David E. Kelley: The Man Behind Ally McBeal

DAVID E KE L L E Y THE MAN BEHIND ILLY M c B E A L

SPIKE N A N N A R E L L O / S H O O T I N G STAR

D A V I D E. KELLEY The Man Behind

A IIv /l/irnpn

JOSH LEVINE

ECW

PRESS

The publication of David E. Kelley: The Man Behind Ally McReal has been generously supported by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

Copyright © ECW PRESS, 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of ECW PRESS.

CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA Levine, Josh David E. Kelley: The Man Behind Ally McBeal Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-55022-372-0 I. Kelley, David E. 2. Television producers and directors - United States - Biography. 3. Television writers - United States - Biography. I. Title. PN1992.4.K444L48 1999

79 1.45'0232'092

C99-930778-9

Front cover photos (clockwise from upper left): Mitch Gerber/Corbis; Lisa Rose/Globe Photos, Inc.; Fitzroy Barrett/Globe Photos; Robert Hepler/Everett. Back cover photos (from top): Fitzroy Barett/Globe Photos; Kevork Djansezian/AP Photo; Eric Draper/AP Photo; Michael Caulfield/AP Photo. Cover design by Tania Craan. Imaging by ECW Type & Art, Oakville, Ontario. Printed by Printcrafters, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Distributed in Canada by General Distribution Services, 30 Lesmill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 2T6. Distributed in the United States by LPC Group, 1436 West Randolph Street, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 60607. Distributed in the United Kingdom by Turnaround Publisher Services, Unit 3 Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, Wood Green, London N2Z 6TZ Published by ECW PRESS, 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario M4E IE2. www.ecw.ca/press PRINTED AND BOUND IN C A N A D A

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction

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Boston Boy

£

Created by David E. Kelley

25

The Practice: The Dark Side of the Law

43

The Birth of Ally McBeal

59

Nothing to Lose: The Life of Calista Flockhart . . . .

79

Making Ally McBeal

93

Searchin' Vonda's Soul: The Music of Ally McBeal .

119

But Is She Good for Women?

127

Ally McBeal Episode Guide: Season One

13^

Emmy Surprises

17^

Ally McBeal Episode Guide: Season Two

179

The Future of David E. Kelley

197

Sources

199

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XTT'TI /T~\ 1T\ ¥ T /^ T1 T ^A X T NTRODUCTION THE MAN BEHIND ALLY MCBEAL

"I love Ally McBeal I" said a woman friend of mine when I told her I was writing a book about the show. My friend is about thirty, works in advertising, and has several failed romances behind her. She has a rich fantasy life of her own, my friend does, which manifests itself in declarations of leaving any day on a plane to Fiji or Morocco. Why, I asked her, does she love the show so much? "Just look at Ally," she said, shaking her head. "The woman is gorgeous, she has a great, high-paying job, and men are always asking her out. And she's still unhappy! Well, if Ally can be unhappy then it's got to be all right for me to be unhappy too." Is that what the popularity of Ally McBeal is about? That misery loves company? Well, partly. But only partly. The dialogue is scintillating, a tennis-match of witticisms. The characters seem eccentric at first but turn out to be just peculiarly themselves. Hell, we know people just like them! (Okay, so maybe the people we know aren't so entertaining.) The storytelling — and not just those fantasy moments — is refreshingly creative and surprising. And the show takes risks almost every week, which is a relief from the usual menu of alien abductions and police shootouts.

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But perhaps most of all, despite the law cases, the legal arguments and depositions and trials, we watch the show because it is really about romance. First-date kisses. Lost opportunities. Jealousy. Feelings of inadequacy. Raging desire. Wattle fetishes. Aren't these everyone's favorite topics? Shakespeare knew it. In his plays there is always some Antonio who loves Hermia who's breaking the poor guy's heart because she's crazy about Orlando who can't stop moaning over Beatrice. Shakespeare knew it and so does David E. Kelley. David who? The unusual thing is you probably already know David E. Kelley's name. He is one of the rare television creator/producers who has become widely known, along with the likes of Steven Bochco (who happens to have been his mentor), Aaron Spelling, and a very few others. And it isn't because Kelley comes from a famous family. No, he was just an ordinary guy who managed to get himself into law school and expected to become just another well-paid drone of a lawyer. In fact, that's exactly what he did become and he was perfectly content with it. It's just that he had this little idea for a movie script . . . But I am jumping ahead. How did David Kelley, an easygoing kid from Boston, become one of the most powerful and exciting writer/creator/producers working in television today? How did he, with almost no writing experience, end up scripting most of the first years of L.A. Lawl And go on to create and write Ticket Fences and Chicago Hope, highly acclaimed if not enormously successful shows? And then marry Michelle Pfeiffer, one of the most talented and beautiful actresses in Hollywood? And then create a female character named Ally who would become so popular, so loved and reviled, that she would end up on the cover of Time and be the subject of countless newspaper columnists and heavyweight thinkers who believed that

she was either singlehandedly destroying the American feminist movement or was revealing the secret hopes and dreams of women across the country? And how did he come to cast a young woman named J o Calista Flockhart in the title role? The first time I encountered the young, then almost unknown actress, was in an off-Broadway play called Mai Forest. She looked almost as young as a teenager, with a round face (I remember it wrapped in a kerchief), and she was totally convincing as a Romanian woman in this ensemble play about the fall of a communist dictator. And that's what she was then: a sensitive and talented young actress and an ensemble player. It was Ally McBeal that would make her into a star, not to mention a figure of controversy ("Doj/ou think she's anorexic?") and the subject of intense media scrutiny. Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention The Practice, David Kelley's other current show, an extraordinarily fine drama starring a talented hunk of an actor named Dylan McDermott. The Practice has a slowly building audience — building the way the audience for Ally McBeal was supposed to, instead of becoming the sudden smash hit that it is. And how can David Kelley write all the episodes for Ally McEeal, unheard of productivity for a writer, and most of The Practice as well, turning out a fresh script every four days? But I'm jumping ahead again. All these questions and more this book hopes to answer. And I plan to have fun doing it, too. Because if there's one thing David E. Kelley is good at, it's bringing comedy and serious issues together. That's it for the introduction and, if I might borrow a favorite expression of David Kelley's, I will not be disparaged for it. Or as Richard Fish would say, bygones.

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BOSTON BOY THE EARLY LIFE AND SURPRISING CAREER OF DAVID E. K E L L E Y

David Kelley, who was born in Maine but grew up in Boston, did not come from an artistic family. No actors, writers, dancers — perhaps that was why it never occurred to David to become a writer. His father, Jack, was a professional hockey coach (he can be found in the American Hockey Hall of Fame) whose later restless retirement would show his son that it was good to keep busy and not rest on one's laurels. His mother, Ginny, was also athletic, but despite having played hockey, David has never professed a childhood desire to become a star center for the Boston Bruins either. He would, however, one day write a movie screenplay about hockey. The city of Boston was certainly the world that David knew growing up; he would draw on the location for his writing, from his first movie script to The Practice and Ally McBeal. But in his Boston high school he was just a bright but ordinary kid, still without a thought of writing. No poems secretly scribbled in notebooks, no stories or plays handed tremblingly to a favorite English teacher for criticism. Nor did any teacher see in his essays and writing assignments a ogerm of ogenius that needed to be watered o with encouragement.

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A quiet boy, David had good relationships with both parents. "What do you mean you have no issues with your parents?" his future wife once said. "I thought, either this guy is lying or he's in terrible denial. Then I met his parents and it made total sense. They were the most wonderful people." It was in high school that David decided to become a lawyer. For a smart kid without any particular vision of the future, law school often becomes the obvious choice. Law schools are notoriously tough to get into, just behind medical schools in their demands for high marks and test scores (LSATS) . Being a lawyer is a respected and often very lucrative profession, if one sometimes treated with hostility since lawyers can be seen as high-priced parasites, feeding off the legal difficulties of their clients. A high school student like David would likely have an image of himself as a crusader in a handsome suit, persuasively arguing his case before an enraptured jury. Like Perry Mason or Ironside. In truth, most lawyers don't do trial work and their days are often monotonous or aggravating, but that is something usually discovered only much later. David's high school marks were very high, gaining him admittance into one of America's most illustrious universities (and his father's old school) — Princeton. The fourth oldest university in the country, it was the alma mater of another male writer who would go on to capture the female spirit of his time: R Scott Fitzgerald. With its campus in Princeton, New Jersey, it would have been David's first time away from home. While at Princeton, David made his mark not in writing but in sports, as the captain of the hockey team. (He has the marks to show for it; a couple of scars on his face and a once-broken nose.) He decided to major in politics, a traditional enough subject for pre-law but also one that reveals his budding interest in social questions — in laws,

morality, and social relations, subjects he would eventually explore in so many television scripts. He also began for the first time to do a little writing just for fun, a pleasant pastime without any serious intentions. But in the first real sign of his creativity and fresh outlook, David found a way to use his new interest in his academic work. For his senior thesis instead of the usual long essay he decided to write a play about the American Constitution. He made each of the amendments a character, comically exploring the laws by turning them into personality traits. For example, the first amendment (on free speech) was a man with a big mouth who wouldn't stop talking. The second (the right to bear arms) only wanted to brag about his great gun collection. The tenth (giving states rights to everything else) was turned into a person with no self-esteem. Already his imagination was coming up with eccentric character types. David himself must have had self-esteem in plentiful supply. Not only did his thesis show creativity, but it also was a sign of David's future courage in taking risks with o o o his writing. In later years many of his scripts would explore the amendments, particularly the right to free speech, as they affected the lives of characters. His interests were embodied., if in early form, in his senior thesis, which was so unusual that his politics professor had to call in a colleague from the English department to help him mark it. While the politics professor gave him a B, the English professor gave him an A. More than good enough for David to graduate in 1979.

