When Will Met Grace

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin Hello, Hello, Revision's History listeners. I'm excited to announce that this season I'm offering a bunch of perks from my most loyal listeners, the ones who subscribe to Pushkin Plus for those who just can't get enough. We're giving every episode to our subscribers one week early. Plus. We've created many episodes released weekly, and I'm calling them tangents. And of course you'll never hear any ads. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus on the Revisionist History Show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot FM.

00:00:57
Speaker 2: Oh wait, do we need to do this?

00:00:59
Speaker 3: Yeah? Put that in your left ear.

00:01:02
Speaker 2: Him Malcolm, You're Max, I'm Max?

00:01:06
Speaker 1: Max? Is Max muchnik. The other voice is that of David Cohen. They're two old friends and screenwriting partners who got on a zoom call with me with only one set of earphones between them.

00:01:17
Speaker 3: Can you hear him? I'm not kidding, because where we're.

00:01:20
Speaker 4: Connected is it going through your ear?

00:01:22
Speaker 3: Wait?

00:01:22
Speaker 1: Max? Can you not hear me?

00:01:24
Speaker 2: I can, but I'm hearing you through the wrong channel, I believe, so hold on one second.

00:01:28
Speaker 4: Okay, Hey, you'd never leave him, all right.

00:01:33
Speaker 1: I called them up to talk about a television show that created together almost thirty years ago, a show that over the years I've become nostalgic for by the way they finally solved the problem of the one set of earphones by sitting on top of each other. Did you have an agenda when you were conceiving of this show.

00:01:55
Speaker 4: I'm not saying no.

00:01:57
Speaker 2: We really came at this purely from a writing standpoint, and specifically Sydney Pollack, who was a mentor of David, taught us a lot about writing and writing stories. Yeah, and we were in his office one day and he knew we were writing, you know, sitcoms at this point, and he said, you know, a love story is over after the boy and the girl kiss. So if you can figure out a way to tell a love story where they don't kiss, you can have a show that would run for a very long time.

00:02:28
Speaker 1: Sydney Pollock was one of the greatest film directors of his generation. His point was that love stories require friction.

00:02:36
Speaker 4: It's only as good as the obstacles that prevent them from getting together. I remember him saying, boy, you know, race isn't the obstacle anymore. Class isn't an obstacle anymore. You know, you couldn't make a guess who's coming to dinner? In nineteen ninety where are the obstacles? Max and I started to working together like I got one.

00:02:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, my name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about Things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This episode is about obstacles and their value, and about whether stories and storytellers do more good in the world when they are faced with barriers that they're forced to overcome.

00:03:29
Speaker 2: David really was the one who was way more comfortable with the idea of exploring the relationship that I had with my high school girlfriend.

00:03:38
Speaker 1: You know, quote unquote, the quote unquote girlfriend was named Janet Eisenberg.

00:03:44
Speaker 2: Oddly, little sidebar story, her father was the surgeon who amputated my diabetic grandfather's legs, and so we had a very bizarre connection to each other, but we were instantly friends.

00:03:59
Speaker 4: He would break it. He would walk into her house and say to her father, wear the legs, where do you keep? What have you done with them?

00:04:06
Speaker 2: Doctor Eisenberg never liked that too much, but it was, you know, an undeniable thing. She was very, very committed and interested in me, and I adored her, you know, and I wasn't ready to deal with my truth at that time. It was the big secret. And in fact, you know, in those days when you were gay and closeted, you actually thought, Okay, how am I going to figure this out? Where I'm going to live a double life. When I told her I was gay, she said, I've I have to rethink everything about what I have been thinking and what I think I love and how I love.

00:04:42
Speaker 1: Every Screenwtter knows that story always ends the same way on television.

00:04:47
Speaker 2: When the gay guy reveals to the female that he's that this is what he is and he loves what he loves. He is banished and punished and she is the victim.

00:05:01
Speaker 1: But Janet wasn't the victim. They all became best friends again, and David and Max realized there was another way to do the story of the gay man and the straight woman who loved each other very much. The result was I'm so excited, me and you, You.

