This has not been entirely the case with film in recent years for me with franchises stretching, plodding, and occasionally just killing the love one has for these characters. At this point it's hard to care what exactly happens to Batman again, for example, even if I loved The Dark Knight, and while I find the "universe" angle fascinating to something like what Marvel creates, I just wish that the movies themselves would be better than they actually are. But by-an-large, film still remains something where the plot and editing can still be fairly central to the art of storytelling, and the best films know where they are taking their characters.
Television, though, is begging to have an issue with telling the same stories or stretching out the love for a show that was once good in recent years, and I'm starting to think that the advantage of hiring quality writers, directors, and actors that cinema has forgotten in place of dollar signs and more redundant stories is being lost in television. Reboots of shows are all the rage, even shows that have already been done recently (did we really need two shows about Sherlock Holmes), and broadcast television has become a glut of interchangeable comedies (how many versions of Modern Family and Black-ish does ABC have) or bland dramas (seriously NBC, the procedurals are literally the only thing anyone knows on your network anymore outside of This is Us). Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than Will & Grace being brought back to television for another season.
With shows like Gilmore Girls, Twin Peaks, and Arrested Development all getting another day in the sun, this was inevitable. Will and Grace is just the right age for a show for a nostalgia-crazed television audience to want to return to it. It reminds us of a simpler time, of gay best friends and when multi-camera sitcoms were actually something that we watched on television. None of the actors on the show really broke out big afterwards, so getting them under contract probably wasn't a huge issue; there was no one that might have become too huge to do a revival of the series on a regular basis (see Melissa McCarthy, Jennifer Aniston, or Chris Pratt for examples). It's filled with characters we love that we can welcome back into our homes and watch our problems melt away.
The problem is that this isn't healthy at all for the television industry long-term, and it's awful for storytelling. Will and Grace in its day was bold, progressive television but seen backwards it's pretty dated. You can modernize it, but you also risk deleting everything that happened in the finale where we went well into the future (past 2017), and the happy endings that occurred for all of the characters in the finale after a lot of strife. The show ended, and continually rehashing it or bringing it back means that we don't give another new sitcom, a new Will and Grace, a chance to shine.
Some people may not care about this. They'll like the familiarity and as was evidenced by the election video they put out last year, some of the jokes still work. Karen is still funny, Grace's bad singing and Jack's outrage still are easy to sell. It's actually funnier than the last couple seasons of W&G were, to be honest. And in a modern culture that is far more accepting of gay people (in part due to shows like Will and Grace), they'll have a lot more latitude to, say, give Jack and Will boyfriends that they actually kiss on television. Hell, I might even check out the premiere just to see what it ends up looking like. But by constantly giving the same ideas and retreading the same shows, we are deprived of new, innovative sitcoms and friend groups on television. Some of the best sitcoms on broadcast TV, the few that could compete in popularity with Will and Grace, are extremely old and past-their-prime at this point (looking at you Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory), and outside of The CW's twin wonder of Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, there's no broadcast sitcom in the past five years that really compares in terms of quality to those shows in their prime. Continually retreading the same ideas is boring and not art. Will and Grace is just one installment out of dozens of recent "play it safe" problems that will eventually lead to record low box office (like, say, the past summer) or ratings. It may be familiar, but what happens when familiar gets tired and Hollywood can't seem to be able to do anything else?
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