girls before going on
Speaker 1: to create the Showtime series Weeds and the Netflix show
Speaker 1: Oranges The New Black. I'll get you, blandy, what'd you do?
Speaker 1: Aren't you not supposed to ask that question? I read
Speaker 1: that you're not supposed to ask that you read that,
Speaker 1: were you who studied for prison? When people refer to
Speaker 1: the current era of television as the Golden Age, they're
Speaker 1: referring to shows like Oranges The New Black. It could
Speaker 1: only be made by streamers like Netflix or HBO or
Speaker 1: Apple TV. It was edgy and unflinching. It had the
Speaker 1: first major transgender character on television, played by Laverne Cox.
Speaker 1: Multiple realistic lesbian relationships tell us what's different about or
Speaker 1: what was different about pitching for Netflix? What's awesome about
Speaker 1: Netflix's They not only say yes, they say yes and
Speaker 1: shoot a whole season. Jeni Cohen was invited to speak
Speaker 1: on a panel at a Vanity Fair conference. They eliminate
Speaker 1: the pilot process, which is so wasteful. Normally in television,
Speaker 1: the people with an idea for a show make a
Speaker 1: test episode first, a pilot, which is then critiqued and
Speaker 1: massaged and shown to focus groups while the network figures
Speaker 1: out whether it wants to say yes to a full season.
Speaker 1: Netflix just listened to Genie Cohan's pitch for Oranges in
Speaker 1: New Black and said, go for it. Give the story
Speaker 1: as much time as it needs. You're not limited to
Speaker 1: everything in the kitchen sink in one hour, and when
Speaker 1: you go into a room and say, yeah, make go
Speaker 1: make thirteen hours of that, that's a dream come true.
Speaker 1: Genie Cohan show represents the new paradigm in prestige TV.
Speaker 1: Give the creator what they want now. Compare Geni's experience
Speaker 1: with what her brother David went through back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties when the show that would become Will and
Speaker 1: Grace was still in development. In the late nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: Netflix was just a little startup sending out DVDs by mail.
Speaker 1: Television was dominated by the old line broadcast networks NBC, ABC, CBS,
Speaker 1: and Fox. Max and David first had to sell their
Speaker 1: show idea to Warren Littlefield, the head of the entertainment
Speaker 1: division at NBC, and they hedge their bets. Max and
Speaker 1: David come in with a pitch, and their pitch was
Speaker 1: a large ensemble comedy. And then at the very end
Speaker 1: they were like the Will and Grace characters over here
Speaker 1: in the corner, and I was like, stop, wait a second,
Speaker 1: that's the show, Like, that's the core of the show.
Speaker 1: Put that relationship front and center. That's what I want
Speaker 1: to see. Of course, Max and David said, well, look,
Speaker 1: we'd love to do that show? But are you going
Speaker 1: to put that on television? Good question, because this was NBC,
Speaker 1: a very staid, old school television network, and one step
Speaker 1: up from Warren Littlefield was his very staid boss, Don Olmier.
Speaker 1: Then we get to Don Ollmeyer going, you did what
Speaker 1: and I said, yeah, it's a script. Most scripts don't work,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just it's development. And I just brushed
Speaker 1: him off. I wouldn't engage in the discussion of the
Speaker 1: right or wrong. Did he think this is not a
Speaker 1: good idea because it's not commercial or did he think
Speaker 1: I done all my er heavy personal objection to that
Speaker 1: kind of a show. I think his primary concern was,
Speaker 1: we will never get advertisers to go into this. We
Speaker 1: are a broadcast network. Our revenue is based upon advertising,
Speaker 1: and advertisers historically are not groundbreakers, and advertisers will reject this,
Speaker 1: and this is bad, a bad idea. Don't do it
Speaker 1: a show with a gay man at the center on
Speaker 1: national TV. Littlefield and his screenwriters had a big obstacle.