00:05:19
Speaker 2: And me with the perfect dame team, Will and Grace.

00:05:27
Speaker 4: This sounds weird, Grace and Will, Now that sounds like the thing.

00:05:36
Speaker 1: Will and Grace. It ran on NBC for eleven seasons, starting in nineteen ninety eight as part of NBC's vaunted Must See TV on Thursday nights. The character Will in Will and Grace was a lawyer. Grace was an interior designer. They shared an apartment in New York City, with constant interruptions from Grace's assistant, the irrepressible Karen.

00:05:59
Speaker 5: There, what can I do?

00:06:00
Speaker 3: How can I help?

00:06:01
Speaker 6: What are we drinking?

00:06:03
Speaker 1: And Will's friend Jack, who functioned as the ID to Will's super ego.

00:06:10
Speaker 3: Can't stay for lunch.

00:06:10
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna grab some money out of your wallet so I can grab a sandwich in a new sweater. Later, together they argued, started relationships, ended relationships, kissed each other in endless comedic combinations. The whole Merry Go Round set in motion by the premise laid down in the very first episode, Grace is about to get married and her best friend Will talks her out of it. With her groom waiting at the altar, she and Will go to a bar to drown her sorrows. She's still in her wedding dress and the patrons at the bar start egging.

00:06:41
Speaker 2: Them on, tell us to your lovely new bron.

00:06:46
Speaker 1: Will and Grace look at each other make up, valves in the moment and think maybe this could work. Will gets caught up in the moment, tries kissing grace, hoping sparks will fly, Sparks do not fly, and with an obstacle like that, love story can go on forever. David Cohen came from a showbiz family. His father, Alan Buzz Cohen, was a writer and producer on The Carol Burnett Show.

00:07:21
Speaker 4: His metier was variety specials throughout the seventies and eighties and nineties that any variety special that was on there was a good chance he was the writer on it.

00:07:31
Speaker 2: But you should know the night that David and I won the Emmy for Best Show and we got on the phone with Buzz from the back of the limo, Buzz said to us, you know, all you have to do is win twenty four more and then you have my record being.

00:07:48
Speaker 1: There ended up being multiple Cohens in television, including David's sister Jenji, who wrote for shows like Sex in the City and The Gilmore Girls before going on to create the Showtime series Weeds and the Netflix show Oranges and New Black.

00:08:04
Speaker 7: I'll goot you, Blondie, what'd you do?

00:08:06
Speaker 4: Aren't you not supposed to ask that question. You read that, you're not supposed to ask that You read that.

00:08:13
Speaker 7: Were you studied for prison.

00:08:16
Speaker 1: When people refer to the current era of television as the Golden Age, they're referring to shows like Orange Is the New Black. It could only be made by streamers like Netflix or HBO or Apple TV. It was edgy and unflinching. It had the first major transgender character on television, played by Laverne Cox. Multiple realistic lesbian relationships.

00:08:39
Speaker 8: Tell us what's different about or what was different about pitching for Netflix.

00:08:43
Speaker 9: What's awesome about Netflix is they not only say yes, they say yes and shoot a whole season.

00:08:50
Speaker 1: Jenji Cohen was invited to speak on a panel at a Vanity Fair conference.

00:08:54
Speaker 9: They eliminate the pilot process, which is so wasteful.

00:08:58
Speaker 1: Normally in television, the people with an idea for a show make a test episode first, a pilot, which is then critiqued and massaged and shown to focus groups while the network figures out whether it wants to say yes to a full season. Netflix just listened to Jeni Cohan's pitch for Orange Is the New Black and said, go for it. Give the story as much time as it needs.

00:09:19
Speaker 9: You're not limited to everything in the kitchen sink in one hour. And when you go into a room and say, yeah, make go make thirteen hours of that, that's a dream come true.