THE

DUTIFUL

LITTLE

ATTORNEY

The next year David returned to his home town for law school. Unlike his creation Ally McBeal, David did not go

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to prestigious Harvard or one of the four or five other elite American law schools. Instead, he was one of about 300 students entering the Boston University School of Law. While many Boston Law School students came from prestigious undergraduate universities like David's Princeton, Boston was not usually their first choice. Instead, it was a good school for achieving students who couldn't quite make it to the top tier. In David's case, economics may also have been a factor since it was cheaper for him to live with his maternal grandmother while attending school. Established over a hundred years earlier, Boston Law School was housed in a rather ugly building that was the subject of constant student complaints for its poor heating and lack of facilities such as decent lounges. Interestingly, it was known for emphasizing legal writing skills and put on special writing seminars for the students. Writing a legal brief, however, is about as far as one can get from penning anything creative or entertaining. In David's day it was also a school with a highly competitive atmosphere, pitting students against one another for the highest marks and awards. Later graduates sometimes complained that the school encouraged students to sign on with big (and rich) law firms after graduation rather than pursue less remunerative but perhaps more socially significant careers in public interest law. These conflicting interests — making money versus fighting important legal battles — would certainly fuel many Kelley narratives in L.A. Law as the more idealistic lawyers clashed with the more mercenary ones. And it would all but define the difference between the crusading lawyers on The Practice and the firm founded by Richard Fish and John Cage in Ally McBeal for the sole purpose of making lots of money. Despite the pressure of a tremendous workload at law school, David didn't want to let his new hobby of writing vanish completely. So he contributed some straight-out

comedy sketches for the law school follies, the annual theatrical review performed by students for the purpose of letting off a little steam by satirizing professors, classes, and their own future in the legal profession. For most students, writing or performing in the follies was a last chance to make fun of themselves and their chosen careers before the serious work of becoming real lawyers began. For David it was just the beginning. But at the time he had no inkling of that. He had dedicated himself since high school to a career in law and now he dutifully applied for jobs at Boston law firms. And upon graduation he became an associate (the usual starting position of salaried employee as opposed to a partner) of the medium-size, fifty-lawyer firm of Fine & Ambrogne. His position was in the litigation department, which meant that he would practise civil as opposed to criminal law. That didn't mean, however, that David wouldn't have a chance to stand up in a courtroom. As a litigator, it would be his job to represent clients in disputes with other parties, and if a dispute could not be resolved it would go to court as a law suit. For example, one of his clients was a bus company. Any time a driver got into some legal trouble, David would represent him. When he became a successful writer, David would have fun with his former colleagues at the firm by using their names as judges, muggers, rapists, and other characters. Later David would say that he suffered the usual delusions about what law practice was going to be like. What were they? "You're going to practise law in a firm where the cases are always exciting," he said, "the issues are of threshold nature, the trials are always dramatic, and you win most of the time. . . . And all the lawyers lead interesting lives." Well, another litigation lawyer by the name of Ally McBeal would say almost the identical thing. Nevertheless, David was perfectly content as a "dutiful little

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attorney," as he called himself, during his three years at Fine & Ambrogne. Nor was he doing badly financially, making about $70,000 a year. It seemed to everyone, including David himself, that he was at the beginning of a long and perfectly respectable legal career.

A

TWO-FINGER

TYPIST

Now in his late twenties and happy at his firm, David had no secret ambition to become a writer and was not casting around for a change of profession. But one day a story came to him. As a young lawyer fairly low on the ladder of seniority, he often had to go to court and sit in the motion section for an hour and a half waiting for his case to be called. Then he would stand before the judge and address the court "with all due deference" as he put it. But what might happen, he wondered, if instead of treating the judge and the courtroom with the expected respect, he "ranted and raved and did crazy things"? What would be the consequences, for his case, for himself, and for the court? What pushed David to begin was the feeling that only he could do this story. Also, the challenge of selling a screenplay excited him. No doubt it was a good thing that he wasn't really aware of the thousands of hopeful screenplay writers who get their scripts turned down over and over, if they are lucky enough even to find an agent or producer to read them. So David began to write. He began a first draft, writing in longhand on a yellow legal pad (a habit he retains to this day), spending time on weekends, evenings, and even while at court waiting for his case to be called. As he wrote, the story took further shape. A young Boston attorney, bored by the paperwork being assigned by the firm's stodgy partners, would find a way to trick

the firm — by hiding from them the notice of the courtdate until it was too late for anyone else to prepare — into giving him a real client to represent. Then he would win the case by using wild courtroom antics — screaming, grandstanding, even arguing about whether the man his client struck could be entered into the record as an "asshole." And his success in the case could lead to a much bigger one — a murder trial in which his hero would represent an icy aristocrat vaguely based on the infamous Claus Von Bulow. (This would be the first time that David would draw on news accounts of a trial for inspiration.) And wiiat could give the piece some heart? Perhaps his hero could develop moral qualms about his own tactics. And if it turned out that the young lawyer realized that his client really was guilty? How could he see that justice was done without being disbarred? Of course there would have to be a love interest. For his second draft, David decided to buy a word processor. He invested $1,200, hoping he wasn't throwing his money away, and began to type with two fingers. The script turned out chock full of furious speeches, funny moments,' and amusingo if unrealistic courtroom antics. Even so, it had more weaknesses than strengths, showing his lack of writing experience and knowledge of dramatic structure. Some characters, like the young lawyer's girlfriend, a pretty and idealistic childcare worker, would never rise above the level of a type. The hero's moral dilemmas would never really be fleshed out. All in all, it would later be noteworthy more as a way to judge just how much better a writer the young David Kelley would become. He typed three words on the title page: From the Hip. For most would-be screenwriters the story would have ended there. But a piece of luck came David's way. A family friend who also happened to be a client of Fine &

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Ambrogne was cofounding a new movie-production company. While established companies are usually drowning in scripts, the new company was hungry for projects to help launch it into the competitive and high-stakes movie business. A new company would have a hard time attracting established screenwriters or paying the fees that they demanded, but an unknown might be just what they were looking for. David gave the family friend his script to read and the man liked it enough to hand it on to his partners. The partners liked it too and offered David a one-year option contract and a small fee. Naturally, he said yes. A one-year option meant that the company had sole rights to the screenplay for one year, during which time it could give the script the green light for production or, as usually happens, simply let the contract expire. If the company decided to actually make the film, it would have to pay David $1^0,000 — not a fortune by Hollywood standards, but a respectable enough fee for a first-time writer from a smaller company. Besides, it was more than double his annual salary at the law firm. Without meaning to, David had become a paid writer. He had done almost the impossible — sold the first script he ever wrote, and at the first try. It was not until later, on his first trip to L.A. when he would notice the pile of scripts beside his cab driver from the airport, that David would realize how lucky he had been. Yes, he was lucky, but he was also shrewd. Using the option as bait, David decided to go fishing for a Hollywood agent. After all, if he could write one script, why not more? He found that agent in Marty Adelstein, who agreed to represent David in exchange for ten percent of anything David made. David went back to being a lawyer. It was Marty Adelstein's job to get him work as a writer, and the agent began sending around copies of From the Hip to show off his

new client's talent. One of the people he sent it to was a television producer who was already famous for creating a cop show called Hill Street Blues. His name was Steven Bochco.

THE

BOCHCO

STYLE

Born in 1943 and raised in the rough neighborhood of New York's Upper West Side (before the Lincoln Center redevelopment turned the neighborhood upper class), Steven Bochco was the son of a classical violinist. A drama major at unglamorous Carnegie Tech, he got his first television job immediately after graduation working for Universal Television. He learned his trade the hard way, writing filler material and then scripts, working as a writer, a story editor and finally a producer on dozens of shows such as Colombo as well as for television movies. But it was his creation of Hill Street Blues that brought a revolution to the small screen and that began a new kind of show that eventually became labeled as "quality television." The original idea for Hill Street Blues was Fred Silverman's, then the head of NBC. He had an idea for a cop show that combined elements from several previous shows and movies. One was the 1971 film The Hospital, directed by Arthur Hiller and written by perhaps the most famous television writer, Paddy Chayefsky, which used a large cast (including future L.A. Law cast member Richard Dysart) to

mix serious issues with wild comedy. Another was the more recent film Fort Apache, The Bronx, which had a setting Silverman liked — a police precinct in an urban ghetto. Also thrown into the mix of Silverman's ideas were the shows Police Story, which mixed cop stories with private lives, the ensemble comedy of Barney Miller, and the filmlike style of the television version of M*A*$*H.

