May 16, 2007

If Only Karen Walker Chose the Music for All Weddings

I recently decided to revisit Will & Grace. I pretty much stopped watching the show about halfway through its run because while I didn't hate it, it was uneven, the lead characters were uninteresting and too often hard to like, and the show seemed to quickly become, basically, a stage for that week's guest stars (it really was like The Love Boat, but with fewer stars or stars in the making per week - though happily if often featured much more talented guest stars than that Spelling show). So why revisit it? Well, a lot of the guest star turns were awfully fun, when the writers had the chance to build to full-on farce it often worked, and because of Karen of course. Sure Megan Mullally's character become wildly over the top pretty damn fast. But hey, she always added some fun to the show, and did what she was supposed to do exceedingly well - and she amused me in the process.

So with fond memories of Karen in mind I decided to rent season 6 of the show. And it played mostly to form. Will was pretty boring, Grace was self-centered, there were a lot of fun little guest star appearances by the likes of Blythe Danner, Dave Foley, Minnie Driver and Mira Sorvino, the show worked best when the writers were able to stage the whole thing around one big whirling set piece (like a dinner party, or a trip out to a restaurant), and then there was Karen who was just as fun and outrageous as I remembered (if more into women than I'd remembered). My favorite Karen bit though came in the two-part finale when she's getting married to a character played by John Cleese. She and Jack are having a conversation about the wedding music and she says that she's going to have "Sympathy for the Devil" played as she walks down the aisle, because it would be in bad taste to play Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" - because after all that's the traditional song for 5th weddings and this is only her 4th.

And you know, you put lines like that together with Mullally's superb timing and delivery and I think I might at some point have to watch more of that old show on dvd. And yeah, nothing against Mendelssohn's march, but I do wish I heard "Sympathy for the Devil" played more often at weddings. That would really liven 'em up.

Posted by armand at May 16, 2007 11:50 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Culture


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