00:09:30
Speaker 1: Jen Cohen's show represents the new paradigm in prestige TV. Give the creator what they want now. Compare Genji's experience with what her brother David went through back in the nineteen nineties when the show that would become Will and Grace was still in development. In the late nineteen nineties, Netflix was just a little startup sending out DVDs by mail. Television was dominated by the old line broadcast networks NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox. Max and David first had to sell their show idea to Larren Littlefield, the head of the entertainment division at NBC, and they hedge their bets.

00:10:15
Speaker 7: Max and David come in with a pitch, and their pitch was a large ensemble comedy. And then at the very end there were like the Will and Grace characters over here in the corner, and I was like, stop, wait a second, that's the show, Like, that's the core of the show. Put that relationship front and center. That's what I want to see of course, Max and David said, well, look, we'd love to do that show, but are you going to put that on television?

00:10:51
Speaker 1: Good question because this was NBC, a very staid, old school television network, and one step up from Warren Littlefield was his very staid boss, Don Olmeyer.

00:11:03
Speaker 7: Then we get to Don Olmeyer going, you did what and I said, yeah, it's a script. Most scripts don't work, you know, it's just it's development. And I just brushed him off. I wouldn't engage in the discussion of the right or wrong.

00:11:28
Speaker 1: Did he think this is not a good idea because it's not commercial or did he think I done all my are heavy personal objection to that kind of a show.

00:11:40
Speaker 7: I think his primary concern was we will never get advertisers to go into this. We are a broadcast network. Our revenue is based upon advertising, and advertisers historically are not groundbreakers, and advertisers will reject this, and this is bad, a bad idea.

00:12:02
Speaker 1: Don't do it. A show with a gay man at the center on national TV. Littlefield and his screenwriters had a big obstacle. Now they had to find a way around it. For the first several decades of its existence, American television was in the grip of what is commonly called mainstreaming. That's a term coined by the Hungarian born scholar George Gebner, who for twenty five years headed the Annenburg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Gerbner was fascinated by American television in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, when the limited number of options on television meant that a hit show could command huge audiences. Take the Western show Gunsmoke, which in the nineteen sixties was the most popular program on television. It would routinely be watched by forty percent of the households in America. With the TV, you could sit next to a random person on a bus the morning after Gunsmoke came on and say, without further introduction, could you believe that part where Matt Dillon shot that guy? And the person sitting next to you would know exactly what you were talking about. George Gubner said that kind of shared experience made television like a giant church where the same message was preached night after night.

00:13:35
Speaker 10: It is comparable to a new religion, not to another medium. It's a total symbolic environment that includes art, science, government, every all parts of knowledge, and that is steady, It is consistent, it is repetitive, and it is used as a ritual.

00:13:55
Speaker 1: Mainstreaming was what happened to those who worshiped in TV's giant church. So take a hot button issue from the late seventies or early eighties, like school busing the forced integration of public schools. Conservatives hated bussing. Liberals were much more likely to be in favor of it. Moderates were in the middle, which is what you would expect. But one of Gerbner's colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, Larry Gross, took polling data about bussing and broke it down according to how much TV people watched. Gross found that among heavy TV viewers, the differences started to disappear. Conservatives became a little more in favor of bussing, liberals a little less in favor. Television viewing brought Americans closer together over time. That's mainstreaming.

00:14:45
Speaker 3: Democrats or Republicans or people who say they're liberal, the more television they watched, the more likely they are to say they're moderate.

00:14:54
Speaker 1: Larry Gross says, how much TV you watch says as much about you as who you voted for.

00:15:00
Speaker 3: It predicts incredibly powerfully. If you watch a lot of television, you're mal likely to say you're moderate, whatever your other views are.

00:15:07
Speaker 1: The moderating effect of TV viewing, in turn, has a moderating effect on the people making television, because if you are competing to be the show that the majority of the country is watching, you have to make a show that's acceptable to the majority of the country. So this is what was going on at NBC in the late nineties. When the network executive don Olmyer heard the pitch for Will and Grace, he heard an idea that was too far from the middle the mainstream. It was not a television show as people like him understood television to be at the time. David Cohen and Max Mutchnik would have to moderate it. They start with the casting choices for the pilot. They cast Eric McCormick. McCormick in real life is straight, conventionally handsome Will his character is a lawyer, a corporate lawyer, not a profession according to the stereotypes of the late nineties that coded is gay.