Speaker 1: Now they had to find a way around it. For
Speaker 1: the first several decades of its existence, American television was
Speaker 1: in the grip of what is commonly called mainstreaming. That's
Speaker 1: a term coined by the Hungarian born scholar George Gebner,
Speaker 1: who for twenty five years head at the Annenberg School
Speaker 1: for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Gebner was fascinated
Speaker 1: by American television in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: when the limited number of options on television meant that
Speaker 1: a hit show could command huge audiences. Take the Western
Speaker 1: show Gunsmoke, which in the nineteen sixties was the most
Speaker 1: popular program on television. It would routinely be watched by
Speaker 1: forty percent of the households in America. With a TV,
Speaker 1: you could sit next to a random person on a
Speaker 1: bus the morning after Gunsmoke came on and say, without
Speaker 1: further introduction, could you believe that part where Matt Dillon
Speaker 1: shot that guy? And the person sitting next to you
Speaker 1: would know exactly what you were talking about. George Gibner
Speaker 1: said that kind of shared experience made television like a
Speaker 1: giant church where the same message was preached night after night.
Speaker 1: It is comparable to a new religion, not to another medium.
Speaker 1: It's a total symbolic environment that includes art, science, government,
Speaker 1: every all parts of knowledge, and that is steady, it
Speaker 1: is consistent, it is repetitive, and it is used as
Speaker 1: a ritual. Mainstreaming was what happened to those who worshiped
Speaker 1: in TV's giant church. So take a hot button issue
Speaker 1: from the late seventies or early eighties, like school busing
Speaker 1: the forced integration of public schools. Conservetives hated bussing. Liberals
Speaker 1: were much more likely to be in favor of it.
Speaker 1: Moderates were in the middle, which is what you would expect.
Speaker 1: But one of Gerbner's colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: Larry Gross, took polling data about busing and broke it
Speaker 1: down according to how much TV people watched. Gross found
Speaker 1: that among heavy TV viewers, the differences started to disappear.
Speaker 1: Conservatives became a little more in favor of busing, liberals
Speaker 1: a little less in favor. Television viewing brought Americans closer
Speaker 1: together over time. That's mainstreaming. Democrats or Republicans or people
Speaker 1: who say they're liberal, the more television they watched, the
Speaker 1: more likely they are to say they're moderate. Larry Gross says,
Speaker 1: how much TV you watch says as much about you
Speaker 1: as who you voted for. It predicts incredibly powerfully. If
Speaker 1: you watch a lot of television, you're more likely to
Speaker 1: say you're moderate, whatever of your other views are. The
Speaker 1: moderating effect of t viewing, in turn, has a moderating
Speaker 1: effect on the people making television, because if you are
Speaker 1: competing to be the show that the majority of the
Speaker 1: country is watching, you have to make a show that's
Speaker 1: acceptable to the majority of the country. So this is
Speaker 1: what was going on at NBC in the late nineties.
Speaker 1: When the network executive Don Olmyer heard the pitch for
Speaker 1: Will and Grace, he heard an idea that was too
Speaker 1: far from the middle the mainstream. It was not a
Speaker 1: television show as people like him understood television to be
Speaker 1: at the time. David Cohen and Max Muchnick would have
Speaker 1: to moderate it. They start with the casting choices for
Speaker 1: the pilot. They cast Eric McCormick. McCormick in real life
Speaker 1: is straight, conventionally handsome Will his character is a lawyer,
Speaker 1: a corporate lawyer, not a profession according to the stereotypes
Speaker 1: of the late nineties that coded as gay. That was
Speaker 1: also a thing that we did very deliberately, was to
Speaker 1: show the world and casting Eric, we had to do
Speaker 1: that We had to make sure that that that type
Speaker 1: of guy was playing this part because he could be.
Speaker 1: In other words, he was conceivable as a straight man.
Speaker 1: This is a sorry. Maybe I don't wear my sexuality
Speaker 1: like a sash and a tr the way Jack does,
Speaker 1: but I am willing to put my gainess up against anybody's. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he passed to use a word of today. You know
Speaker 1: he was able to do that, and that just made
Speaker 1: it safe. The casting of Will was a moderating choice,
Speaker 1: and so too was the way the topic of sex
Speaker 1: was handled on the show. Am I allowed to use
Speaker 1: swear words? Yes? Yeah. A very famous director, Joel Schumacher,
Speaker 1: summed it up best. Naturally, we were having dinner at
Speaker 1: the foot of Joel's bed while he brushed his hair
Speaker 1: and he was making Batman at the time. Max's dinner
Speaker 1: companion mentioned the show that Max had pitched to NBC.
