When “Will & Grace” premiered in 1998, the biggest comedies of the year were “Seinfeld,” “Veronica’s Closet” and “Friends.” It was the year President Bill Clinton denied having “sexual relations” with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The year that gave us Google. A time when the notion that young adults were spending less time with the television set was beginning to percolate.

And there were two thirtysomething writers, Max Mutchnick and David Kohan, on the verge of helping to pave the way for LGBTQ characters on TV with their prime-time sitcom that featured two openly gay characters.

“Will & Grace” followed the close friendship between gay lawyer Will Truman (Eric McCormack) and straight interior designer Grace Adler (Debra Messing) along with their kooky cohorts Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes) and Karen Walker (Megan Mullally).

The comedy, which packaged its then-boundary-pushing portrayal of gay men in a simple premise about friendship, ran for eight seasons, racked up 16 Emmy Awards and was one of the last ratings stalwarts of NBC’s venerated “Must See TV” era.

“When the show wrapped, I moved to New York City and went to a therapist,” Mutchnick, now 51, recalls. “The first thing I said to her was, ‘I’ve just finished a run of a popular television show called “Will & Grace,” and I’d like to figure out a way to not talk about it ever again.’”

So much for that.

These days, the show is all Mutchnick and Kohan find themselves talking about as the comedy gears up for its splashy return to NBC on Tuesday — 11 years after the series went off the air. The sitcom’s second coming — featuring its original cast — is one of the network’s top assets this season, and its return underscores the value networks see in bringing familiar faces back into living rooms in an age when keeping up with television’s roster of shows requires a spreadsheet.

The cast, who ventured on to various projects to varying degrees of success after the show ended, uniformly say there was no hesitation about reviving their career-defining roles for a longer term.

“Part of the reason I wanted to come back was because I felt like I needed to laugh,” says Messing, who stumped for Clinton. “The last year has been hard on everyone in this country, and I just felt like, ‘I need to laugh.’ And I want to be able to make other people laugh.”

“You’re always told: You can’t go home again,” says McCormack, who juggled his return to the comedy with the Netflix Canadian time-travel drama, “Travelers.” “But we got to go home again. And the reason they say that is because it’s not going to be the same. But it was. I mean, it really was.”

Which prompts the question: Can a show that broke ground with its portrait of the gay community stand the test of time?

Sarah Kate Ellis, president of the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, says the show can’t be everything - and that’s OK.

“When we’re seeing acceptance for LGBTQ persons flip back-wards, to have a positive show around the LGBTQ community — one that has been so impactful in shaping culture and changing hearts and minds — I think can only be good,” Ellis says by phone. “It’s not up to ‘Will & Grace’ to carry the full LGBTQ torch.”