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The pilot episode, airing in January 1981, confused many viewers with its hand-held camera work, its large number of actors, its overlapping realistic dialogue, and its multiple story lines that didn't neatly conclude at the end of the hour. It even had unusual settings, such as the precinct lavatory where intimate conversations often took place at the urinals. (This was the predecessor of the unisex bathrooms of Ally McBeal.) While the first season's ratings were very low (the show placed eighty-third out of ninetyseven series), critical raves kept it on the air as well as the fact that third-place NBC had nothing to replace it with. What it did have was a large number of viewers who were eighteen to forty-nine and had education and money — just the demographics to make advertisers happy. These were the same viewers that David Kelley's own shows would later attract. Of course in time the show became a popular as well as critical hit, and viewers made an appointment with their television sets so as not to miss an episode. As the novelist Joyce Carol Gates wrote about the show, watching it was "as intellectually and emotionally provocative as a good book." Indeed, Hill Street Blues was almost more of a novel than a traditional television show, and viewers developed strong loyalties to the characters as they changed and grew. And one of those loyal viewers was the young David Kelley, first in law school and then as a beginning lawyer. What he especially liked about it was the realism, the involving stories, and writing that didn't bring attention to itself. As a New York Times journalist would later write, Steven Bochco "virtually invented the contemporary ensemble drama form that has now become Mr. Kelley's signature." The journalist did not mention the significant differences, however. David would come to prefer a smaller, more intimate cast and episodes that were, despite some continuing story lines, more self-contained. And of

course the characters that David would create were very much his own. Also, David would never be as interested in challenging the networks' standards departments, which censored explicit language and images. The simple reason was that David found other ways to tell his stories. But the journalist was right; David's shows were direct descendants of the shows of Steven Bochco. That is until Ally McBeal, his first truly innovative drama, the one that other producers would in their turn begin to imitate. With Hill Street Blues and Bochco's next series, St. Elsewhere, "quality television" was born. Critics often contrasted such shows against the lowbrow fare created by the likes of Aaron Spelling (Charlie's Angels) and the mass appeal entertainments of the past. What made such television possible was, ironically enough, the decline of network television itself. Now that cable gave viewers far more choices, not to mention the arrival of VCRS, viewership was becoming far more fragmented. No longer were all the households of America tuning in to watch / Love Lucy or some other enormously popular show. Instead, the networks began to seek audiences that might not be as large, but that -were more desirable to advertisers because of their education and disposable income. As television critic Robert J. Thompson has written, a "quality television" show is driven not by network executives or even producers but by the creator/writer who is given unusual freedom. The writing itself is at a higher level than other shows, demanding greater concentration from viewers. Controversial topics, often very current (and usually accompanied by liberal attitudes), are often the subject of story lines. Realism is usually the predominant style. Steven Bochco was eventually fired by MTM, the company that produced Hill Street Blues, and it was partly in revenge that he was hungry to produce a new hit show. All of the major production studios were anxious to work O

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with him, and he agreed to a deal with Twentieth Century Fox, the studio that would later produce David's shows. The origin of L.A. Law is a strange one. o o One day Bochco read in a newspaper that NBC chairman Grant Tinker asked him to create a television show based on the 1982 Paul Newman film, The Verdict. In fact, Tinker hadn't asked him but the two talked and agreed that a lawyer show would be a good idea. Bochco summed up well the richness of law as a subject: "The law . . . has everything — good and bad, right and wrong. . . . The law is human behavior in the crucible of stress — emotional, financial, moral, sometimes even physical stress." Because he himself wasn't a lawyer, he decided to partner up with Terry Louise Fisher, a former Los Angeles District attorney who had been the producer/writer of Cagney Ik^Lacey. Now all they needed were writers who knew the law. At the time, however, not every lawyer was trying to turn himself into another John Grisham and talent was hard to find. So when Marty Adelstein sent Bochco a copy of From the Hip, he read it eagerly and picked up the phone to call David in Boston. Would he mind flying out to Los Angeles for a meeting? The call was completely unexpected, but David booked off work and flew out to L.A. The interview lasted not a day but a week, during which the two men hit it off. Bochco made a prediction to David that the young lawyer was definitely going to go places as a writer. Despite David's almost total lack of experience, Bochco offered him a job, not only as a full-time staff writer on the show but also as story editor. At the time, a script writer would earn about $ 19,000 for an episode, while a story editor would start at $2,000 a week. After David's success as a creator, Bochco would naturally be asked about his discovery. "He not only had a gifted

legal mind," he said of David, "but he was deft at writing characterization." Not fully believing in what was happening, David asked his law firm for a leave of absence. For months the firm retained his office hoping that he would return. At about the same time, David heard that From the Hip was going into production. As he liked to joke later, the $1^0,000 fee more than paid for the word processor.

L .A. LAW: "TOO IMPROBABLE TO BE B E L I E V E D " As Bochco and Fisher explained to David, L.A. Law was an ensemble show like Hill Street Blues. But while they also wanted it to mix humor with serious issues, they imagined the show as being much more fun and colorful rather than showing the grim underbelly of life. Among the characters were the womanizing divorce lawyer Arnie Becker (with Corbin Bernsen cast in the role), the smoldering Victor Sifuentes (Jimmy Smits), the handsome but dour Michael Kuzak (Harry Hamlin), husband and wife Stuart Markowitz and Ann Kelsey (Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry), the emotionally vulnerable district attorney Grace Van Owen (Susan Dey), and a secretary named Roxanne (Susan Ruttan). Years later at the firm where Ally McBeal works, David would also have a husband and wife (Billy and Georgia), a district attorney (Renee), and would make Ally's secretary Elaine an important supporting role. As a writer for Cosmopolitan would express it, at the law firm of McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney, and Kuzak, "men were ambitious, women aggressive, and both were successful. Yet neither sex had a firm grasp on that elusive concept called happiness." The same description could almost be

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applied to Ally McBeal, yet the two shows would feel very different. One inherent drawback of a lawyer show as opposed to a cop show was that action could not be supplied by car chases, jumping over roofs, or firing guns — at least not usually. A lawyer show was mostly about people talking, which meant that good writing had to hold the viewers' interest and carry the stories along. At the best of times writing for a television series is done in a pressure-cooker atmosphere. With twenty-two hours or more of air-time to fill a season, the writers are under the gun simply to produce enough material. Besides David, L.A. Law had two other staff writers, one of whom (Marshall Goldberg) was also a lawyer. (An associate producer on the show named Bob Breech was a lawyer as well; he would later come to work for David E. Kelley Productions.) So David would sit in a room on the lot of Twentieth Century Fox with Bochco, Fisher, and the two other writers, working out story ideas. In fact, Bochco already had strong story "arcs" that he "wanted to run through the season's episodes. David's role then, like the other writers, was not so much to create as to do the slogging work for the creators — to actually write the dialogue that Bochco and Fisher would write if they had the time and inclination to do it themselves. But David's inexperience showed, and the other writers too were not fully satisfying their demanding bosses. After a half-dozen scripts were written, Fisher said, "Steve and I have a vision, but we're having trouble communicating that vision to the other writers and getting them to replicate it." While Bochco praised their writing skills, he noted that David and his cohorts were not yet "good mimics." Only later would David be allowed to bring in his own vision of the show. Although David was so new at the game that he didn't even know in how many ways he was ignorant, at least he

had a real knowledge of the law to draw on. At the same time, lie learned from his superiors that while accuracy about legal procedure was desirable, the story came first and realism had to give way to drama. Fortunately, he was a fast learner. He learned about more than just writing. For example, since the law firm was supposed to be a rich and glitzy one, the offices had to be lavish; so the sets cost a million dollars to build. Characters were given carefully chosen wardrobes — Arnie Becker in flashy designer suits, the patriarchal Leland McKenzie in equally expensive but more conservative attire. While the suits worn by the women lawyers were fairly conservative, they were stylish and pricey — the forerunners of Ally's controversial short skirts. As the first season progressed, David became more familiar and comfortable with the writing process. Every Monday morning he and the other writers would meet with Bochco and Fisher in Bochco's office. The day would be spent throwing out story ideas and weaving them into episode outlines. Each episode had to have three or four stories, with one "tentpole courtroom story" as David called it, to "power" the episode forward. Fisher had lots of story ideas herself, while Bochco was a master editor who could take someone else's idea and develop it in surprising and dramatic ways. And each good story line was carefully challenged: did it work harmoniously with the other plots, would the characters make those kinds of decisions? David described this collaborative process as casual rather than organized, as "protracted and very inexact." It was very different from the method he would come to prefer for his own shows, which was basically to simply hide away and write. David and his co-writers would do the actual writing (a script usually had twenty-five or so scenes), but for the «/

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first couple of years, the two co-creators would do a rewrite on every script to make sure the tone was what they wanted. Many of the plots were suggested by actual cases that the writers found in recent law journals and newspapers, although the writers always used them as inspiration for their own fictional purposes. From the beginning they dealt in controversial issues — rape, AIDS, homosexual rights, and more. It was on L.A. Law that David learned how controversial issues could make exciting — and talked about — drama. And perhaps he began developing his own fearlessness in the face of critics. As Fisher said, "We've managed to offend everyone. If we don't, we must not be presenting anything of much interest." Among those critics were many lawyers who, despite becoming hooked on the show, didn't like the way the profession was depicted. The lawyers at McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney, and Kuzak were often manipulative, shamelessly self-promoting, money-grabbing, and egotistical. As Newsweek put it, the show "raised lawyer-bashing to a national spectator sport." That is not to say they weren't also charming and even sexy — otherwise, why would millions •want to watch th,em? But as David said while working on the show, people didn't always realize "we do not endorse all the actions and statements that our characters make." This was a confusion among viewers that would dog him during the first season of Ally McBeal as well. Besides the issues, L.A. Law was of course notable for its particular brand of humor. Bochco had an absurd sense of reality at times, which resulted in some bizarre story lines. In one a man who was terminally ill wanted to have his corpse freeze dried and put on display on his front lawn. A woman sued her husband for divorce, claiming that he had cheated on her with a female pig. A dentist who dated the handsome Victor Sifuentes insisted on flossing his teeth. (Could this be the origin of Ally McBeal's Judge

Happy Boyle and his obsession with teeth?) David's own loopy sense of humor was fostered on the show and contributed to it. And along with humor there was sex. As one of the other o writers said, instead of police chases and shoot-em-up action L.A. Law had sex to break up the talk. Some of the stories were simply fun, such as the first season's famous "venus butterfly" episode in which a bigamist taught Stuart Markowitz a sexual technique that brought women to extraordinary climaxes. (The idea sounds like David's, but it was actually Fisher's.) Others were more serious, but in every story the show acknowledged just how driven most people are by sexual and emotional needs, and how strange (but not necessarily immoral) those desires can sometimes be. David's very first script credit for L.A. Law, episode seven of the first year, was called "Raiders of the Lost Bark." It interwove a number of plots, but one is particularly notable as a precursor to Ally McBeal. In the story a female TV anchor is fired from her job after undergoing a mastectomy. Refusing a settlement, the woman comes to the firm to sue the station for wrongful dismissal. Over ten years later, he would write an Ally episode in which a female TV anchor is dismissed because she is considered too old and no longer an object of sexual desire for male viewers. She too sues for wrongful dismissal — and refuses a settlement. Later David would often rework an old story idea, finding a fresh approach and something new to say — much in the way a novelist returns again and again to certain themes and stories. In another first-season episode, cowritten with Jacob Epstein, a case involves bull semen and a certain joke involves the actual container of semen. In Ally McBeal, Ally and Georgia are stopped in a car by two policemen who spot an odd-looking container on the dashboard; it contains human semen from a prisoner trying

