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Considering that Debra Messing's played nothing, in her comparatively brief career, but hags and slags, she's done pretty well for herself.
Even if you like her (not terribly likely), you know it's true: when Messing isn't playing a hag (i.e. a fag hag on Will & Grace; a marriage-of-convenience hag on Ned & Stacey; a cat hag in Garfield: The Movie; a messiah hag in the TV movie Jesus), she's playing a slag (the quick-to-divorce Beth on two episodes of Seinfeld; a skanky girlfriend in Hollywood Ending; abandoned fiancée Betty in A Walk in the Clouds; and finally the cuckolding harlot who cheats on her new husband ON THEIR HONEYMOON in the current Along Came Polly). Basically, if Messing is on screen, you can fairly safely bet that the dude she's with either has no interest in her sexually and never will (hag), or that he can't wait to get rid of her (slag).
Whatever else Grace -- Messing's most famous character -- may be, she is a character who has yet to bewitch a man sufficiently to keep him around for a whole season. And don't bother explaining that Leo and Grace would still be together if not for Harry Connick Jr.'s touring schedule and family and his own sitcom deal and all that horseshit; in the world of the show, what we're left with is a character apparently so unlikable that she failed to make it to her first wedding anniversary, officially making Grace Adler less lovable than MONICA GELLER. Okay? It's a little harder to defend her when the terms are put like that, isn't it?
What's strange about Messing -- at least in terms of her fame, and the roles that have brought her said fame -- is that she doesn't seem to have noticed that she's pretty much exclusively played very unappealing characters, and thus behaves as if she's America's Sweetheart. Messing seems to have confused the press into overlooking her character's essential unlikability. When Sofia Milos plays a homewrecker, or Linda Fiorentino a remorseless maneater, their asses don't end up on the cover fo Vanity Fair. And, granted, Grace Adler isn't amoral or anything, but she's nearly as sociopathic as Elaine Benes (and a lot more shrill and annoying). But whereas Seinfeld was clear about its characters' ethical shortcomings ("no hugging, no learning"), Will & Grace acts like it thinks it's Friends. And it's not.
If Will & Grace were honest about its characters' failings and consistent in its portrayal of them, then maybe we'd come to love Grace's irritating behaviours as much as we did Elaine's, or as we have come, in a short time, to love Lindsay and Lucille Bluth's. We're supposed to identify with Grace and regard her as we would any real person. But we can't. Or, if we do, we end up hating her, because she sucks. She's selfish and rigid, demanding and manipulative, disloyal and childish. (She's also a terrible dresser.) (Karen is all those things too, of course, but at least she's consistent and unapologetic about it; she doesn't behave as though all her character flaws are adorable.) (She also dresses better.) In a character less hateful than Grace, the whole "hag" thing would be a non-issue; we didn't care that Elaine couldn't make a relationship last, because we liked her, and even thought the guys she dated weren't good enough for her, half the time. (Puddy, of course, excepted.) But because Grace is so grating otherwise, the fact that she repels all straight men seems just and right and gives us something else to hold against her.
And it would be one thing if Messing played Grace as a balls-out anti-heroine in the Elaine Benes mold, but then managed to line up appealing movie roles to play on hiatus -- a sweet, if neurotic, anti-princess, for example. But, as we've already explained, Messing has instead made a career out of finding as many different modes of unpleasantness to play as she can, to the point where the sight of her is a shorthand to let you know you should take an instant dislike to whomever she's playing -- or, at the very least, you know that the Messing character is the one you should not trust.
Fine: Debra Messing is no Hitler. But just the same, we'd prefer it if the press stopped trying to pass her off as Donna Reed.
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