If the recent glut of TV revivals has proven anything, it’s that you really can’t go home again. Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life underscored how poorly its entitled lead characters had aged; Fuller House is manic and joyless; Murphy Brown 2019 landed with a thud. (It may have gotten more traction if the series that spawned it were available to stream: also true of Mad About You, a Spectrum Original Series that even Spectrum customers had a hard time finding when its revival launched last year.) Roseanne was riveting for all the wrong reasons, though watching it became a less ethically dubious prospect after its star was fired and the show was rechristened The Conners.

And then there’s NBC’s Will & Grace, which was reborn as a pro-Hillary Clinton PSA before getting the full-scale revival treatment. The PSA didn’t work, of course—but it did rack up 7 million views, indicating that the show’s audience was eager to reconnect with their old friends.

So the series returned to NBC—and, after a breezy ret-con of the original show’s divisive ending, got down to business as usual. Megan Mullally’s Karen was right to say that no one wanted to see Will and Grace trying to raise their tweens; after the political grandstanding of that PSA, though, viewers likely expected the show to comment on current events. Will & Grace did do that, albeit in a cringe way: one episode found a Donald Trump\–supporting Karen getting Grace (Debra Messing) a job redecorating the Oval Office. (Yes, there was a joke about Trump being a Cheeto.) In another, Grace tries to get a baker to make a MAGA cake for Karen; the baker gives her one that says “I’MAGAY” instead. Grace’s response: “Very clever, but this isn’t for the vice president.”

Mostly, though, the show has focused on rehashing old plotlines. Its 2017 funeral for Karen’s maid, Rosario (Shelley Morrison), echoed the funeral Will & Grace held for Karen’s husband, Stanley, in season five, right down to the reappearance of Minnie Driver’s Lorraine. Will’s friend Jack (Sean Hayes) enters into a relationship with a closeted man, mirroring Will’s serious relationship with closeted Matthew (Patrick Dempsey) in season three. The revival still relied upon a crutch for which the show was rightly criticized in its first run—stunt casting—except this time, it re-stunt-cast characters who had already appeared in the first eight seasons. Out with Geena Davis and Alan Arkin as Grace’s sister and father; in with Mary McCormack and Robert Klein. Will’s most significant ex, Michael, could once again have been played by Chris Potter, still a mainstay of Hallmark productions—but why call him when Cheyenne Jackson is available?

Perhaps most mind-bogglingly of all, the revival’s final-season premiere last fall found Grace going on a trip, having unprotected sex, and becoming pregnant accidentally—just as she did in the show’s first final season, back in 2006. This plotline was plausible 15 years ago, when Grace was in her early 30s. Now, though, Grace is supposed to be 48—and based on what we know about her horrible diet and aversion to exercise, she probably has the body of a sexagenarian.

It’s a baffling decision that reads as a desire to redo the show’s original finale, in which Grace and Will (Eric McCormack) have such a poisonous fight over Grace’s decision to raise her baby with her ex-husband, Leo (Harry Connick Jr.)—rather than co-parenting the kid with Will—that they wind up not speaking for 20 years.