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to impregnate his wife. For season two of L.A. Law David penned an episode called "The Wizard of Odds" guest starring a lawyer nicknamed "Mighty Mouse" because he was a dwarf who used his diminutive size to win the sympathy of juries. In Ally McBeal Ally goes against a nineyear-old lawyer prodigy who is also tiny because of a medical problem and who uses his age to win sympathy. In season three David and Steven Bochco co-wrote an episode ("Hey, Lick Me Over") involving a man charged with sticking his tongue into a woman's ear in a movie theater. Ally has to defend a man for tickling a woman's feet without her permission. Steven Bochco and the network expected the show to gradually win an audience, but in fact it was an instant hit. The early ratings were good and in its first year it received twenty Emmy nominations, winning outstanding drama series and four others. By the second year it reached the top ten. While Hill Street Blues had attracted mostly male viewers, L.A. Law attracted a lot of females, just as David's shows would later. Individual episodes were often talked about over office water coolers, and applications for law schools across the country took a sudden jump. While David was still learning the ropes at L.A. Law, his first movie went into production. The production company, called Indian Neck, along with the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, had decided that David's script needed a going over. So they gave it to a more experienced writer, Bob Clark, to both re-write and to direct. Best known at that time for writing and directing the lowbrow high-school comedy Porky's, Clark was hardly the most sensitive choice for the task, with his much more sophomoric and frankly vulgar sense of humor. No doubt much of the immature hijinks and foolish horseplay, and the feeling that the film is descending into noisy chaos, come from his writing and direction.

Most of the casting of the film was good: Elizabeth Perkins as the love interest, Darren McGavin as a senior partner and the hero's nemesis, and especially the gaunt English actor John Hurt as the murderer who needs defending. Unfortunately, the starring role went to Judd Nelson, an actor with little charisma whose idea of acting outrageously, probably encouraged by the director, was to shout as loud as he could. The film used Boston as a setting, and the opening shot of the awakening city and then of Elizabeth Perkins asleep in bed is reminiscent of openings of some Ally episodes. Otherwise the direction was workmanlike at best and the film had a modest budget, cheesy look to it, not helped by a goofy musical soundtrack more appropriate for a television sitcom. Instead of bringing out the best qualities of David's first flawed script, the production brought out the worst. If David was disappointed when he saw the film, he must have been glad to be working in television, where writers' words were actually more respected. He could not have been surprised when the film got lousy reviews and quickly sunk out of sight. The well-known and popular critic Leonard Maltin rated it as a "bomb." Although David was not through with movies, this first experience could hardly have encouraged him. In any case, he was too busy working on L.A. Law to worry much. As the show succeeded, so did David. And Bochco's confidence in him rose. For the second season David was promoted to executive story editor and in mid-season became a co-producer. Then when Terry Louise Fisher left the show in 1988 (in a controversial partnership break-up with Bochco), David became the supervising producer and second-in-command. He had a large and elegant office equipped with a rowing machine, exercise bike, and miniature pool table. At the age of thirty-two, he was earning about $420,000 a year. Meanwhile, discovering

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that he was most creative when under the pressure of time, David wrote like crazy; he scripted or co-scrip ted two out of three episodes during the first five years of the show. In one year he wrote eighteen of twenty-three episodes, a virtually unheard of productivity for a television writer, most of whom manage no more than four or five episodes a season at best. When Bochco decided to leave L.A. Law in the fourth season to create other shows, he appointed David as executive producer in his place. The result was, during the season when most hit shows begin to lose steam, that L.A. Law boasted even better episodes and higher ratings. Also more Emmy awards, including two writing awards for David in consecutive seasons. His salary was heading towards $£0,000 a week, but David was earning every penny of it for the network. Indeed, after David would leave the show in 1992, it would seriously decline in quality and the ratings would begin to slip. As Newsday critic Marvin Kitman later wrote, "The difference between good and bad L.A. Law . . . was David Kelley." Not bad for a guy who hadn't even written a single script just a few years before. While he was making a lot of money, he was working too many hours to lead a Hollywood lifestyle, which in any case did not attract him. "I've only been to the beach maybe three times in two years," he said. "I still don't surf; I'm not into analysis; and I don't go to crazy parties." David had become a known figure in the industry, but only now did the general public begin to hear about him. The first major profile of David was published in the New York Times in February 1990. He was thirty-three years old. As the reporter wrote: "If somebody wrote Mr. Kelley's story in a script for L.A. Law, it would very likely be rejected: too improbable to be believed." The soft-spoken David modestly told the reporter, "I think of myself as a writer now."

CREATED BY

DAVID E KELLEY

While he was working on I.A law, Bochco asked David if he would help him develop one of his new television shows. Co-created by Bochco and David, Doogie Howser, M.D. began airing on ABC and turned out to be a solid success. In it the young actor Neil Patrick Harris played a child prodigy, a sixteen-year-old resident physician in a hospital. A fairly small show, involving Doogie, his best friend, his girl, and his wise father (played by James B. Sikking of Hill Street Blues and later Brooklyn South), it was sweetly comic and a touch sentimental. Also very likable, as its audience (many of them kids) discovered. While there wasn't much about the show that was typical of David's talent, or of Bochco's, it did use one device that David must have been intrigued by. At the end of each episode Doogie would write a diary entry on his computer, expressing his inner thoughts. This was an inner monologue that helped to reveal the character, just as Ally's voiceovers would. Doogie Howser, M.D. was also David's first experience in the genre of the medical show. David himself decided to leave LA. Law at the end of the 1990-91 season. Five years on one program was long

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enough, and he now felt eager and confident enough to create his own show. L.A. Law would go into a slump after his departure, and he and Bochco would both return as "creative consultants" in 1992, helping the show to survive another couple of years. But David's heart was really in creating his own show, which was due to begin airing that fall.

BEHIND

PICKET

FENCES

In fact he had conceived of Picket Fences some three years earlier, his imagination suddenly aflame with the idea of a setting that would take the leading role. "If I'm forced to nutshell it," he would say just before it began, "the show, more than anything else, is about community. It's about family, the workplace, and the town integrated into this community." That community was the fictional town of Rome, Wisconsin, home to thirty thousand souls, where the police dispatcher knows everyone's business and is happy to tell it. Life in Rome would be exaggerated, odd, even "distorted" to use David's word, but only so as to reflect real society more vividly. It would mix tragedy and farce, strangeness and normality. As the New York Times would call it, it was "a crossroads of the surreal and serious." As the idea became concrete, it centered on the Brock family. Because the father, Jimmy Brock (to be played by Tom Skerritt), was the town sheriff it would be in part a cop show. And (as critic Robert J. Thompson has noted) because the mother, Jill (Kathy Baker), was a doctor, it would also be a medical show. With Judge Henry Bone (Ray Walston, later to appear as a judge on Ally) and defence attorney Douglas Wambough (Fyvush Finkel), it could include the kinds of legal plots that David had been

writing for L.A. Law. It would also be a family show, about the Brock's two kids. An unusual aspect of the show that would develop was its interest in religious subjects. Or more specifically the question of faith in a time of uncertainty and science. Religious figures — priests, rabbis, and ministers — would make their appearance, and questions of God, of how to bring up children, and of personal faith would haunt the characters. David hoped that by raising such questions, the show would cause viewers to re-evaluate their own views on religion and other subjects. To him, if the first main character was the town itself, then the second was the audience at home. To first commentators the show seemed to recall a couple of other recent television successes. One was David Lynch's bizarre Twin Teaks, with its eccentric characters in a rural setting and its mix of mystery, comedy, and drama. The pilot episode of Ticket Fences would revolve around a murder, just as the opening of Twin Peaks did. The other show was Northern Exposure, set in a town in Alaska, with another eccentric ensemble cast and an interest in new-age spiritualism. David himself acknowledged these influences; he was still new enough at the business to need such models. Even so, Picket Fences was distinctly his own. David felt from the start that he wanted to work on the show for at least three or four years, unlike some creators who abandon ship as soon as a show is established but still rake in the weekly residuals. The characters were peculiarly his own and would need his guiding hand to fully come alive. He had no plans to hire writers and collaborate the way Bochco did, or assign episodes to other writers as was always done, but to write the series almost completely by himself. For the first time, David had to pitch his idea to the networks. But although he was a novice, he hardly needed

