Buy, Buy Baby

After seeing Grace (Debra Messing) so happy about her pregnancy, Karen decides she wants a baby and offers to pay a surrogate (Sykes) to carry one for her.

Jack gets on board and informs his guest, actor George Takei, that the network asked that he not reveal he is gay on the show.

This prompts Cricket to quit and Karen revealing to Grace that the only reason she wanted a baby was to help her marriage.

[12][13] The show's creators, David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, thought she did a "surprisingly good job".

[18] In the press release, NBC said the episode would include a scene in which Spears hosted a Christian cooking segment called "Cruci-fixins".

[21] NBC, however, stated that the "Cruci-fixins" segment was "erroneous information" mistakenly included in the press release and that it was an idea for another episode that had yet to be written.

When NBC said that the script 'has yet to be written,' what they didn't tell you is that the 'story board' had been completed and the offensive material was scheduled to be a part of the episode.

Lenny Ann Low of The Sydney Morning Herald commented that Spears as a right-wing co-host was a miss.

"[24] In Low's opinion, the only thing that saved the episode from a "thumbs down", was "its message about finding the courage to be yourself in a sea of conservatism, saccharine though that sounds.

"[24] Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune thought Spears "bombed" in the episode,[25] and Jeff Hidek of Star-News disliked the Southern accent she used in her performance.

[26] The Plain Dealer's Mark Dawidziak commented: "Granted, the episode wasn't very well written, but Spears seemed more out of place on the show than Megan Mullally's Karen at a sensitivity seminar.

"[27] A Herald Sun reviewer, however, thought she gave the final season of Will & Grace the "send-off it deserved.

[14] Television researcher Tim Brooks, the co-author of the 1979 book The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, commented that Spears' role was a "very good way to get her chops into comedy", in part because it is "very out of type.