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"Will & Grace" and "Roseanne" will rise from their TV graves, but can they leave the bitterness and behind-the-scenes drama behind them?

Everyone involved hopes viewers have forgotten how those series ended — and all the nastiness.

The final season of "Roseanne" was a disaster. And in the finale, the fictional Roseanne revealed that, to some degree, all nine seasons were a figment of her imagination.

Dan (John Goodman) had died; Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) was a lesbian; Darlene (Sara Gilbert) was paired with Mark (the late Glenn Quinn) and Becky (Lecy Goranson) with David (Johnny Galecki), not the other way around; and so on.

We don't have details for the eight-episode "Roseanne" revival ABC will air in early 2018, but it's clear they will ignore all this. And a lot of people have forgotten what a nightmare Barr was on the set.

Her battles with writers, producers and network executives were legendary. She forced her second husband, Tom Arnold — whom she married and bitterly divorced during the series' run — onto the show as a writer/producer/actor, and the two of them fought pitched battles with pretty much everyone.

There's an unconfirmed story that Barr defecated in the middle of the "Roseanne" set to signal her displeasure.

Of course, her career has tailed off since "Roseanne" was canceled. And she seems a kinder, gentler person these days. (I interviewed her a few years ago and she was charming and lovely to me.)

There are parallels to "Will & Grace," which returns Sept. 28. It ended with a flash-forward in which we learned the title characters became estranged; Grace remarried Leo (Harry Connick Jr.); Will partnered with (maybe married?) Vince (Bobby Cannavale); and both became parents.

And, circa 2025, Grace's daughter and Will's son would meet and, eventually, marry.

But when "Will & Grace" returns in the fall, neither character will have a spouse. Neither will have a 10-year-old child. The finale will be ignored or explained away.

That might be easier than the tortuous road that led to the sitcom's creators/executive producers returning to run the series after a protracted, extraordinarily bitter behind-the-scenes battle.

In Dec. 2003, David Kohan and Jason Mutchnick sued NBC, alleging that they'd been cheated. That NBC Studios sold the sitcom to the NBC broadcast network at a bargain rate, leading to huge production deficits.

Because NBC didn't charge itself what it could have gotten from an outside buyer, and because Kohan and Mutchnick's contract gave them a share of the profits, they charged breach of contract and bad faith and sought $65 million.

This did not go over well at NBC. The network/studio countersued, and the creators of "Will & Grace" were barred from working on the series in Seasons 5, 6, 7 and 8 — with the exception of the finale.

The acrimonious dispute was finally settled a year after the show left the air; Kohan and Mutchnick were awarded $49 million.

In the years since, they've had five shows that all bombed. Kohan and Mutchnick became the sitcom-producer equivalent of box-office poison. So … they have great incentive to make the "Will & Grace" revival work.

Ignoring all the unpleasantness and erasing the previous endings seems like the best way to go for both shows.

spierce@sltrib.com

Twitter: @ScottDPierce