Will & Grace Review: Filthy Phil Part 1 (Season 11 Episode 12)

There have been a few times this season where I’ve watched a storyline and wondered to myself, “hmmm, that doesn’t feel totally authentic to that character.” Watching Will & Grace Season 11 Episode 12 “Filthy Phil, Part 1” that thought returned.

Too much of this season feels as though the writers threw out a bunch of scenarios and just assigned them randomly to characters. No character has felt like a bigger victim of this than Karen.

This episode, following Karen’s relationship with likely conman/wannabe Dirty John, Phil, feels off for a few reasons. Only a few episodes ago on Will & Grace Season 11 Episode 8 “Lies and Whispers”, Karen was commenting that she wasn’t yet ready for a relationship.

It’s unclear how much time has passed since then — a recurring issue of this season — so while her newest relationship doesn’t seem to track with that statement, I’m somewhat willing to look past it. However, her falling for Phil is totally inexplicable. Karen is many things; stupid is not one of them.

Karen is traditionally drawn towards strong personalities and she can sometimes get carried away quickly. Remember Nikki (Samira Wiley) from last season? I’ll acknowledge that Phil (guest star Joel McHale, who I guess we’re just agreeing to forget appeared in the original run as a love interest for Grace) fits that bill.

However, Karen is also a great con woman herself, so you’d think that she’d be able to sniff out the artifice in Phil’s story. Hell, Grace is the first to pick up on it, and Grace is genuinely never the first to pick up on anything.

I can believe that Karen would turn her back on Will and Grace in favor of a man because she does tend to go all-in on her relationships. However, I simply can’t believe that she’s incapable of noticing any of the missing pieces of Phil’s story or that she’d be totally fine fetching his napkins from the floor.

The Karen Walker of the past few seasons doesn’t seem like she’d fetch napkins for anybody. Moments like this make me miss Rosario so much. She’d knock some sense into Karen!

While this storyline generally irks, I do enjoy that it gives Will and Grace a shared goal and another reason to team them up. Despite the fact that they’re both preparing for parenthood, we haven’t seen them in shared storylines for much of the season, and they are such a good team and balance for one another.

Though I loved Will and Grace’s scenes as they dug into Phil’s past, there is one thing that stood out negatively during this moment.

What is it with this show and other members of the LGBTQ community? It continuously bungles bisexual representation and this episode has a snide remark about the trans community, when Grace glibly comments that if Phil was actually trans, they’d be obligated to like him. I get that this is a comedy, but given this show’s weird track record with stories about the queer community outside of homosexual men, that stuff just isn’t funny.

Jack’s efforts to buy Miss Coco’s fare better than Will and Grace’s attempt to enlighten Karen on her boyfriend’s true intentions.

That’s a general theme this season: even in the midst of some bad writing and storylines, Jack — and Sean Hayes by extension — still seems to come out relatively unscathed and successful.

Buying a gay bar, despite having no prior experience running a business, is on brand for Jack given how prone he is to biting off more than he should probably chew. (It also makes infinitely more sense than Karen buying a baseball team, a storyline we’ve thankfully been saved from having to watch for a few episodes but that will certainly rear its annoying head again soon enough).

Both of Jack’s meetings with bank rep, Ruth (a hilarious Nicole Sullivan) are episode highlights. Ruth is drawn with such specificity and her dialogue about her cat and “winning her breakup” are easily some of the funniest lines of the episode. Every once in awhile, Will & Grace has a guest star that just clicks despite minimal screen time, and Sullivan definitely falls into that category.

Jack’s powerpoint presentation is by far the funniest moment of the episode. It’s a totally unexpected, completely hilarious, and contextually appropriate bit of comedy combining word play and Hayes’ gift for physical comedy.

After Jack is initially rejected, Miss Coco’s response that Jack “did [his] best which is probably why it didn’t work” is guffaw-inducing but I found myself wondering: how can one storyline of this episode feel so character-appropriate and funny while the other feels shoehorned in and flat?

Having done some research, it appears that two writers worked on this episode. I’m deeply curious as to how they worked together because the episode doesn’t feel cohesive or balanced in pacing, tone, and comedic style.

We’ll hopefully have a resolution to the Phil storyline next week but truthfully, I’m more looking forward to following Jack’s efforts to take over the bar and make it his own. I hope we actually get a chance to see that, because it’s by far one of the more interesting and promising storylines to come out of the season.

Can you imagine Jack as a boss and businessman? It feels like it would be an even more amplified, ridiculous version of one of his shows, and I am here for it.

What did you think of this episode of Will & Grace? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Will & Grace airs Thursdays at 9:00/8:00c on NBC.

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