It’s “A Gay Olde Christmas” on Will & Grace! Unfortunately, gay does not (additionally) mean happy for Will this holiday season. The world is dark, getting darker, and Will only feels it will get worse. Who can blame him? The only thing Will can look forward to on the holiday is to not be surrounded by his family. What will change Will’s bah humbug attitude? A little trip a hundred years into the past might do the trick. At the very least, Will is convinced that things in the past were not all Silver Bells and Figgy Pudding.
The way Will sees it, to be a gay man in 2017 was nothing to be thankful for. No amount of tinsel or Karen-spiked eggnog can put Will in a jolly mood. He even takes it out on Santa, “another old white perv we once trusted”. Talk about Scrooge. Will doesn’t need Christmas cheer, he needs a wake-up call. A trip to the past might do the trick.
Picture it: Christmas in New York, 1912. In this fantasy Karen is a mother living in poverty. Jack’s character is a seaman with muscles. It’s like Alice in Wonderland-The Christmas Edition. Will plays Bilhelm, a rich businessman who harasses his boarder, Karen. But he’s married to Grace, so I guess not much has changed in a hundred years. He also takes his advice from Frederick Trump. Again, not much has changed in a century. There are correlations between our 1912 characters and our 2017 characters, most notably that Will has kept himself in the closet.
Grace’s 1912 character Fanny believes that the immigrant dream of an American melting pot is still possible, that it just takes awhile sometimes. Jack believes he can help Karen by getting some, ahem, Christmas spirit, inside Will. It puts ‘Bilhelm’ in a good enough mood to give Karen a temporary reprieve on her rent. The gang admires the 1912 gang, until they learn about their horrible and tragic deaths. No one lived a long life, and everyone was punished for being different. This cures Will of any notion that things would have been better if he lived in the time of all early Christmas songs.
Yet that wasn’t the Christmas miracle. Jack said something smart about justice! Don’t get too excited, his boyfriend’s name was Justice. The real Christmas miracle, however cheesy, is the snow. Grace ends the show with a surprisingly touching, yet still tone-deaf, version of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”.
I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly grateful for the return of Will & Grace. So until the New Year, “Peace on Earth, Good Will & Grace”.
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