00:16:09
Speaker 2: That was also a thing that we did very deliberately was to show the world. In casting Eric, we had to do that. We had to make sure that that type of guy was playing this part that.

00:16:23
Speaker 1: He could be. In other words, he was conceivable as a straight man.

00:16:29
Speaker 11: This is some Sorry.

00:16:30
Speaker 2: Maybe I don't wear my sexuality like a sash and a tiara the way Jack does, but I am willing to put my gainness up against anybody's.

00:16:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, he passed to use a word of today.

00:16:41
Speaker 2: You know, he was able to do that, and that just made it safe.

00:16:46
Speaker 1: The casting of Will was a moderating choice, and so too was the way the topic of sex was handled on the show.

00:16:52
Speaker 2: Am I allowed to use swear words?

00:16:54
Speaker 3: Yes? Yeah.

00:16:56
Speaker 2: A very famous director, Joel Schumacher, summed it up best. Naturally, we were having dinner at the foot of Joel's bed while he brushed his hair and he was baking Batman. At the time.

00:17:09
Speaker 1: Max's dinner companion mentioned the show that Max had pitched to NBC Will and Grace. Quick side note, you may have noticed an explicit label on this episode. Well, we have Joel Schumacher to thank for that. Children cover your ears.

00:17:27
Speaker 2: He looked up and said, just make sure whatever you do, you don't make the show too butt fucky.

00:17:34
Speaker 4: That's not what people want to think about.

00:17:36
Speaker 2: And he was really hitting something that was so real and it is so true and we kind of knew it. I'll let them suspend their beliefs while they watched this show and this fantasy, but I need them to know when that character goes off the air at eight thirty, that actor is not going home and having anal.

00:18:01
Speaker 1: Sex casting mainstreamed content mainstreamed. Then comes the choice of a They picked Jimmy Burrows, the famous Jimmy Burrows, who co created the show Cheers and who directed episodes of virtually every sitcom from the nineteen seventies. On Phyllis wrote a third Rock Friends Fraser Jimmy Burrows is as straight down the middle as you can get. To Warren Littlefield, he was the median strip on Hollywood Boulevard.

00:18:31
Speaker 7: I said to Don Olmeyer, Hey, you know that script that you know you had a problem with whatever, you know, it's really good. We love it. It's on your desk, it's in your en file. We're going to make it and Jimmy Burrows is going to direct it. And that was kind of like a wall that Don didn't quite know what to do with.

00:18:53
Speaker 1: So Littlefield brings in Jimmy Burrows, mister moderation, and mister Moderation naturally moderates the show still further. Here he is in an interview with the Television Academy.

00:19:04
Speaker 11: I know how difficult homosexuality would be, too, Eric, so I tell Max and David, I think we should try the first year to make America believe that Will's going to recant and marry Grace, because that's what the show is. The show is a relationship, a sexual relationship with any sex.

00:19:26
Speaker 1: They filmed the pilot. One final obstacle remains Bob Wright, head of the whole NBC network. Bob Wright is a staunch Republican. Grew up Catholic on Long Island public school kid. Started out as a lawyer at General Electric, later worked in their plastics division. He is a house in Palm Beach. He's president of the Palm Beach Civic Association. Bob Bright's idea of a radical act is doing a donut in his golf cart in the parking lot of the Palm Beach Country Club. In the end, it doesn't matter what anyone else at NBC thinks about Will and Grace. The only way to show is going to get on the air is if Bob Wright says, yes, Bob Wright is your mainstreaming test. Bob Wright hops in the company jet and flies out to Los Angeles from New York for a special screening of the Will and Grace pilot episode thirty five, forty people in the room. The show's future is in the balance.

00:20:25
Speaker 7: The lights come up after the screening, the room is quiet. Donald Meyer's there, and Bob Wright goes, that's the best thing we've ever had our logo on.

00:20:38
Speaker 1: Wait, are you kidding me? Bob Wright said that.

