Will & Grace – Sweatshop Annie and The Annoying Baby Shower

By: Kelly Kearney

This week Jack reunites with Jenifer Lopez while Grace battles her mean girlfriends at a baby shower. Meanwhile, Will gets deep liked by an old flame and Karen turns a teen drama troop into her own private sweatshop. It’s “A Hard Knock Life” peek at what it means to be forty-something and single as well as the importance of child labor laws when it comes to martini-swilling socialites.

INSTAGRAM FAILS AND BABY SHOWER BLUES

At Will’s (Eric McCormack) apartment, Jack (Sean Hayes) bursts in to steal some money from Will’s wallet but interrupts his personal ATM as he’s scrolling through some pictures on his cell phone. Jack assumes he’s looking at porn but, no, it’s just the Instagram account of Will’s first love Michael, who seems to have gotten hotter with age. “Insta-Grandma,” as Jack calls Will, isn’t very media savvy and accidentally likes a photo the two men were drooling over. Liking your ex’s selfie is one thing, but liking his selfie from months ago means you’re in deep and might be a little bit of a stalker. Will panics and quickly taps to unlike, but the damage is done, he’s pinged on Michael’s radar and there’s no turning back now.

Speaking of panicking, Grace (Debra Messing) walks in complaining about having to attend a baby shower for an old high school friend. It’s not the sandwich platter and cheesy games that have her down but the fact she feels like a failure for not having a child. Grace doesn’t want to catch their shade about how work isn’t as fulfilling as motherhood and worries this will turn into some Mean Girls sequel. Will agrees that this party sounds awful, but Grace assures him she RSVP’s for them both. Grace might not be in a relationship or a have a child, but she has a gay husband and that’s the next best thing.

JENNY FROM THE BLOCK

At Grace Adler and Associates, Jack walks in to find Karen (Megan Mullally) having phone sex with Stan while reading a grocery list of meats and side dishes. The word, ‘bacon’ does the trick and she hangs up to hear Jack’s big news about his acting job. He’s landed the coveted role of a male corpse on Jenifer Lopez’s hit show, “Shades of Blue.” Karen is thrilled for her friend and wonders if JLo dropped her restraining order and unblocked him. Jack is squealing with glee over finally getting back in his celebrity BFF’s good graces and asks Karen if she can lead his drama troop’s rehearsal of “Annie” while he’s on set. Before she agrees, he ushers in a dozen or more young teens from the Boy’s and Girl’s club, making it “A Hard Knock Life” for Walker who just wants to get back to work (drinking).

Back at Will’s apartment, Grace is freaking out over this baby shower and Will’s trying to calm her nerves. He teaches her a tried and true Truman trick that has been passed down through his family for generations. Whenever Grace feels attacked by the baby maker crew, she needs to write her feelings down on a piece of paper and shove it in her pocket. This WASP technique, as Grace calls it, is foreign to her since her people tend to eat their emotions instead of bottle them up. She agrees to try it and hugs Will for being a good friend. A good friend with a pocket full of crumpled feelings, all which he claims have nothing to do with her. Yeah…right.

Over at Miss Hannigan’s designs, Karen’s popping pills and pouring martinis while the drama kids are locked in the backroom rehearsing their lines. Of course, Karen thinks this is appropriate since she’s confused the red-haired orphan with Anne Frank, the attic dweller hiding out from the Nazi regime. Potatoes, Po-tah-toes…Karen doesn’t have time to worry about the kids, she is more concerned with a delivery order that she mistakenly or maybe on purpose, screwed up. The material Grace told her to order was supposed to come with attached tassels and now she has a tassel-less order and not enough nimble hands to sew all of them on. Or, does she? Kids, nimble fingers, abused orphans…You can see where this is going.

BREADCRUMBS, WISH JARS AND DEEP LIKES, OH MY!