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to beat down executive doors; his success on L.A. Law made him more than welcome at all the networks. Although he figured that CBS wouldn't want it as they already had Northern Exposure, he didn't leave the network out but met with Jeff Sagansky, CBS'S president of entertainment. Sagansky had been at NBC during the time of Hill Street Blues and knew a quality television idea when he heard one, even if it didn't sound like an instant hit. Sagansky not only said yes, but offered David a three-series deal. He even wanted to build Friday night around it. His decision was heartily supported by Peter Tortoreci, senior vicepresident of CBS : " Of all the people doing one-hour drama, we think he is the next real superstar." David signed. Once the deal was inked, David had to write the pilot. He did it in a remarkable two weeks, but when he brought it in to the network the executives persuaded him to expand it to two hours in order to give the show a big launch. Once the pilot script was done, it began to circulate to actors David was interested in for the regular roles. He was particularly keen on snatching film actors for Jimmy and Jill Brock, but film actors were highly wary of "stooping" to do a television show. David sent the script to Kathy Baker, who was known for the films Street Smart, Clean and Sober, and Edward Scissorhands, even though her agent didn't want her to do television. But she read it and fell in love with the doctor role. "I thought, 'This is better than 90 percent of the film scripts I read,' " she later recounted. Baker met and liked David, but her agent turned down three offers as not being lucrative enough. Still, the part kept nagging at Baker and finally she told her agent to accept the last offer. Her acceptance helped to convince another film actor, Tom Skerritt, to put aside his reservations. (Among Skerritt's many pictures was Steel Magnolias, which also featured a young Dylan McDermott, later to

star In David's The Practice.) When Skerritt went to meet David, he found himself facing a boyish-looking man who appeared five or ten years younger than his thirty-six years. "When I first saw him," Skerritt laughed, "I thought, This is all well and good, fella, but why don't you introduce me to your boss?' " The young-looking David, who liked to wear jeans and bright Hawaiian-style shirts, might not have been leading a Hollywood lifestyle, but he was having a Hollywood-style romance — with the actress Marlee Matlin. While the pair broke up not long before Picket Fences went to air, David cast her in a guest role as a new-age Robin Hood who arrives in Rome to rob a bank. David's virtual home while making the show was a Twentieth Century Fox backlot in West Los Angeles. Here were the sets on sound stages side-by-side — the Brocks' house, the town jail cells. But if the show became almost his whole waking life, he wasn't complaining. "I enjoy the frenzy," he said at the start of the season, "and 1 write and think better amid all the madness than I do in isolation." That first season turned out to be a rocky one for David. The overall rating for Picket Fences placed it a poor seventythird out of ninety-seven shows. Critics were divided; while some adored its quirkiness and odd mixing of serious issues and crazy humor, others such as EntertainmentWeekly called it one of the worst shows on television. Even so CBS , remembering the slow start of Hill Street Blues, renewed the show for a second season. No doubt the executives were convinced in part by the three Emmys it won — for best dramatic series, and best actor and actress. But while the show did about i o percent better in year two, it leveled off again in the third. Still CBS renewed it, not only because of the good demographics of its viewers but also because it was a prestige show.

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David Kelley, Kathy Baker, and Tom Skerritt LISA R O S E / G L O B E PHOTOS,

INC.

The first season's lousy ratings did shake David's confidence some. He said ruefully, "When you're beaten by a re-run of a Perry Mason show, that's a bit sobering." So he made some changes, just as he would later listen — at least

a little — to viewer complaints that Ally was too much of a whiner. "People would be watching this seemingly benign entertainment vehicle," he said of the first season,' O * "and then they'd realize it wasn't so silly and that, in fact, it was pretty serious stuff. They didn't know what to make of it." David was involved in the show as he had expected, writing or co-writing almost every episode of the first three years. For better or worse, Ticket Fences, like other Kelley shows, would be the creative vision of one man. His attempted solution to the problem of audience size was to concentrate more on the dramatic stories and play down the quirky stuff. The plot of the second season opener had the mayor mortally shooting a car thief, resulting -in an exploration of taking the law into one's own hands. Other subjects of the season included sexual abuse and gun control. Not that the humor or lighter stories vanished completely. David explained the structure he employed this way: "Often we try to seduce the audience at the beginning that this is going to be fun, a romp or a ride, and then once the ride has begun to reveal some serious subject matter for them to think about." As one producer on the show noted shrewdly, David's stories were often about First Amendment issues: America is a land that worships freedom, but just how free can a person be before interfering with someone else? In one instance, for example, he wanted to examine the effects that the Anita Hill affair had on the general public's sexual conduct. Never did he have a lesson that he wanted to teach; instead, his aim was to find "story lines that raise moral or ethical questions without easy answers." The changes didn't make much difference in the size of audience — Ticket Fences simply never caught on with a large number of viewers — yet it had a dedicated following, many of whom considered it the best show on television.

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And once in a while it found itself the subject of national attention, if not of the magnitude that would later greet Ally McBeal. A second season episode called "Sugar and Spice" included an exploratory kiss between the Brock's sixteen-year-old daughter Kimberly and her friend Lisa. What actually caused the controversy and news coverage was CBS'S refusal to allow the scene as David had written it. As the papers noted indignantly, CBS was afraid that some affiliate stations with more conservative audiences would not run the episode. In fact, a previous episode in which a teenager was apparently made pregnant by her father was turned down by affiliates in Seattle and Salt Lake City. In the end David did change the scene so that the kiss took place in a darkened room and was heard rather than seen. Unlike his mentor Steven Bochco, David did not relish such fights. As he explained, the purpose of the episode was not to titillate but to put Kimberly's parents in a situation where their liberal values were suddenly challenged. Fans of Picket Fences will remember many other serious and surreal moments. A local production of The Wizard of Oz in which a very fat Dorothy dies of a heart attack backstage. A father and son playing "Duelling Banjos" on trombone and saxophone. A woman being murdered when she is pushed into a dishwasher along with her collector plates. A fat woman who killed her husband by sitting on him. (Stories about fat people, who are invisible on most television shows, run through David's series.) The discovery that cows were being used as surrogate mothers. A school teacher who was found out to be a transsexual. Nuns committing euthanasia. A Christmas show about a "virgin" pregnancy that pushed all the characters to reevaluate their religious beliefs. David Kelley could never be accused of turning out run-of-the-mill stories.

MICHELLE GOES

PFEIFFER

BOWLING

A sullen teenager growing up in Orange County, California, Michelle Pfeiffer had a job bagging groceries in a local market. She had genuine working-class origins as the daughter of an air-conditioningo contractor. Her mother o managed the house. The story of Michelle's rise out of the life she was born to began when she entered a local beauty contest. The judge was a talent agent who quickly signed her on and got her work in television commercials. After that came films: Grease 2, Scarface, The Witches of Eastwick, Married to the Mob. The slender blond with a pure unlined face and eyes of intense blue soon became known as one of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood. And unlike some male and female beauties, she was respected for her acting as well. Unlike David Kelley, Michelle's own early experience with the small screen had been dismal. In 1979 she had played the character of "Bombshell" in an Animal House spinoff called Delta House. The next year she tried a show about race-car-driver police called B.A.D. Cats. Both vanished almost instantly. Fortunately her film career took off, even if her private life wasn't nearly so successful. She had been married and divorced (to Thirtysomething actor Peter Horton) and then, at age thirty-five, had ended a three-year relationship with actor Fisher Stevens. That was why friends wanted to fix her up on a blind date with this television guy named David Kelley. Michelle felt awkward about going out alone with David but she agreed to a bowling party. The two hardly spoke ("We really had to work at making conversation," Michelle remembered) but afterwards he called her to go to a movie. It took only a few weeks for her to begin falling in love with him. But an early test of their feelings came when

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Michelle confided to him that she had recently begun the process of adopting a baby. "I thought, This one's not going to be going away soon, so I better tell him," she later recalled. While her intention had been to give birth first and then adopt, life just wasn't turning out that way and she didn't want to wait anymore. J That David happily accepted the idea of adoption helped to seal their romance. As a result, he was there from the start to become the father of baby Claudia. Claudia's christening was planned for November 1993 and Michelle sent out about seventy invitations to close friends and family. The day before the christening she phoned all the guests and cried, "Surprise! It's a wedding!" Michelle and David tied the knot and that very night their son John Henry was conceived. "He's so cute," Michelle has said about the hubby who sends her flowers, usually gardenias, every day. "I pinch myself every day. Whenever I go anywhere with him, I feel like the luckiest girl in the room." No matter how busy with his shows, David has always been sure to come home in the evenings and weekends to be with the family. And he seems to have no trouble mixing home and work life. Michelle marvels at his work habits. "He can sit down and write for twenty minutes and then come out and give the kids a bath and read them a story and then he'll go back into it." On at least one occasion Michelle has turned the tables and entered her husband's working life. In 1995 she

secretly taped a brief appearance in an episode of Picket Fences (she played a retiring spinster), arranging the shoot with the show's executive producer, Michael Pressman. David had no idea until he viewed the finished episode. Having Michelle as a wife has turned out to be a valuable resource for David in another way. He sometimes runs his ideas by her, especially when they involve women

characters. "I do give my opinion," Michelle has said, "and I think he respects my opinion. I guess it becomes advice if they listen to you." It is said that Michelle has had considerable influence on the character of Ally, and the fact that Calista Flockhart bears a slight resemblance to Michelle has only encouraged the rumor. Happy in love, happy in work. David Kelley was one lucky guy. But he was hardly about to rest on his laurels.

