Q Toon: Must've Déjà Vu TV

NBC is indeed bringing back "Will & Grace" in the fall, resurrecting the 1998-2006 situation comedy, along with the network's 1980's slogan, "Must See TV."

"Will & Grace," in case you've forgotten, centered on Will, a gay lawyer; Grace, his best friend; Jack, his best gay friend; and Karen, an idle rich woman who hung around with them for no apparent reason. Together, they tossed bons mots about whatever was current in popular culture and ... well, I watched the show, and I guess they did sitcom stuff. Will and Grace had jobs and parents, Grace had boyfriends, Jack turned 30, and Karen could hold her liquor. That's pretty much the whole story.

Still, the show and each of its stars won Emmys the first time around. You can't knock success.

It was a groundbreaking show, in that a gay man was a central character. He wasn't closeted, and he wasn't insecure about it, even if he didn't get around to dating anyone until late in the series. The show wasn't about HIV/AIDS or hate crimes or antigay preachers or gays in the military or marriage equality, any of the Big Issues Of The Day. In a way, it was a show about nothing, although not quite as edgy as "Seinfeld." There definitely was no talk about who could be masters of their domain.

NBC executives obviously want to offer their audience something comfortable and familiar — and the fact that what was once groundbreaking is now comfortably familiar is something of an achievement in and of itself. But if the characters are still stuck exactly where they were in 2006, I doubt viewers will stick with the show.

Jack has hit 40, after all. The bloom is off the rose, and if he hasn't found independent means of support by now and is still leeching off of Will, there's no way Will can have held onto any self-respecting boyfriend this long. Karen may have hired Grace to remodel her office yet again (what ever does Karen do there?), but she's not a simpleton and would surely have become bored with Jack, if not Will and Grace as well.

Well, we'll leave it to the writers to figure that all out. This isn't Tristram Shandy, after all. There are plenty of fresh new pop cultural references with which to pepper their scripts.

If they are successful, we can look forward to the return of "Friends," "Malcolm in the Middle," "Desperate Housewives," and "Veronica's Closet."

Q Toon: Irish Ayes

Over the weekend, Irish voters overwhelmingly approved granting gay and lesbian couples the same right to marry that heterosexual couples enjoy. Which you already knew, if for no other reason than you read the fake newspaper headline at left.

We cartoonists put these fake newspapers in our cartoons because we can't trust that every reader will have knowledge of the story we are commenting on, or that they will connect the cartoon to it. These newspaper headlines require figuring out some way to compose the cartoon so that it doesn't look out of place to have a newspaper prominently displayed where the reader can read it.

But they do come in handy, because the Irish vote might have been overshadowed by the subsequent vote of the Greenland Parliament in favor of marriage equality. It's so easy to confuse Ireland and Greenland, you know; them both being Atlantic islands and into the color green and so forth.

So, now that I'm quite certain that you have indeed read the headline and located Ireland on a map, here's the cartoon.

Paul Berge Q Syndicate✒May 28, 2015 EditorialCartoonists.com

This year, the New York chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians begrudged the LGBT employees of NBC-Universal to march in its St. Patrick's Day parade, if only at the insistence of NBC, which televises the parade. Before then, the AOH forbade any LGBT group from its parade, ever since the hostile reception to them (and then-Mayor David Dinkins marching with them) in 1991.

Greenlander-Americans, so far as I know, have never barred LGBTs from marching in their parades. Ullortuneq is coming up on June 21, and I expect to see a healthy representation of out and proud Greenlanders marching in cities all across these United States.

Q Toon: So Chic!

I've been seeing a lot of complaints about the U.S. Olympics teams' outfits, and Facebook keeps urging me to check out the Norwegian Olympics curling team's pants. Are the Germans' team rainbow jackets a protest against Russia's antigay laws, or just a way to make themselves easy to find if they get lost on the slopes?

Surely, there is no pro-gay message behind the Russians' own pink suits, which are even more colorful than the tap water at the Sochi hotels.

Qtoon: Sense and Censorability

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate •Sep 5, 2012 EditorialCartoonists.com

The fall TV programs are almost here, and a few of them have One Million Panties in a bunch.

"Partners" is a CBS program by the creators of "Will & Grace" which is essentially about the creators of "Will & Grace" except that they are architects instead of TV show writers. Or else it's a retread of "Will & Grace" in which Will is named Joe and he's straight, and Grace is named Louis and he's Jack. Or something like that. We'll see in a couple of weeks.

And NBC is introducing "The New Normal," which centers on a gay couple, the surrogate mother of their child-to-be, her opinionated grandmother, and her precocious and presumably adorable daughter. As NBC's promo page for the series puts it, "These days, families come in all forms - single dads, double moms, sperm donors, egg donors, one-night-stand donors... It's 2012 and anything goes."

Management at NBC's Salt Lake City affiliate, however, have decided that it's not 2012 and some things still don't go. They're not going to show "The New Normal." KSL management issued a statement that, "For our brand, this program simply feels inappropriate on several dimensions, especially during family viewing time." The local CW station has stepped in to show it on Saturday nights after all the good Mormons have gone to sleep.

Meanwhile, ABC is continuing the Emmy-winning "Modern Family" and spring replacement series "Happy Endings," which is "Friends" except that there's a gay guy and a black guy so you can tell the difference. And "Glee" continues on Fox, Ellen DeGeneres continues in syndication, and Andy Cohen continues in charge of Bravo.

Management at KSL aside, the reaction from the upright citizens' brigades to this smattering of TV comedies has been, frankly, far less than impressive. It could be that they're saving their energy in favor of establishing a moral monopoly on government this November. At present, if they complain about "Happy Endings," all they accomplish is calling attention to a series few people had heard of before, and possibly making a hit out of it. Take over the government, and they can have the FCC issue a fine for every episode of every program with a non-traditional family or out-of-wedlock hook-up.

It's 2013 and everything stops.