Speaker 1: Will and Grace quick side note, you may have noticed
Speaker 1: an explicit label on this episode. Well, we have Joel
Speaker 1: Schumacher to thank for that. Children cover your ears. He
Speaker 1: looked up and said, just make sure, whatever you do,
Speaker 1: you don't make the show to butt fucky. That's not
Speaker 1: what people want to think about and he was really
Speaker 1: hitting something that was so real and it is so
Speaker 1: true and it and we kind of knew it. I'll
Speaker 1: let them suspend their their beliefs while they watched this
Speaker 1: show and this fantasy, but I need them to know
Speaker 1: when that character, you know, goes off the air at
Speaker 1: eight thirty, that actor is not going home and having
Speaker 1: anal sex casting mainstreamed content, mainstreamed. Then comes the choice
Speaker 1: of actor. They picked Jimmy Burrows, the famous Jimmy Burrows
Speaker 1: who co created the show Cheers and who directed episodes
Speaker 1: of virtually every sitcom from the nineteen seventies on Phyllis
Speaker 1: rode A, Third Rock, Friends, Frasier, Jimmy Burrows is as
Speaker 1: straight down the middle as you can get. To Warren Littlefield,
Speaker 1: he was the median strip on Hollywood Boulevard. I said
Speaker 1: to Don Olmeyer, Hey, you know that script that you
Speaker 1: know you had a problem with whatever, you know, it's
Speaker 1: really good. We love it. It's on your desk, it's
Speaker 1: in your in file. We're gonna make it, and Jimmy
Speaker 1: Burrows is going to direct it. And that was kind
Speaker 1: of like a wall that Don didn't quite know what
Speaker 1: to do with. So Littlefield brings in Jimmy Burrows mister moderation,
Speaker 1: and mister Moderation naturally moderates the show still further Here,
Speaker 1: he is in an interview with the Television Academy. I
Speaker 1: know how difficult homosexuality would be too middle of Eric,
Speaker 1: so I told Max and David, I think we should
Speaker 1: try the first year to make America believe that Will
Speaker 1: is going to recant and marry Grace, because that's what
Speaker 1: the show is. The show is a relationship, a sexual
Speaker 1: relationship without a new sex. They filmed the pilot. One
Speaker 1: final obstacle remains Bob Wright, head of the whole NBC network.
Speaker 1: Bob Wright is a staunch Republican, grew up Catholic Onlonge
Speaker 1: Island public school kid. Started out as a lawyer at
Speaker 1: General Electric, later worked in their plastics division. He's a
Speaker 1: house in Palm Beach. He's president of the Palm Beach
Speaker 1: Civic Association. Bob Wright's idea of a radical act is
Speaker 1: doing a donut in his golf cart in the parking
Speaker 1: lot of the Palm Beach Country Club. In the end,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter what anyone else at NBC thinks about
Speaker 1: Will and Grace. The only way to show is going
Speaker 1: to get on the air. Is if Bob Wright says, yes,
Speaker 1: Bob Wright is your main streaming test. Bob Wright hops
Speaker 1: into company jet and flies out to Los Angeles from
Speaker 1: New York for a special screening of the Will and
Speaker 1: Grace pilot episode forty people in the room, the show's
Speaker 1: futures in the balance. The lights come up. After the screening,
Speaker 1: the room is quiet. Donald Myers there and Bob Wright goes,
Speaker 1: that's the best thing we've ever had our logo on. Wait,
Speaker 1: are you kidding me? Bob Wright said that. Bob Wright
Speaker 1: said that, so, I of course was like game over, Like,
Speaker 1: Don's not going to do anything. No one's going to
Speaker 1: put up a wall. We own it, we love it.
Speaker 1: And the number one guy just put his seal of approval.
Speaker 1: I'm like, that's it. We're putting it on the air.
Speaker 1: When Will and Grace first made it on the air,
Speaker 1: it was roundly criticized by gay and lesbian groups and
Speaker 1: television critics too, all pointing out the ways in which
Speaker 1: the show's depiction of gay life was compromised in order
Speaker 1: to please the Don Olmeyers and Bob Rights of the world,
Speaker 1: like the fact that this was a show about gay
Speaker 1: men in New York City in the late nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: and there was no mention of HIV none. We could
Speaker 1: never quite crack a story where that was going to
Speaker 1: be genuinely funny coming from these characters. Funny was their
Speaker 1: way of staying right in the middle. I always thought
Speaker 1: that we needed to approach all of the gay stuff
Speaker 1: in the same way that I approached coming out to
Speaker 1: my family, with love and with sensitivity and with caring
Speaker 1: about the way that the people that I was giving
Speaker 1: this new information to we're going to receive it. This
Speaker 1: bothered a lot of people, and I understand that, but
Speaker 1: by a lot of people, meaning you know, organizations like
Speaker 1: GLAD and you know activists and act up. They just
Speaker 1: thought it was bullshit and we were soft peddling it.