AN OF

ACCIDENTAL LOVE:

LABOR

CHICAGO

HOPE

Although Picket Fences was hardly a commercial success, CBS was still eager for David to continue fulfilling his deal with them and create another show. Networks have to fill a lot of hours each week and their insatiable hunger for programming can never be met by the small number of truly innovative and successful creators. David himself didn't feel ready to divide his concentration, but CBS pressured him; they wanted "product" and the sooner the better. In fact, they wanted a new show from David a full year before he was able to deliver. It was because of the network that he began his unusual practice of writing two different shows at the same time. The idea David came up with was a medical show. Doctor shows had a long and successful history on television and after the difficulties of Picket Fences, he wanted to prove that he could create a program that was unabashedly commercial. Also, he didn't expect to get as personally involved as he was on Picket Fences; his plan was to get the show on its feet, then hand it over to a producer named Michael Braverman half-way through the first season. Chicago Hope would not be a labor of love but a straight commercial assignment. What David didn't realize

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was that it was impossible for him not to get personally involved. The series was more conventional — at least in so far as the convention of quality television had been established by earlier shows. It would center on a big, sometimes coldly indifferent institution — a hospital. The large cast of characters would come into conflict because of their unstable relationships and high emotions. While they were larger than life because of their life-saving medical skills, they would also be only too human, with real flaws and idiosyncrasies. Story lines would continue from week to week. Like Picket Fences, the show would be produced by the company he had created, David E. Kelley Productions. Running a company was not David's strong suit. How could it be, for someone who hated to delegate and so tried to write all his shows himself? And he had no desire to create a bustling industry like Bochco had. (Indeed, an attempt to produce someone else's show — The Pastor's Wife, from the creators of Northern Exposure — was a flop.) Instead, he put together a separate crew for each show, with him sprinting back and forth between them. The network suits were anxious to get Chicago Hope on the air as there weren't any other medical shows at that time. Casting went ahead: Hector Elizondo as Chief Surgeon Phillip Watters, E.G. Marshall as the father figure Arthur Thurmond, Mandy Patinkin as the brilliant but arrogant Jeffrey Geiger, Adam Arkin as the straight-laced Aaron Shutt. All in all it was a striking cast with some familiar faces that would draw in curious viewers. One of the supporting roles, the hospital lawyer Alan "The Eel" Birch, was given to Peter MacNicol, who David would later call on again for the role of John Cage on Ally McEeal. MacNicol's role on Chicago Hope was a small one at first but in time he became one of the most interesting charac-

ters on the show. MacNicol would leave the show in 199^ at the same time that David Kelley decided to write fewer episodes. Without David's words, MacNicol figured, the legal stories on the show would just not be as good. The stories that made up the pilot and first episode gave a clear sense that this would be another David Kelley show mixing off-kilter comedy and serious ethical questions. An elderly patient turned out to have a brain tumor. A pair of siamese-twin babies had to be treated. (A nurse said of them: "They seem quite attached to one another.") Dr. Geiger wheeled a dead body away from a grief-stricken husband in order to conduct an experiment. A fight with a health insurance company over coverage. The medical details were shown in Ogruesome detail: an open heart 1 cavity, the physical connection between the Siamese twins. Neither David nor the network could know that Chicago Hope's premiere in fall 1994 would pit it directly against another medical show set in Chicago — ER. While it was ER which turned out to be the monster hit, quickly making it to number one, many reviewers preferred Chicago Hope. People Weekly had some criticisms — the ethical issues were too predominant, the doctors too saintly — but it praised the show overall. "Intelligent, fleet, emotionally complex and lightly dusted with Kelley's celebrated sense of the absurd. . . ." The reviewer for Entertainment Weekly found it manipulative at times but liked it better than both ER and Picket Fences. During this first year of Chicago Hope and third of Picket Fences, David found himself living an exhaustingo schedule. o Michael Braverman was supposed to take over Chicago Hope by episode six, but by episode ten David was still there. He had become involved in the ongoing stories as they developed and didn't think it was fair to the show to take himself out. At some point he had to make a conscious decision to stick with both shows until the end of the ?

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season. The amount of writing he did — about twenty scripts for each — was unheard of. Having two shows on the air at once allowed David to try something unusual: a crossover episode. Since he was writing both of them, and they were both on the same network (making permission easy to get), he could cause the characters of one fictional world to pass magically into another. And so in November 1994, on an episode of Picket Fences, Dr. Jill Brock took the lawyer Douglas Wambaugh to Chicago Hope hospital to undergo some medical tests. It was David's first crossover and it was fun to do. Also, it helped bring the viewers of one show over to sample another. In fact, David wanted to try it again, only with a show that he didn't control. One day in that same season he ran into Chris Carter, the creator/producer/writer of The X-Files, in the parking lot of Twentieth Century Fox. While these two gifted men had different styles and tastes, they had some traits in common: strong personal visions, the courage to take risks, and a commitment to their shows which meant writing as many episodes as possible. At the time The X-Files was in its second season and had a cult following, but it was soon to break out as a major hit. By coincidence their shows followed one another on the same night (but on different networks) and they started talking about a story that could begin on The X-Files and conclude during the following hour on Picket Fences. So Carter wrote his script and gave it to David who liked it and decided to continue where it left off. David Duchovny, the star of The X-Files, would visit Rome, Wisconsin,' to investigate rumors that cows were beingo o injected with alien DNA. Unfortunately, David's network nixed the idea; partypooper CBS did not want to help out a rival network's show. David used his script but wrote Duchovny out of it. The irony, of course, is that the cross-

over would probably have helped Picket Fences more than The X-Files.

On both shows David was still honing his skill at balancing serious issues with more entertaining fare. He praised CBS for rarely interfering with his scripts, even one on abortion. David himself was learning the limitations that are imposed not by the network but by the audience. After all, people turn on series television for pleasure, not education. "There are times I will hesitate because of the entertainment question," he said during the year. "For example, a show about child molestation is very difficult to do. It's not that I'm afraid of the subject matter, it's just that it's a very distasteful arena and you've got to be cognizant of the fact that your audience wants to be entertained and is entitled to be entertained. . . . You've got to honor your relationship with your audience." David did believe that creators like himself had to lead rather than follow when it came to choosing subject matter. But he was admirably modest in not believing he could change the world or that he had a lesson to spoon-feed his viewers. "You should not forget," he said, "that the people who are watching your shows get their richest experiences and most educational experiences not on a television show." The frustrating aspect of the year was that David had no time to think about the stories of both shows over the long term and so direct where they might lead to in the second or third seasons. Also, neither show was particularly successful that year, with Chicago Hope being trounced by the flashier ER. By the end of the year David decided he had had enough. He stepped down as executive producer of both shows. In three years he had written more than sixty episodes of Picket Fences; now it needed new blood and fresh ideas in order to go on. As for Chicago Hope., he had never intended to stay.

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Not that he planned to desert either show, however. He would still write a few episodes each year and act as a consultant. By the time his new shows The Practice and Ally McBeal were shooting, Picket Fences would be off the air, but he would still act as a consultant for Chicago Hope, occasionally visiting the set on the other side of town. The older show even gave a nod of greeting to one of the new ones. In a spring 1998 episode of Chicago Hope the character played by Mark Harmon noticed a television on. The show? Ally McBeal, showing a scene with John Cage, played by Peter MacNicol who of course had once been a lawyer on Chicago Hope. "Gee," Mark Harmon remarked in passing, "that opuy looks familiar." J As if David wasn't busy enough writing two television series, he agreed to take on a movie project too. Perhaps the idea of adapting a play for the screen — Michael Brady's To Gillian on Her 3Jth Birthday — seemed like a relatively easy way to get a second crack at the big screen. Probably the casting of his wife Michelle Pfeiffer — not as a lead but in an important supporting role — had something to do with it. It seems unlikely Michelle would have done the film without David's involvement. Gillian is basically a romance with a touch of comedy. A Boston teacher named David Lewis is so distraught by the death of his beautiful wife that he retreats to a beachside house, refusing to work, see other women, or recognize the unhappiness of his teenage daughter. What holds him back are the visions he has of his dead wife, who "appears" on the beach at night to talk to him as if she were still alive. What might have appealed to David was the idea of a man's absolute devotion to a woman — the sort of ideal that Ally McBeal will look for. The rest of the script was fairly mechanical, including a fight over custody for the daughter between David and his sister, but some of the emotion was touching and there were lines of genuine

sharp humor that sound something like the dialogue of Ally. Released by Sony Pictures in the fall of 1996, the film starred Peter Gallagher as David, Picket Fences's Kathy Baker as his sister, and Claire Danes (star of the critically acclaimed but unsuccessful television series My So-Called Life) as the daughter. Michelle Pfeiffer played the apparition of David's wife and, well, it's not hard to understand why a man might not get over her. What's notable about the production is its use of old pop songs such as Billy, Don't Be a Hero and You Make Me Feel Like Dancing which the characters dance and sing to something in the manner of The Big Chill. David was on his way towards discovering a more innovative use of pop music for Ally. The reviews of To Gillian on Her 3Jth Birthday weren't the sort to make David the most sought-after screenwriter in Hollywood. Variety called it "a bargain-basement Ghost" more suitable for the "video bin." But other critics noted its sentimental appeal. Vogue said that it was "soppy" but the reviewer cried anyway. David's imagination, he asserted, "isn't yet large enough to conquer the big screen." But that was all right. After all, David Kelley's conquering of the small screen had really only just begun.

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THE PRACTICE: THE DARK SIDE OF THE LAW

David Kelley spends far more years nurturing his shows than most creators, and three and a half years passed between the start of Chicago Hope and his next new show. Fie had branched far from his own personal experience in creatingO the strange town of Rome and the overheated O environment of a hospital. Now he would go back to what he knew best: the law. Of course he had never completely left it; both Picket Fences and Chicago Hope used legal stories and had supporting characters who were lawyers. But law had not been front and center since his start on L.A. Law. L.A. Law had to be the point of comparison for any legal show that David might do. But instead of trying to imitate it — and if there's one thing David can never be accused of it's simply reproducing an old successful idea — he decided to create its mirror image. Instead of high-priced lawyers in luxurious offices working on behalf of rich clients, he would make a show about lawyers at the bottom of the feeding chain. The firm at the heart of The Practice

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would be what David called "disenfranchised lawyers serving a disenfranchised part of society." The lawyers would be dedicated, obsessive workaholics who had chosen not to trade in their ideals for a skyscraper office window and two hundred grand a year. (Not that the temptation wasn't lurking around the corner.) Idealistic, trying to act according to the dictates of their consciences, they would be confronted by the real world of law — compromise, expedience, even corruption — and challenged to maintain those ideals. The firm where they worked would be hampered in every way — understaffed, underfunded, and with inadequate and unglamorous office space. In fact, the firm would be in precarious financial straits precisely because of the kinds of cases the lawyers chose to take on. At the center of this maelstrom would be the firm's founder, Bobby Donnell. With smoldering good looks and a dark past, he would often cause sexual fires to flare up in the females around him. His sometimes mutinous crew was made up of Ellenor Frutt, a warmhearted woman with a weight — and self-esteem — problem; Eugene Young, a former private investigator with an angry soul and a quick-burning fuse; Lindsay Dole, an ambitious young Harvard graduate; and (joining slightly later) Jimmy Berluti, a big, soft-bodied and soft-hearted man worried that he lacked the toughness necessary to win cases. Also included would be office manager Rebecca Washington and a government prosecuting attorney aggressively in pursuit of Bobby Donnell. The Practice was intended to be a more conventional legal show than Ally McBeal later would. The legal stories — and the ethical questions they raised — would come first and foremost. The private lives of the characters would come second, more as a break from the heavy stuff. It was almost as if David decided to take one aspect of his previous shows, their serious side, and concentrate solely on that.

