Will & Grace -- which bows out Thursday after eight seasons and 196 episodes -- is a throwback to those classic, four-camera sitcoms like The Bob Newhart Show.

The San Fernando Valley lot has even deeper comedy roots. It was built by silent-comedy pioneer Mack Sennett back in the late '20s before becoming a B-movie factory.

All this TV history was not lost on the four main Will & Grace cast members -- Eric McCormack, Debra Messing, Megan Mullally and Sean Hayes. They, director Jim Burrows and producers Max Mutchnick and David Kohan, welcomed critics to the set last January.

"We're really an old-fashioned sitcom in a lot of ways," McCormack, a Scarborough native, told critics. He remembers auditioning exclusively for four-camera sitcoms in 1997. "Now," he said, "Desperate Housewives is a comedy."

Mullally -- who will return with a syndicated talk show next September -- seemed destined for Stage 17 success. When she was 11, her parents took her to her first sitcom taping, an episode of The Bob Newhart Show. "I sat right there," she said, pointing up into the bleachers.

When he was four or five, Hayes attended a Laugh-In taping on the very same soundstage where he had worked for eight years as Will and Grace's flamboyant friend, Jack. "We had family friends in San Diego and we all drove up here," he said.

Except for the cluttered living room set, not much else has changed. The high, wide bleachers looked as if they hadn't been swept since the '60s. Old black phones marked "switcher" and "recordist" seemed from another era. Even the crew hadn't changed much. Will & Grace property master Gilbert Spragg was a prop man on Laugh-In.

Even the main living room set -- Will & Grace's apartment 9C -- looked as if it had been dressed with furniture from a garage sale. Among the dusty books on the shelves of the den was a biography of Truman Capote. The refrigerator was packed with more food than you'd find in anybody's real house.

Backstage, the walls were littered with Polaroids of the cast and crew with various visitors over the years. A poster of "Chas Burrows Lonely Hearts Club Band" featured the four leads in Pepper costumes with Will & Grace spelled out in flowers.

What was new about this situation comedy was the situation: Two of the four main characters were gay. It doesn't seem that earth-shattering today, but eight years ago, at the very first Will & Grace press tour session, NBC executives instructed the cast to downplay the gay storyline and to use the word "friendship" a lot.

When Burrows remarked it was "a seminal show," McCormack cracked, "Do you mean 'seminal' in a gay way? Because in eight years, my character's not gotten any 'seminal.' "

McCormack has had enough of all the criticism that Will's sex life was kept in the closet. "First of all, nobody wants to see sitcom characters have sex," he said. "I didn't even want to see the girls from Sex And the City have sex."

When the show premiered in 1998, America was still freaked over Ellen DeGeneres's character coming out in Ellen. This was before Queer As Folk, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and way before Brokeback Mountain.

Perhaps because the show was a good old-fashioned sitcom it made it easier for the public to embrace. The series quickly won a People's Choice Award and drew 17 million U.S. viewers a week by the 2001-02 season.

A parade of guest stars, including big Hollywood names such as Madonna, Cher, Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Lopez, Matt Damon, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Michael Douglas and, on a more regular basis, Harry Connick Jr., helped goose ratings and kept the series "must-see" for years.

"It just started to happen," said Mutchnick. "Then we got a reputation for it because it was kind of a fun playground for these actors to work with."

The series also became famous for its double entendres. McCormack's favourite early on was when Will and Grace were talking about an upcoming election. Will was voting for the gay guy.

McCormack recalled that "hooha" was also out. Also "teabag" couldn't be used as a verb. A scene where the rest of the cast cupped Messing's breasts came with specific "no nipple touching" notes.

"After the first one, we all kind of looked at each other and said, on an energy level, we'd love to do this every week," McCormack said. "I strive for perfection and perfection gets you nowhere. With live shows, all everybody talks about the next day is the f----ups and laughing."

Fans will just have to tune in. Asked in January how he'd like to see it all end, McCormack seemed willing to leave it all up to the spirit of Studio 17.

Before Will & Grace, McCormack paid his dues in Canadian television, guesting in episodes of Street Legal, Katts and Dog and E.N.G. before starring in Lonesome Dove: The Series.

- That '70s Show: 8 p.m. on Fox and 9 p.m. on CH, Thursday. The slyly subversive adventures of affable geek Eric Forman (Topher Grace) and his Wisconsin high school pals have had retro fun with the Me Decade since its 1998 premiere. Surreal dream sequences and 360-degree whip-around scenes in Forman's basement typify the show's signature zonked-out sensibility. That '70s Show also turned Ashton Kutcher -- who plays loopy goofball Kelso -- into a Hollywood star, a successful TV producer (Punk'd, Beauty and the Geek) and marital material for Demi Moore.

- Alias: 9 p.m., ABC, May 22. Jennifer Garner soared to major stardom, strutting her glamorous action stuff as spy Sydney Bristow. But even though a created a sleek, sophisticated roller-coaster ride of adrenaline-fuelled fun that also packed a surprising emotional wallop, Alias never became a breakout hit. Blame it on the conspiracy thriller's impenetrable mythology of secret organizations and Rambaldi prophecy bunk. They could be a distraction. But if you just ignored all that and focused on the sexy kick of Sydney Bristow's high-octane escapades, that's entertainment.

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