Will & Grace premiere recap: The 5 best burns in season 10, episode 1

Has Grace met her match with guest star David Schwimmer? Let’s recap the season 10 premiere of Will & Grace with the 5 best quotes!

Honey, you better believe they’re back and in tip-top shape! Well, make that tipsy-top shape for Karen. When we last left the gang in the season 9 finale of Will & Grace, everyone and their mother (that’s not hyperbole) was getting engaged and making decisions based on the seemingly tragic stagnancy of Will and Grace’s lives. Yikes.

Oddly enough, the season 10 premiere doesn’t mention Will and Grace’s parents’ engagement and their relationship’s upcoming transition into something resembling siblings. Instead, Will & Grace jumps right into the season like a well-oiled machine and doesn’t miss a single beat. While Jack weathers a cosmetic blunder and Karen sues a doctor for ripping off her best asset, Grace faces off against the “West Side Curmudgeon,” played by guest star David Schwimmer.

It’s the Will & Grace and Friends crossover we always knew we needed, and it’s just getting started. Let’s recap with the five sickest burns from the season premiere!

1. “Your wife is yappy and rude.” “That’s why we never have sex.”

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Grace hosts a campaign brunch in her building’s lobby for her bid as the president of the New York Society of Interior Designers (which, according to Google, is a real-ish thing). She’s off to a bad start when she doesn’t recognize her downstairs neighbor of nearly two decades, then Jack overdoes his bribed performance as a campaign surrogate. Hey, you can’t say he didn’t go for the Oscar.

2. “It’s not a secret, so you can stop talking like a drug dealer on a kids’ show.”

As if Grace’s brunch couldn’t get anymore unpredictable, the infamous Twitter user “The West Side Curmudgeon,” a.k.a. Noah (David Schwimmer), waltzes in for the free food. Grace recognizes him from his salty tweets and hopes to charm him into sending out an endorsement to his legion of followers. She doesn’t quite convince Noah to change his online brand, as he takes one of her pamphlets to later mock in a pointed tweet. But has Grace ever not gotten the last word?

3. “How dare you insinuate that I would go to an Italian doctor?”

While Grace plots a forward trajectory toward a leadership role, Karen’s mired in the aggravation of a lawsuit. In a scene that Megan Mullally absolutely kills and already warrants a second Emmy nomination for the revival, Karen recounts to Will her experience of seeing an exact replica of her breasts on a perfect stranger. As Karen finds out, a doctor calls them the Karen Walkers and gave them to women all across Manhattan. Clearly, Karen’s up to big things in season 10!

Also preoccupied with matters of appearance, Jack frets that he doesn’t look young enough for his Skype call with Estefan’s parents. He’s meeting his future in-laws for the first time, and he wants to look his best. In preparation for the call, Jack uses a numbing cream on his face to shave those years off in an instant, but he uses far too much of the cream. Will tricks him into eating a banana to reverse the effects, and the results are, again, Emmy-worthy. The call doesn’t paint Jack in the best light, but Jack always bounces back.

4. “Flirted? You mean when you talked and I didn’t stop you?”

Determined to force Noah to delete the tweet, Grace tracks him down at a diner and proceeds to plead her case. It’s classic Grace gone blinded by rage, and Debra Messing hits all the right notes opposite Schwimmer. Grace mistakes Noah’s indifference for flirtation, which isn’t a baseless accusation. Still, Noah pushes her away and insists he’s against the beautification of New York that Grace is pedaling in her campaign. However, Grace leaves and returns to the diner twice and both reveal that they’ve googled each other. Goodbye, nasty tweet. Hello, romance!

5. “If you can’t trust Satan, who can you trust?”

Did anyone really think Karen wouldn’t back a doctor into a corner and walk away with victory (and probably some pill samples) in hand? Will, who isn’t currently practicing law, wins Dr. DeLorenzo’s agreement that he will no longer steal Karen’s likeness or, as she refers to them, her “intellectual property.”

What follows is perhaps one of the most honest and striking conversations on Will & Grace. Karen and Will speak openly about aging and mortality and share a tender moment of genuine friendship, free of barbs or zingers. Strange how a story about knocked off knockers (Will’s phraseology) can carry so much hidden depth.

What did you think of the season premiere? Let us know in the comments!

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