Grace and Will make it to the baby shower hosted by their dear friend and game night victim, Ellen (Leigh-Allyn Baker). It’s not long before Grace pulls out a pen and starts scribbling away her emotions and shoving the crumpled papers into her pocket. While Grace is dodging passive-aggressive insults, Will finds two unlikely allies (Cary Dutcher and Katarina Demetriades) in his Michael Instagram drama. Two teenage girls notice Will is having issues with his social media stalking and they offer him some advice; never deep like your ex’s Instagram if you don’t want him to breadcrumb you. Will doesn’t speak Generation Z, so they explain it to Insta-Grandma in a way he will understand. If you like an old post from your ex’s feed that’s a “deep like” and if that ex messages you back hoping you reach out, that’s “bread crumbing.” Will is all ears as the two teens explain dating in the age of technology and there are so many rules to follow, he should’ve probably borrowed Grace’s notepad.

Speaking of Grace, her pockets are full of scribbled feelings of failure and anger as her friend’s trade stories about the glory of parenting. All these happy moms are making her crazy and questioning all her life’s choices. Meanwhile, Will is also questioning his life and wondering if he’s missing his opportunity for happiness by ignoring Michael’s bread crumbs. It’s sort of a mid-life crisis moment where he’s watching his loved ones get married and have babies all the while he’s wondering if he will ever have those things. Could this trail of breadcrumbs lead to a rainbow and a pot of gold? In Will Truman’s gay dreams, they could.

Speaking of rainbow dreams, Jack finally comes face to face with JLo and he can hardly contain himself. Usually, when playing a corpse, the actor remains quiet and dead like, but the minute Lopez pulls him out of the morgue drawer, Jack asks her if she remembers he was her back up dancer and best friend? Of course, she doesn’t, and they do the scene again but every time she pulls him out of the corpse freezer, he interrupts they yell, “CUT!” Whether it’s singing, capturing the moment with a selfie stick or just rambling on about all the great times they never had, he cannot keep it together for this shoot. Finally, Jennifer gets in the freezer and tries to show him how it’s done, but after wasting all day on a short scene, Jack is given his pink slip. In the end, it wasn’t a complete loss. Jennifer never mentioned reinstating the restraining order, so there is that.

IT’S A HARD KNOCK LIFE…

Back at the office turned sweatshop, Karen puts the kids to work sewing away her mistakes and Jack is furious. They were supposed to be rehearsing and their parents are on their way to watch their kids perform what they’ve learned. Needless to say, they won’t be happy with Miss Hannigan cracking the whip at the sweatshop. Luckily, these kids are talented, and Jack manages to turn this child labor fiasco into a decent display of thespian talent. The kids continue sewing as they play back up the chorus to Jack’s, “Annie,” red wig and all.

Over at the baby shower, Will’s WASP trick is an epic fail when Grace discovers her feelings have fallen out of her sweater pocket. Frantically she grabs Will from his teen drama but before they can survey the room for her papers, Ellen gathers everyone for a game. She explains it’s a game where the entire party writes down their wishes for the new baby then places them in a bowl and everyone has to guess who wrote which wish. A woman interrupts to say she found some extra wishes under a sweater and added them to the bowl and at that moment, Grace begins to panic. The sweater the woman pointed to belonged to her and that wish bowl is full of Grace’s nasty takedowns. Ellen reads the first wish and it’s a harmless blessing from the baby’s Grandmother. Grace makes a sigh of relief and tries to end the game by saying Grandma’s wish was so good nobody can top it. Ellen ignores her and reads the next and it’s a petty put down by Grace and most everyone knows it was her, even after she tried to blame it on Grandma. One after another Ellen reads Grace’s hurt feelings and angry comebacks until the party dissolves into a mess. Grace and Ellen trade barbs, Granny is confused and the mother-to-be is upset her shower turned into the Adler Butthurt Hour. Eventually, Grace apologizes and admits baby showers make her uncomfortable, especially when people define her by her work and nothing else. One by one the other women admit they hate being defined by their children when they are so much more than baby makers. Grace and the mean girls find common ground and toast to the new baby girl, hoping that one day she can live in a world that allows her to define herself. Speaking of toast (the bread kind not the clinked glasses kind), Will decides to pick up Michael’s breadcrumbs when he wonders if life is passing him by. Could Michael be the one to fulfill his dreams of one-day settling down and starting a family? After all, he’s not getting any younger and they wouldn’t have to waste time getting to know each other. He decides to take the risk and calls Michael hoping that the one that got away, might be the one he’s been looking for all along.