"On L.A. Law and other shows," David explained, "the legal profession was shown as a glamorous place where people could live out their intellectual dreams. I wanted to create characters who still clung to the idealism of what law could be." While joining a big rich firm was certainly tempting for lawyers, especially since small firms were sometimes trying to merely keep solvent, it usually meant giving up on that idealism. But how to keep idealism alive in the harsh world? "Hopefully," he said, "the characters on this show will be alive with that kind of realism." David developed the idea for ABC, a network badly in need of a new hit. Network executives had a strongo feelin?o The Practice was just what they were looking for and they urged David to get it on the air by fall 1996. But David refused, not because the show wouldn't be ready but because of the complications of the programming schedule. Starting in the fall would mean the show had to air on Thursday nights opposite either Seinfeld or ER on NBC , two juggernaut shows that crushed everything in their paths. David was a veteran by now and knew better than let his show commit suicide. He was also in a position where he had the power to say no. That did not, however, solve the problem of just when The Practice would run. ABC agreed to begin it as a midseason show in March 1997, committing to eight episodes. The show would get a boost by replacing David's old friend Steven Bochco's hit, N.Y.P.D. Blue, while it went on hiatus for six weeks. After that The Practice would move to Wednesdays at ten. At least that was what David thought the network had promised. UNGLAMOROUS

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David knew the importance of good casting for the success of any show. No matter what words he wrote on the page,

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characters were brought to life by the actors who played them. Audiences related to a character, loving or hating him or feeling indifference, according to the degree that the actor could seduce them through his performance. Although casting a "name" actor did not mean automatic success, it could bring some star power to a show and cause viewers to take a look. Chicago Hope was aided by such familiar presences as Mandy Patinkin and Christine Lahti. Picket Fences had two movie actors, not "A" list major stars but still well known. For The Practice, however, David had a different idea. Star names might shine too brightly and destroy the sense of gritty realism that he wanted. Unknown actors, on the other hand, seemed to audiences to exist only as the characters they played. And so the actors he cast might be vaguely familiar from previous minor film and television spots, but that was all. Steve Harris got the role of Eugene, Camryn Manheim was Ellenor, Kelli Williams (who had appeared once on Picket Fences) became Lindsay, Michael Badalucco got to play "big head" Jimmy, and the office manager went to Lisa Gay Hamilton. And while Lara Flynn Boyle as the prosecuting attorney was slight and pretty, none could be considered glamorous or beautiful. None except for the actor chosen to play Bobby Donnell, the firm's founder. David knew that he needed to sell this series with somethingo more than heavy drama. He J needed a strong central figure, an arresting actor who would give the series just the touch of charisma it needed to hook viewers. He needed sex appeal. He found it in Dylan McDermott.

''LIQUID SEX'': DYLAN MCDERMOTT In his mid-thirties, six feet tall, with brilliant blue eyes, a strong jaw perpetually in need of a shave, and unruly black

hair, Dylan McDermott is sex appeal personified. "The man is liquid sex," Camryn Manheim, one of his costars has said. "He's a walking orgasm." The show's co-executive o o producer Jeffrey Kramer neatly summed up his appeal: "Women under 40 want to marry him, and women over 40 want to adopt him." Those women fans would sometimes send him nude photos of themselves. During the second season of The Practice he would be named by People Weekly one of the fifty most beautiful people in the world. Sigh. It wasn't always easy, having such looks. McDermott would too often be labelled a "poster boy" and given roles strictly on the strength of his jaw. "I don't always get taken seriously," he has complained. "Maybe if I looked like Woody Allen I would get all those great parts." But he finally got a great part as Bobby Donnell. Of Irish descent, named after the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, Dylan was five years old when his mother died. He and his sister were raised by their grandmother in Waterbury, Connecticut. Later he moved to New York to be with his father, the owner and bartender of the West Fourth Street Saloon. His father had remarried and Dylan's stepmother, Eve Ensler, was a playwright who gave him his first part in a children's play she wrote. "I saw in Dylan a very funny, passionate, and creative person who needed a place to direct that," she remembered. As for McDermott, after that one play, "I got hooked." (By a fluke, Ensler would eventually play a part in the feminist debate over Ally McBeal.) McDermott majored in theater at Fordham University, but only after graduation did he really become serious about his art, enrolling in the Neighbourhood Playhouse and studying with the well-known teacher Sanford Meisner. "When my mom died, I felt invisible psychologically," McDermott has said. "So from that point on, my goal was to be seen. Acting wasn't about making a

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career choice. It was almost like I had to become an actor to heal that scar." Aware of his natural good looks, he worked on his persona from an early age. After high school he began to model himself after Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, and Montgomery Clift — all charismatic men who were capable of showing a vulnerable side. As a young man he sometimes succumbed to too much drinking, but eventually learned how important it was to control such impulses. In the late seventies he became part of the Studio £4 crowd, wearing powder blue pants and two-tone shoes as he danced the night away. His taste in clothes would later mature, but he would remain a connoisseur of fine apparel. In fact, when he first spotted the woman who would become his wife and the mother of their daughter Colette (actress Shiva Afshar) in an L. A. coffee house, he ran home to change into his leather jacket in order to look more hip. McDermott made his film debut while in his early twenties, and not in a small role but a starring one. In the Vietnam picture Hamburger Hill he played a sergeant who gradually breaks down under the stress and violence. The story of the i o i st Airborne Division battling for ten days to take over a hill for no obvious advantage was written by a veteran named Jim Carabatsos and directed by John Irvin. Filming over three months in the Philippines was a tremendous strain for the young actor. "I had all these death scenes," he said after the film premiered in August 1987. "At six in the morning. As an actor I had nothing left to give. How much death can you see before you go crazy?" His intense performance won him his first profile, as a "New Face" in the New York Times. Despite such notice, great film roles did not pour in. McDermott continued to act in theater, performing offBroadway in one of his stepmother's plays, Scooncat. His next big chance was in 1989^ Steel Magnolias, a major film

loaded with stars: Sally Field, Shirley Maclaine, Dolly Parton, and Tom Skerritt. McDermott played Julia Roberts' husband, while off-camera the two began a romance and were soon engaged. The relationship didn't last (he gave her a basset hound when they parted) and for a while McDermott found himself in the annoying position of being famous as another of Julia Roberts' ex's. More film roles followed, but all failed to deliver stardom. Some, such as a Sharon Stone vehicle called Where Sleeping Dogs Lie, went straight to video. Others like Home for the Holidays, Miracle on 34th Street (the remake), Destiny Turns on the Radio, and The Cowboy Way did modest business at best and received lukewarm reviews. No matter what he put into a role — he spent time in prison to prepare for his part in The Cowboy Way — it didn't seem to pay off. He had a good part in a 1993 summer hit, In the Line of Fire, as Clint Eastwood's partner in the secret service, but it didn't prove to be his breakout as expected either. Casting directors weren't sure what to do with him. McDermott was beginning to feel that those good looks were a curse as much as a blessing. And then came the call from David Kelley. Kelley's first choice was actually the actor Oliver Platt, who said no. The breakout would finally happen — but on television, not in the movies. McDermott was one of many actors who were discoveringo that the best roles available for actors in the 19908 were not on the big screen.

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With actors and crew in place and sets built, shooting of The Practice began. The costume designers wanted McDermott to wear a "Sears look" — inexpensive suits and polyester shirts, but the actor said no way. McDermott

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liked good clothes too much so he argued that Donnel] would shop at designer discount outlets, convincing the designers to dress him in style. In time McDermott had a more significant influence on The Practice, convincing David to give his character more of a love live. The result were some wild sex scenes with Helen Gamble, played by Lara Flynn Boyle, with the two groping on coffee tables and stove tops. A good deal of research had to be supplied to David for his scripts. The factual background was so important to the show, that its official Web Site would provide World Wide Web links to legal research data bases and information on actual cases so that viewers could investigate the issues further. The kinds of cases that drew David revealed moral and ethical dilemmas and explored the difficult choices that lawyers had to make. How far should a lawyer go to defend his client? Should he or she bend the law, or do something that was ethically or even legally wrong? David also knew that cases were not usually about good versus evil, but about two people who both believed they had justice on their side. Robert Breech, one of the show's producers and a lawyer who worked with David back in the days of L.A. Law,7 said.~ "The strength of David's writingo J o is that he honors the audience with sophisticated writing and concepts. He cares about the outcome and the principles involved." Part of Breech's job was to prepare the cast for performing like lawyers. He would take each courtroom speech and go through it paragraph by paragraph, explaining both the legal argument being made and the tactics being used. Of course the courtroom scenes could not be absolutely authentic; if they were they would make less than riveting drama. In real life lawyers don't move around the courtroom and call out "objection!" for dramatic effect. And yet David strived to achieve what Breech called "procedural

accuracy," so that the audience would see how justice works. At the same time, Breech admitted that "the important thing is emotional truth . . . and when it is necessary, emotional truth supersedes accuracy." The pilot of The Practice aired on March 4, 1997. Viewers were introduced to Bobby, a workaholic still at the office at midnight. The main plot centered on Bobby defending a seventeen-year-old girl on a drug charge (she was trying to protect her brother), culminating in Bobby's terrific court summation. A second plot had new associate Lindsay OB the good side of a lawsuit, representing the widower of a woman who died of cancer. On the tobacco company's side was none other than her old Harvard law professor (played by veteran actor Edward Hermann). A minor and lighter subplot involved defending a flasher. The quick story developments did not allow for much initial character development, establishing the prominence of the legal cases over personal lives. Critical response to the show's start could only have delighted David, the actors, and ABC. Caryn James in the New York Times hailed it as a "refreshing, immensely likeable series. These characters say the things lawyers never say on shows about hot-shot legal minds, things you've been waiting and wishing they would." Despite the down-atheels look of the firm, it has "just enough glamor and heroism to make an entertaining drama." She even called McDermott a "dreamboat." She ended by hoping that the show would not descend into soap opera or silliness, as she believed had happened to both Picket Fences and Chicago Hope. The acclaim was echoed elsewhere. "Acting is aces throughout," pronounced Variety. People called it "immediately involving," another Kelley series where "words count." Elle magazine called it the sharpest show of the season, praising McDermott for his "bruised tenacity."