Speaker 1: I think another another another thing is that you know,
Speaker 1: at no point we were we trying to you know,
Speaker 1: get idea or or promulgate some ideology. Ever, it was
Speaker 1: always what would this person that we knew, What would
Speaker 1: Max do in this situation, what would Janet do in
Speaker 1: this situation? There was never we were never thinking in
Speaker 1: terms from the outside in. We're basically from an show
Speaker 1: business background, our families come from this. It's a trade.
Speaker 1: It was the trade and the town that we grew
Speaker 1: up in, and we understand the work aspect of it,
Speaker 1: how to survive. And because of all of that, we
Speaker 1: knew our job, Our number one job was to entertain
Speaker 1: the largest number of people we could every week. That
Speaker 1: was the job. That was the job. But what about
Speaker 1: Genji Kohen, David's sister. She never had to ask Netflix
Speaker 1: the question, are you going to put oranges in New
Speaker 1: Black on television? She never had to bring in mister moderation.
Speaker 1: She never had to avoid taboo topics. Netflix love that
Speaker 1: she explored taboo topics. Now, the obvious response here is
Speaker 1: to say, why would we want to go back from
Speaker 1: Genie's world, to her brothers, to the compromises and sacrifices.
Speaker 1: Netflix and all the other streamers have brought us an
Speaker 1: explosion of quality and choice. Television has never been better.
Speaker 1: But this is why we do thought experiments to consider
Speaker 1: the possibility that what we think of as obvious might
Speaker 1: be wrong. Television, like any medium, has a set of
Speaker 1: implicit storytelling rules. It is the case generally that television
Speaker 1: chooses to introduce controversial issues, for instance, through comedy that's
Speaker 1: Bonnie Dow who teaches at Vanderbilt University, and too many
Speaker 1: years ago, back in the glory days of broadcast television Dominance,
Speaker 1: wrote a brilliant paper about the norms of television. The
Speaker 1: same thing is true with depictions of gay characters is
Speaker 1: that they show up in sitcoms, right, which are these
Speaker 1: thirty minute vehicles in which a problem is introduced and
Speaker 1: then the problem is solved by the end of the episode.
Speaker 1: And it's a very comforting form. It's very funny, and
Speaker 1: it allows for something to be treated lightly. Dal identified
Speaker 1: four rules, let's call them Doo's rules. Rule one, a
Speaker 1: gay character cannot be the lead in any story. They
Speaker 1: can only be secondary characters whose gayness is an issue
Speaker 1: that creates resolution. The narratives tend to be about how
Speaker 1: their revelation about their sexuality affects their relationship ships with
Speaker 1: straight characters, friends and family, co workers, and how they
Speaker 1: are and how they become a sort of problem that
Speaker 1: has to be solved. Rule number two, it's all about
Speaker 1: the straight people. Rule number three. Gay characters don't associate
Speaker 1: with other gay people, so they tend not to have
Speaker 1: gay friends. They did not to go to gay events,
Speaker 1: their gayness becomes this solely personal thing. Right. And then finally,
Speaker 1: which is related to the thing that I just said,
Speaker 1: you rarely ever see or saw back in the day,
Speaker 1: depictions of gay desire or or gay sex. Right. So
Speaker 1: these were people for whom the whole point really was,
Speaker 1: you know, the whole point of their identity. The way
Speaker 1: it was depicted was that they were sexually interested in
Speaker 1: their same gender. But yet you actually didn't see that
Speaker 1: being enacted. In her essay, Dowd talks a lot about
Speaker 1: the sitcom Ellen starting to comedian Ellen DeGeneres. In the
Speaker 1: show's fourth season, Ellen comes out as gay, which was
Speaker 1: considered to be this epic moment in social progress. When
Speaker 1: you put one of these taboo topics onto prime time,
Speaker 1: people act as though the entire difficulty has been solved, Like,
Speaker 1: we used to be homemophobic, we used to not represent
Speaker 1: GLBTQ characters. Now we have Ellen, and everything's fine, right,
Speaker 1: is sort of the narrative, And that's not true, right,
Speaker 1: That's just not true. There's a lot more work to
Speaker 1: be done. The film historian Vito Russo once surveyed thirty
Speaker 1: two Hollywood movies from the sixties and seventies that had
Speaker 1: major gay characters. Eighteen of those characters were murdered, thirteen
Speaker 1: committed suicide, and one was castrated. Ellen was definitely a
Speaker 1: step up from that, But Ellen left all the other
Speaker 1: rules intact, her identity a problem to be solved. I mean,
Speaker 1: just listen to Ellen's struggle as she comes out to
Speaker 1: her friend Susan. No. I mean, why can't I see
Speaker 1: the truth? I mean, by who I am, I'm thirty
Speaker 1: five years old. I'm so afraid to tell people. I mean,
Speaker 1: I just Susan, I'm gay. Ellen was just Baby Steps.