00:20:40
Speaker 7: Bob Wright said that, so, I of course was like game over, Like, Don's not going to do anything. No one's going to put up a wall. We own it, we love it. And the number one guy just put his seal of approval. I'm like, that's it. We're putting it on the air.

00:21:04
Speaker 1: When Will and Grace first made it on the air, it was roundly criticized by gay and lesbian groups and television critics too, all pointing out the ways in which the show's depiction of gay life was compromised in order to please the Don Ol Myers and Bob Wright's of the world, like the fact that this was a show about gay men in New York City in the late nineteen nineties and there was no mention of HIV none.

00:21:28
Speaker 4: We could never quite crack a story where that was going to be genuinely funny coming from these characters.

00:21:37
Speaker 1: Funny was their way of staying right in the middle.

00:21:40
Speaker 2: I always thought that we needed to approach all of the gay stuff in the same way that I approached coming out to my family, with love and with sensitivity and with caring about the way that the people that I was giving this new information to were going to receive it. This bothered a lot of people, and I understand that, but by a lot of people, meaning you know, organizations like GLAD and you know activists and act up. They just thought it was bullshit and we were soft peddling it.

00:22:11
Speaker 4: I think another another thing is that you know, at no point we were trying to you know, get idea or promulgate some ideology. Ever, it was always what would this person that we knew, What would Max do in this situation, what would Janet do in this situation? There was never We were never thinking in terms from the outside in.

00:22:37
Speaker 2: We're basically from an show business background. Our families come from this. It's a trade. It was the trade and the town that we grew up in, and we understand uh the work aspect of it, how to survive. And because of all of that, we knew our job. Our number one job was to entertain the largest number of people we could every week. That was the job.

00:23:06
Speaker 1: That was the job. But what about Jenji Cohen, David's sister. She never had to ask Netflix the question, are you going to put oranges in New Black on television? She never had to bring in mister moderation. She never had to avoid taboo topics. Netflix love that she explored taboo topics. Now, the obvious response here is to say, why would we want to go back from Geni's world, to her brothers, to the compromises and sacrifices. Netflix and all the other streamers have brought us an explosion of quality and choice. Television has never been better. But this is why we do thought experiments to consider the possibility that what we think of as obvious might be wrong. Television, like any medium, has a set of implicity storytelling rules.

00:24:10
Speaker 6: It is the case generally that television chooses to introduce controversial issues, for instance, through comedy.

00:24:16
Speaker 1: That's Bonnie Dow who teaches at Vanderbilt University, and too many years ago, back in the glory days of broadcast television, Dominance wrote a brilliant paper about the norms of television.

00:24:28
Speaker 6: The same thing is true with depictions of gay characters is that they show up in sitcoms, right, which are these thirty minute vehicles in which a problem is introduced and then the problem is solved by the end of the episode. And it's a very comforting form. It's very funny, and it allows for something to be treated lightly.

00:24:46
Speaker 1: Daw identified four rules, let's call them Dow's rules. Rule one, a gay character cannot be the lead in any story. They can only be secondary characters whose gayness is an issue that creates resolution.

00:25:01
Speaker 6: The narratives tend to be about how their revelation about their sexuality affects their relationship with straight characters, friends and family, co workers, and how they are and how they become a sort of problem that has to be solved.

00:25:19
Speaker 1: Rule number two, it's all about the straight people. Rule number three. Gay characters don't associate with other gay people.

00:25:28
Speaker 6: So they tend not to have gay friends. They tend not to go to gay events, their gayness becomes this solely personal thing.

00:25:36
Speaker 11: Right.

00:25:36
Speaker 6: And then finally, which is related to the thing that I just said, you rarely ever see or saw back in the day depictions of gay desire or gay sex.

00:25:48
Speaker 5: Right.

00:25:48
Speaker 6: So these were people for whom the whole point really was the whole point of their identity. The way it was depicted was that they were sexually interested in their same gender. But yet you actually didn't see that being enacted.

