Will & Grace review: A decade after we said goodbye, little has changed

It took only a couple of minutes, in the pre-title sequence of Will & Grace (Stan, streaming now), to return us to the familiar: the spacious New York apartment of lawyer Will Truman (Eric McCormack) with the show's other characters Grace (Debra Messing), Jack (Sean Hayes) and Karen (Megan Mullally) lined up neatly on the sofa.

We're back, a decade after we said goodbye, but little has changed. We're reminded that Will and Grace are not just skilled at parlour games, but obnoxiously so. That Jack is exhaustingly flirtatious (with a modern twist, and a dating app punchline) and that Karen is, in equal parts, the drunkest, darkest and funniest part of the equation. "What's going on, what's happening, who won the election?" she blurts when woken from her stupor by the rattling of a pill bottle.

The series quickly sets up its rebooted premise, which is essentially its old premise (straight girl/gay guy best friends, plus sidekicks) minus the original series' finale, which postscripted the story by leaving Will and Grace married and with kids. Happily married is now happily single, for both, and the kids were nixed, merely a wrinkle in Karen's dream.

In Will & Grace 2.0, Will is still Will, Grace is "staying here just for a couple of weeks until the dust settles" on her divorce, Jack is still Jack, and Karen is still rich, and still married to Stanley Walker, the never seen New York billionaire.

The premise itself naturally wears thin with age: two single friends co-habiting and surfing a social loop that includes a single gay friend and a married (but not obligated) socialite. You do begin to ask why these folks never got on with the rest of their lives. And here the cast are naturally older, which means the delivery is a fraction slower, the movement around the set pieces more slowly instinctive than urgently directed.

But what really stuns is how effortlessly the band gets back together and, in barely a few moments, is back in lockstep. The retorts are rapid fire. The performances almost – almost – indistinguishable from those of almost two decades ago when the original series premiered in 1998. This isn't a company of actors who have recaptured it quickly, rather a company of actors who probably never really lost it in the first place.

The debut episode was political in thrust, a natural second half to the 10-minute election-themed mini-episode which was the catalyst for reviving the series in the first place. Will's pursuit of an environment-bashing congressman sends him to a White House event where, of course, Grace has been offered a gig redecorating the Oval Office thanks to Karen's friendship with Melania Trump.

The touches were sharp, from the subtle note of Karen kneeling on the sofa in the style of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, to the more obvious (but laugh out loud) note of Grace matching the decor to Donald Trump's colouring using a Cheeto snack rather than a swatch. Gift with purchase: Kyle Bornheimer's brilliant swing as gay Secret Service agent Lenny.

While the politics will no doubt remain a voice in the series chorus – as it was with the original series – that should give way quickly to some more traditional sitcom threads. The series is promising to deeply mine the Will & Grace canon, notably with return engagements for Bobby Cannavale's Vince D'Angelo and Harry Connick Jr's Dr Leo Markus, the two spouses with whom Will and Grace were respectively paired off when the original series took its final bow.

You can add to that Minnie Driver's Lorraine Finster and Leslie Jordan as Karen's diminutive nemesis Beverly Leslie. The series will also acknowledge the death of Debbie Reynolds, who played Grace's high-kicking musical theatre mother Bobbi Adler.

Before the series launched, actress Debra Messing said she was drawn to the idea of reviving the series because she felt she badly needed to laugh again, coming off a bruising decade of depressing headlines, escalating world crises and tectonic shifts in politics.

To some extent the audience's attraction to the show is much the same. David Kohan and Max Mutchnick's razor-sharp writing, Jim Burrows' direction, the proliferation of laugh-out-loud punchlines, smoothed by the familiarity we have with the performances and the four very different styles of comedy the show's stars use. It's all a nice reminder than once upon a time we laughed out loud at TV sitcoms. And it's nice to be able to do it again.