Speaker 1: But do you know what show wasn't Baby Steps? Will
Speaker 1: and Grace. That's the truth that so many critics missed. Yes,
Speaker 1: Getting Will and Grace greenlit at NBC meant that the
Speaker 1: character Will had to be essentially a straight guy who
Speaker 1: just claimed to be gay, and the screenwriters had to
Speaker 1: spend a full season pretending that Will and Grace might
Speaker 1: eventually get together. Gay characters could kiss, but not much else.
Speaker 1: An HIV could never come up at all, even though
Speaker 1: HIV was the central issue in gay life in the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties. Will and Grace drove activists crazy, but they
Speaker 1: missed the point beneath that moderate exterior. Will and Grace
Speaker 1: was deeply subversive because it broke every one of Dalla's rules.
Speaker 1: Gay character is central to the narrative. Check, fy, folks,
Speaker 1: most people that meet me do not know that I
Speaker 1: am gay. Jack, blind and deaf people know you're gay.
Speaker 1: Homosexuality not a problem to be solved. Check Am I
Speaker 1: a bad gay man? Yes? How can you answer that
Speaker 1: so easily? Because yesterday when I saw that you didn't
Speaker 1: leave me any milk for my coffee, I remember saying
Speaker 1: bad gay in gay people hanging out with other gay people. Check?
Speaker 1: Have you asked anyone to dance? Have you talked to anybody?
Speaker 1: Have you done anything? Like? Everyone's judging me? Well, of
Speaker 1: course they are to gay bar acknowledgement of gay desire.
Speaker 1: Check especially when Jack gets going here he is with Grace. Oh,
Speaker 1: want to be useful the man standing behind him with
Speaker 1: the big package, Grace, don't tease me, Dray Sidler design.
Speaker 1: I'll sign for it. Just your names for I don't
Speaker 1: need your phone number. On the Thursday Night lineup just
Speaker 1: before Will and Grace was Friends Friends didn't break any rules,
Speaker 1: nor did another stalwart of NBC's famous Thursday Night Seinfeld
Speaker 1: Friends in Seinfeld are just variations on the theme of
Speaker 1: eccentric young white people implausibly living in vast New York
Speaker 1: City apartments. Will and Grace had eccentric people in a
Speaker 1: New York City apartment where something radical is happening below
Speaker 1: the surface. We knew that we had a win in
Speaker 1: the fact that there was an out gay man at
Speaker 1: the center of our show, and we were going to eventually,
Speaker 1: over time show a very, very full life yeah that
Speaker 1: people were choosing to identify with. To answer your question,
Speaker 1: I mean that is how we slowly fed this gay
Speaker 1: conspiracy to the American public. Max is joking about gay conspiracy,
Speaker 1: of course, but only slightly. Because what happens during the
Speaker 1: very same period that Will and Grace is breaking all
Speaker 1: four rules, something shifts into culture. The idea that gay
Speaker 1: people are normal and that we shouldn't be afraid of
Speaker 1: them starts to spread. In the mid nineties, before Will
Speaker 1: and Grace, only a quart of Americans were in favor
Speaker 1: of gay marriage. By the time the show was over,
Speaker 1: the percentage of those in favor of gay marriage had doubled.
