Will & Grace Season 9 Episode 5 Review: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Crying

This Will & Grace review contains spoilers.

Will & Grace Season 9 Episode 5

This episode could’ve easily have been titled “Be Careful What You Ask For” or “All That Glitters Isn’t Gold” due to what unfolded. Setting and achieving short and long-term goals is a good thing, sometimes, until we attain a specific personal or career benchmark and realize there are unforeseen circumstances or penalties.

Insecurities and comparisons can motivate us to do what might seem impossible in life if only to quiet the voices in our head, family, friends or loved ones. Will and Grace have personified this over the course of nine seasons. Grace doesn’t get along with her sister, and Will wants to be accepted as a mainstream gay.

What happens when we get the dream spouse, job, or house and it’s a disappointment? It’s then the time to reexamine how and why we reached that crossroads without a contingency plan. Will & Grace is a good show to explore some of life’s hiccups without feeling weighed down as one might while watching a drama. Comedies are designed to make us laugh, and Will & Grace accomplishes this more often than not.

Will’s singular focus on becoming a senior partner at his law firm once realized was undesirable. Pursuing goals can be more exciting than resting on the other side of the finish line. Will’s promotion wouldn’t end him, but it’d put a damper on his free spirit having to look and behave responsibly in the eyes of the undoubtedly heterosexual partners.

Working out to lose weight for an upcoming high school or college reunion is exhilarating because we are determined to arrive physically attractive to former classmates, especially ones who broke our heart. To our chagrin, the heartbreaker is either absent, grotesquely obese, or married and miserable. The lesson here is don’t do anything for anyone besides oneself.

Grace landed on the opposite side of the emotional spectrum than Will. I can’t recall over the span of the first eight years if Grace had a client on the scale of Eli Wolf, the hotelier. The stakes are high for the three-person Grace Alder Designs office. She’ll need additional help because Karen probably won’t do much to move the project along, and her new design apprentice isn’t yet experienced to balance the workload.

Enter Will S. Truman who needs to find meaning in life again and to be challenged professionally. The answer to the burning question over the next few episodes will be can these two best friends live and work together with Grace as the leader? Will typically is the emotional anchor in their friendship, so we’ll discover how he adjusts as a follower rather than as the leader.

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