00:26:05
Speaker 1: In her essay, Doubt talks a lot about the sitcom Ellen starting to meeting Ellen DeGeneres. In the show's fourth season, Ellen comes out as gay, which was considered to be this epic moment in social progress.

00:26:18
Speaker 6: When you put one of these taboo topics on to prime time, people act as though the entire difficulty has been solved, Like, we used to be homophobic, we used to not represent GLBTQ characters. Now we have Ellen, and everything's fine. Right, It is sort of the narrative, and that's not true, right, That's just not true. There's a lot more work to be done.

00:26:39
Speaker 1: The film historian Vito Russo once surveyed thirty two Hollywood movies from the sixties and seventies that had major gay characters. Eighteen of those characters were murdered, thirteen committed suicide, and one was castrated. Ellen was definitely a step up from that. But Ellen left all the other rules intact, her identity a problem to be solved. I mean, just listen to Ellen's struggle as she comes out to her friend Susan.

00:27:08
Speaker 4: I mean, why can't I just see the truth? I mean, be who I am.

00:27:11
Speaker 9: I'm thirty five years old.

00:27:13
Speaker 1: I'm so afraid to tell people.

00:27:14
Speaker 6: I mean, I just.

00:27:17
Speaker 4: Susan, I'm gay.

00:27:24
Speaker 1: Ellen was just baby Steps. But do you know what show wasn't Baby Steps? Will and Grace. That's the truth that so many critics missed. Yes, Getting Will and Grace greenlit at NBC meant that the character Will had to be essentially a straight guy who just claimed to be gay, and the screenwriters had to spend a full season pretending that Will and Grace might eventually get together. Gay characters could kiss, but not much else, and HIV could never come up at all, even though HIV was the central issue in gay life in the nineteen nineties. Will and Grace drove activists crazy, but they missed the point beneath that moderate exterior, Will and Grace was deeply subversive because it broke every one of DAW's rules. Gay character is central to the narrative.

00:28:18
Speaker 11: Check, Fyi, folks, most people that meet me do not know that I am gay.

00:28:22
Speaker 4: Jack, blind and deaf people.

00:28:24
Speaker 11: Know you're gay.

00:28:27
Speaker 1: Homosexuality not a problem to be solved. Check Am I a bad gay man?

00:28:33
Speaker 11: Yes?

00:28:36
Speaker 2: How can you answer that so easily?

00:28:38
Speaker 11: Because yesterday when I saw that you didn't leave me any milk for my coffee, I remember saying bad gay.

00:28:43
Speaker 1: In gay people hanging out with other gay people.

00:28:50
Speaker 6: Check have you asked anyone to dance? Have you talked to anybody?

00:28:53
Speaker 4: Have you done anything?

00:28:57
Speaker 11: Yeah? Like everyone's judging me.

00:28:59
Speaker 5: Well, of course they are at.

00:29:00
Speaker 1: The gay bar acknowledgment of gay desire. Check especially when Jack gets going here he is with Grace.

00:29:08
Speaker 4: Oh, have be useful.

00:29:09
Speaker 2: Help the man standing behind him with the big package.

00:29:12
Speaker 8: Grace, don't tease me? Well, Gray Sadler design, I'll sign both just your names for I don't need your phone number.

00:29:31
Speaker 1: On the Thursday night lineup, just before Will and Grace was friends, Friends didn't break any rules, nor did another stalwart of NBC's famous Thursday Night Seinfeld. Friends in Seinfeld are just variations on the theme of eccentric young white people implausibly living in vast New York City apartments. Will and Grace had eccentric people in a New York City apartment where something radical is happening below the surface.

00:29:58
Speaker 2: We knew that we had a win in the fact that there was an out gay man at the center of our show, and we were going to eventually, over time, show a very, very full.

00:30:11
Speaker 4: Life that people were choosing to identify with.

00:30:15
Speaker 2: To answer your question, I mean that is how we slowly fed this gay conspiracy to the American public.