Speaker 1: Now it's up to more than seventy percent, and everyone
Speaker 1: moved in that direction. Young and old, black and white,
Speaker 1: a shift in public opinion almost without parallel in American histort,
Speaker 1: the idea of gay marriage is mainstream. I think Will
Speaker 1: and Grace probably did more to educate the American public
Speaker 1: than almost anything anybody's ever done so far. Do you
Speaker 1: remember Joe Biden's famous comment, un meet the press back
Speaker 1: in twenty twelve when he was Vice president, And I
Speaker 1: think people fear that which is different. Now they're beginning
Speaker 1: to understand he was right. Even people on the other
Speaker 1: side of the gay marriage issue agreed. Listen to the
Speaker 1: former Republican Senator Rick Santorum, a longtime opponent of gay rights.
Speaker 1: Politics does not shape those issues. Popular culture, cand you
Speaker 1: go aditional marriage. Look at the sexual revolution caused the
Speaker 1: big change in sexual moris of this chart. But when
Speaker 1: it came to the issue of marriage and changing the
Speaker 1: definition of marriage, there was no change, no zero for
Speaker 1: thirty years. Then a tunlevision shoke came on the air
Speaker 1: called Ruld Grace. Could a television show today change minds
Speaker 1: in the way that Will and Grace changed minds? No,
Speaker 1: not a chance. Will and Grace started in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, right at the tail end of the Big
Speaker 1: Church era, in broadcast television. It had an audience. Will
Speaker 1: and Grace at its peak had about seventeen and a
Speaker 1: half million viewers, which translates to a rating of about twelve.
Speaker 1: I watched Will and Grace all the time, so did
Speaker 1: everyone I knew. If you were in your late twenties
Speaker 1: or thirties in the early two thousands, you could sit
Speaker 1: down next to another young stranger on a bus on
Speaker 1: a Friday morning and say, can you believe that thing
Speaker 1: that Jack said to Karen last night? That was the
Speaker 1: bargain you made in the old television paradigm. You allowed
Speaker 1: Don Omier to scale back your ambitions and push you
Speaker 1: into the middle, but in return, you got to change
Speaker 1: the world to reach people. I called up Brian Furrer
Speaker 1: to find out what rating for a sitcom would make
Speaker 1: a network executive happy today. Fire as a senior vice
Speaker 1: president at the Nielsen Company, which has been providing ratings
Speaker 1: for the television industry for decades, I think if you
Speaker 1: get it at anything above a five or three or four,
Speaker 1: that would be wildly successful. Oh wow, So like a
Speaker 1: network executive today. Having a conversation with a network executive
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy five about what would make them happy.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't need to be speaking the same language now
Speaker 1: totally different. There's a funny thing. The guy who creates
Speaker 1: Will and Grace his sister is the person who created
Speaker 1: Oranges A New Black. As there's a wonderful little comparison point.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious, can we estimate the viewership of something
Speaker 1: like Oranges a New Black? It would have done about
Speaker 1: a one rating for all the episodes across Netflix, maybe
Speaker 1: across the first week after a new season was released.
Speaker 1: At best, Oranges the New Black could have had a
Speaker 1: rating of one, and that made it a hit for
Speaker 1: its time. The peak rating for Will and Grace was twelve.
Speaker 1: David got a twelve, his sister got a one. And
Speaker 1: if you're Netflix and mistakes for each of your shows
Speaker 1: are so small, why bother trying to play the main
Speaker 1: streaming game at all? Now? There is no suit in
Speaker 1: the corporate office who pushes you to the middle, no
Speaker 1: big boss who has to fly out from New York
Speaker 1: to give the oka. Instead, you get told go and
Speaker 1: make art, and when you come back with your little
Speaker 1: bit of unfettered creative genius, Netflix throws it on their
Speaker 1: platform along with its thousands of other offerings where it
Speaker 1: is recommended to those Netflix subscribers who, on the basis
Speaker 1: of their previous viewing choices, are guaranteed to agree with
Speaker 1: every edgy thing your show has to say. We have
Speaker 1: redeemed television's soul at the price as if it's impact.
Speaker 1: Do me a favor, Go back and watch a few
Speaker 1: episodes of Will and Grace. We will never see anything
Speaker 1: like that again. Revisionist History is produced by Eloise Linton
Speaker 1: Leaving Gustu and Jacob Smith, with Tali Emlyn and Harrison VJ. Choi.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is Mia Lobell.
Speaker 1: Original scoring by Luis Skara, mastering by Flawn Williams and
Speaker 1: engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact checking by Kesha Williams. I'm
Speaker 1: Malcolm Glaube.