Earlier this year, Megan Mullally took a leave of absence from two episodes of the final season of Will & Grace amid a reported feud (the substance of which has not been made public) with co-star Debra Messing which prompted them to unfollow each other on social media.

Will & Grace creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick addressed the tensions in a lengthy new interview with Entertainment Weekly but didn’t offer much on the substance. They also revealed that Messing’s “pain-in-the-ass” contract actually saved the show’s finale.

Of the tensions between Messing and Mullally, Mutchnick said: “We always work under this kind of motto that everything’s about the work. It’s just about the work. And so if we stay true to that, then we just keep you guys out of whatever happened on the set this year because it would have done nothing but get in the way of the stories that we wanted to tell. It was not an easy year, but the permanent legacy of the show is much more important to us than any temporary squabble that would take place on the stage.”

Mutchnick also revealed why the series had a finale episode when many shows’s production schedules were tabled due to the pandemic: “Oh my God, thank God. It would have been the most unfinished feeling to not get to the end of this season. Thank God Debra had it in her contract that we had to be done by Christmas. I finally found the silver lining in that really pain-in-the-ass clause. [Laughs] We did run into trouble with the retrospective that’s airing right after the finale. We weren’t finished with that and that was not easy to get to the finish line with the world shut down.”

Read the full interview here.