Debra Messing is one hell of an actress, albeit comedic or dramatic. The dramatic side of her character Grace Adler isn’t seen too much, and when it does it usually revolves around her relationship with men or her longtime friendship with Will (Eric McCormack). That all changed on Thursday night’s episode where she opened up about her own #MeToo incident that occurred at a very young age.
The episode has two storylines this go around, with Grace reluctantly going to Schenectady with her father Martin (Robert Klein) to visit her late mother Bobbi’s (Debbie Reynolds) grave and his best friend Harry. Before leaving their apartment, Grace says that she will no way visit Harry’s grave, which at this point gives no clues as to why she won’t go.
The other storyline revolves around Will and Karen (Megan Mullaly) battling it out to be Jack’s (Sean Hayes) best man at his upcoming wedding. Wow… Jack is actually getting married! The scene takes place at a fictitious gay bar named after the legendary drag queen Coco Peru, who hilariously appears throughout. Essentially W&G comes up with its very own “Lip Sync for your Life” type of ordeal that RuPaul’s Drag Race has done for a decade now, except their version centers around lip syncing to a monologue to determine who will be Jack’s best man.
Will’s lip sync was to “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!”, where he emulates Chris Crocker beautifully and hysterically. Karen goes a little more classic with hers, lip syncing to the Wicked Witch’s monologue from The Wizard of Oz. It ends up in a tie, where they then have to answer questions about how well they know Jack. Jack ends up choosing both of them in the end, as he had a hard time picking between the two people he’s been the closest with for so many years.
That storyline is all and great, but Grace’s is far more important given the climate we are in with the #MeToo movement. They stop by a local diner on their way to Schenectady, where there’s a bit of humor courtesy of a waitress who takes her job way too seriously. Martin flirts with her during their scenes, which makes Grace very uncomfortable to which he thinks that everyone is so sensitive in today’s world.
At some point, his friend Harry gets brought up and Grace bravely tells why she is adamant on not going to his grave. Her story revolves around him sexually molesting her when she was 15 while she worked for him over the summer. Grace gets very graphic and direct with Martin over how it happened, leaving him completely devastated over what he heard.
It leads to Grace yelling at her father regarding why he didn’t protect her, which he emphatically apologizes shortly after and starts crying. He then asks Grace for her forgiveness which she gives him. Later on in the episode Grace visits Bobbi’s grave, who was the only person that knew about the situation.
Will & Grace this season is really doing a fantastic job at their storylines, something I felt they lacked during the first season’s reboot. A lot of their lives continues to unravel, and it will be interesting to see how these characters continue to develop as the show goes along.
Kudos to the show for creating an episode surrounding the #MeToo movement, as these stories need to be told… real or fictional.
This post was created by one of our Contributing Writers and does not reflect the opinion of Instinct Magazine or the other Contributing Writers when it comes to this subject.