00:30:24
Speaker 1: Max is joking about gay conspiracy, of course, but only slightly. Because what happens during the very same period that Will and Grace is breaking all four rules, something shifts in the culture. The idea that gay people are normal and that we shouldn't be afraid of them starts to spread. In the mid nineties, before Will and Grace, only a quart of Americans were in favor of gay marriage. By the time the show was over, that percentage of those in favor of gay marriage had doubled. Now it's up to more than seventy percent, and everyone moved in that direction, young and old, black and white. A shift in public opinion almost without parallel in American history. The idea of gay marriage is mainstreamed.

00:31:15
Speaker 12: I think Will and Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody's ever done so far.

00:31:22
Speaker 1: Do you remember Joe Biden's famous comment on Meet the Press back in twenty twelve when he was Vice president.

00:31:29
Speaker 12: And I think people fear that which is different. Now they're beginning to understand.

00:31:34
Speaker 1: He was right. Even people on the other side of the gay marriage issue agreed. Listen to the former Republican Senator Rick Santorum, a longtime opponent of gay rights.

00:31:44
Speaker 4: Politics does not shape those issues.

00:31:48
Speaker 3: Culture shapes those issues.

00:31:50
Speaker 7: Could you go.

00:31:51
Speaker 3: Indition of marriage?

00:31:52
Speaker 8: Look at the sexual Revolution caused a big change in sexual.

00:31:55
Speaker 3: More raising discuss but when it came to.

00:31:57
Speaker 2: The issue of marriage.

00:32:01
Speaker 8: And changing the definition of marriage, there was no change, no zero for thirty years.

00:32:10
Speaker 2: And then a television show came on the air called Willem Grace.

00:32:21
Speaker 1: Could a television show today change minds in the way that Will and Grace changed minds? No, not a chance. Will and Grace started in the late nineteen nineties, right at the tail end of the Big Church era in broadcast television. It had an audience. Will and Grace at its peak had about seventeen and a half million viewers, which translates to a rating of about twelve. I watched Will and Grace all the time, so did everyone I knew. If you were in your late twenties or thirties in the early two thousands, you could sit down next to another young stranger on a bus on a Friday morning and say, can you believe that thing that Jack said to Karen last night? That was the bargain you made in the old television paradigm. You allowed Don Olmyer to scale back your ambitions and push you into the middle, but in return, you got to change the world to reach people. I called up Brian Feuher to find out what rating for a sitcom would make a network executive happy today. Fure is a senior vice president at the Nielsen Company, which has been providing ratings for the television industry for decades.

00:33:29
Speaker 5: I think if you get it at anything above a five or three or four, that would be wildly successful.

00:33:35
Speaker 1: Oh wow, So like a network executive today. Having a conversation with a network executive in nineteen seventy five about what would make them happy, they wouldn't even be speaking the same language now totally different. There's a funny thing. The guy who creates Will and Grace his sister is the person who created Orange Is a New Black. As it was a wonderful little comparison point. So I'm curious, can we estimate the viewership of something like Orange is a New Black.

00:34:00
Speaker 5: It would have done about a one rating for all the episodes across Netflix, maybe across the first week after a new season was released.

00:34:11
Speaker 1: At best, Oranges and New Black could have had a rating of one, and that made it a hit for its time. The peak rating for Will and Grace was twelve. David got a twelve, his sister got a one. And if your Netflix and mistakes for each of your shows are so small, why bother trying to play the mainstreaming game at all? Now? There is no suit in the corporate office who pushes you to the middle, no big boss who has to fly out from New York to give the okay. Instead, you get told go and make art, and when you come back with your little bit of unfettered creative genius. Netflix rows it on their platform along with its thousands of other offerings, where it is recommended to those Netflix subscribers who, on the basis of their previous viewing choices, are guaranteed to agree with every edgy thing your show has to say. We have redeemed television's soul at the price of its impact. Do me a favor, Go back and watch a few episodes of Will and Grace. We will never see anything like that again. Revisionist History is produced by Elouise Linton, Leeman Gestu, and Jacob Smith, with Tolly Emlin and Harrison VJ. Choi. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is miil Obel. Original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by Flon Williams and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact checking by Keishaw Williams. I'm Malcolm Glawa.