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And Entertainment Weekly said that The Practice had "the

goods to be a don't miss show." It did not, however, become an instant hit. Not that David, who still hadn't made a hit of his own, expected it to; the show's tough realism would have to grow on viewers. The numbers were moderately good and in the second season it would just barely break into the top twenty on some weeks. Kelley would have to hope for a surge in the third season.

A D I R T Y JOB BUT S O M E B O D Y ' S GOT TO DO IT Almost everything about The Practice turned out, as David promised, as a mirror image to L.A. Law. Even the look of the show, from its dark and grungy palette to its dizzying shifts in which the camera blurs as it appears to slide from one scene to the next, shows that it is worlds away from the privileged world of corporate lawyers. Because most of the actors were virtual unknowns, without classical profiles or figures like Greek statues, they had a plain-faced reality to them. Perhaps (with the exception of Bobby Donnell) they weren't the immediate objects of desire, but it was easy to feel empathy and affection for them. Perhaps the easiest to like was Ellenor Frutt. Camryn Manheim, the actress who played her, was the first on the show besides Dylan McDermott to begin receiving press attention. While Manheim is a big woman (she isn't afraid to use the word "fat"), she has a pretty oval face, twinkling eyes, and more important, a demeanor as Ellenor Frutt that reveals an intelligent, sympathetic personality. Roles for large women are notoriously few despite the fact that most women are not Ally McBeal-thin. (In fact, some feminists would denounce Ally McBeal for promoting a

thin, near anorexic, female image as an ideal.) Those first magazine and newspaper articles made a kind of role model out of the character for large women everywhere, a role that Manheim was happy to fill. In the first half season, viewers discovered just how financially precarious the firm was when Bobby was forced to accept a questionable loan from an old friend. While Bobby stuck to defending accused murderers, the other lawyers took on their own cases — Eugene defending a mugger, while Lindsay continued her battle against the tobacco company over several episodes. Jimmy Berlutti would become a member of the firm in episode three; this latecoming would be a factor in the second season's conflict over partnership in the firm. Bobby's own love life began to warm up in the premiere of the second season in fall 1997 when he fell for a woman accused of killing her neighbor. Later he would become involved with Helen Gamble, although the two would continue to meet in front of a judge. (Lara Flynn Boyle, the actress playing Gamble, had appeared in Twin Peaks, a series David admired.) Both in this show andinAllyMcBeal, David liked to have current and former lovers become courtroom adversaries. It was a neat way of combining the legal and private-life stories. Over the season a number of hot issues would get plenty of debating time in the courtroom: doctor-assisted suicide, the death penalty (this one captured by a documentary crew following the lawyers about), young murderers being tried as adults. Sometimes the issues would take a personal turn, such as the episode in which Jimmy's mother would not only tell him that she was gay but also that she wanted to wed another woman. On another Lindsay was slipped the notorious "date-rape" drug by an occasional boyfriend. Perhaps the most moving personal story line in the 1997-98 season concerned a romance between Ellenor and

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old high school friend, a chiropractor. Viewers felt Ellenor's emotional journey as she fell in love (and he seemed to reciprocate the feelings) but put off going to bed with him. Finally she confided how painful and difficult it was to take off her clothes before a man, and viewers felt joy when the two finally became lovers. But that joy was short-lived, for it turned out that the chiropractor was a decent man involved in an insurance scam being investigated by Ellenor's own firm. In the end she lost him and suffered for it. These personal stories made it clear that the show was no Law and Order in which viewers learned almost nothing about the characters. Yet David was truthful when he said that the private lives of the characters would take a back seat to the legal cases. One of the least flashy but most involving cases belonged to Jimmy Barluti, acting in a class action suit on behalf of a group of people who believed that hydroelectric lines near their homes gave them cancer. The evidence in favor of Jimmy's clients was less than solid and he had to work with extraordinary deliberation in the courtroom to build his case and earn the jury's sympathy, all the while knowing that Bobby didn't have faith in his ability to win. Bobby even became outraged when Jimmy encouraged his clients to turn down a large settlement. In o o the end the jury found for Jimmy's clients and awarded them $36 million but the judge overturned the decision for lack of evidence. Brokenhearted, Jimmy was left a winner in spirit but a loser in fact. And once again the firm found itself in economic straits. While the episode focused primarily on the case, it succeeded because David so brilliantly engaged the viewers' sympathies: he quietly dramatized Jimmy's personal involvement with the cancerpatient victims as well as Jimmy's need — unfulfilled in the end, despite Bobby's new respect — to prove himself. David might have acquiesced to Dylan McDermott's

request for a love life for his character, but he was not about to make this a show in which romance conquered all. In fact, this show was about people who put their work first, even to the detriment of their personal lives, and he dramatized the point in a thrilling two-part episode about a murder trial that made adversaries of the lovers Bobby Donnell and Helen Gamble. As a prosecuting attorney working with the police, Helen was gathering evidence against a prominent surgeon she believed murdered the woman with whom he was having an affair. Meanwhile, the surgeon's regular hotshot lawyer took the doctor to see Bobby, the most experienced lawyer on homicide defences in Boston. The case was worth a million dollars and more to the firm, but Bobby knew that by taking it he risked putting a strain on his relationship with Helen. The case itself was fascinating, with its marshalingo of o* evidence and the skilful way it made the viewer's belief in the doctor's innocence or guilt seesaw back and forth. Guest star Linda Hunt as the judge brought a sharp and amusing credibility to the role. (Some viewers might have noticed a similarity between the case and the one in Scott Turow's novel Presumed Innocent.) But what made the episodes even more involving was the way the case revealed Bobby's seething emotions. His hunger for winning the case and earning bigO monevJ was larger than his feelings for O O O Helen. For ten years he had been working in that grungy office, with more successful lawyers "looking down" on him. Now one of those lawyers had come to him, Bobby Donnell, because he was the best. And in his strained voice and face could be seen those years of pent-up frustration, anger, and insult. In turn, Helen's anger at Bobby's willingness to sacrifice them was almost as palpable. The result was a deep personal undercurrent that made the courtroom battle between them, with dirty tricks on both sides, almost shocking.

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It would be a mark of difference between The Practice and Ally McBeal that in the more realistic world of the former the lawyers would often lose. They seemed almost to carry the burden of their failures on weary shoulders. On Ally McBeal the lawyers would virtually always win. Late in the season Lindsay would upset the whole firm by accusing Bobby of hoarding power and control of the firm, demanding to be made a partner. Bobby at first refused, but in the next episode he made all the lawyers partners, and even gave the manager, Rebecca, a piece of the firm. The only one he did not offer a partnership to was Jimmy, claiming that he hadn't been with the firm as long as the others. Wounded, Jimmy asserted that Bobby simply didn't value him. These professional and personal conflicts would continue to plague the firm almost as much as its financial problems. But what threw Bobby even more in the same episode was a confession of love from Lindsay, even though she believed that he would never love her in return. Along with all the drama of these episodes, another real-life drama almost took David Kelley off the show. As expected, ABC ran the first episodes of The Practice on Tuesday nights, temporarily filling the spot owned by N.Y.P.D. Blue. But then the network put the show on Saturday nights, despite what David understood was a promise not to air it on the night with the lowest number of viewers. So angry was David that in May 1997, before the first half-season was even over, he announced that he was quitting the show. True to himself, however, David found himself too artistically and emotionally committed to just walk away. Later in the summer he announced his change of mind. He said, "The truth is, I stomped around with my little bat and ball and said, 'Oh, I'm not going to play anymore.' But the other truth is that they probably didn't believe that, because they knew I cared about the show."

For a Saturday audience, however, David needed to make some changes. He couldn't rely on a regular audience that would see every episode; the simple fact was that people usually went out Saturday nights. Complicated story lines running over several weeks had to be replaced by single-episode plots with resolved endings. But ABC knew that the show was wasted on Saturday and moved it as soon as a slot opened up at the start of the second half of the second season — to Mondays at ten. Yet it did not find as large an audience as ABC believed it capable of pulling in, and so scheduled another change — to Sundays i o o J — for the start of the third season. The Practice was a reasonably successful show, but not yet a hit. Its solid story lines, fine acting, and critical acclaim had not yet won it all the attention it deserved. And if anything, the hardworking actors on the show would be cast in the shadow of David's first genuine and sudden hit, Ally McBeal. "Everything I thought we were going to get, they got," Dylan McDermott has admitted. "All of a sudden they come on and we're the stepchild and they're getting all the attention. It was hard." It wouldn't be long, however, before the Emmy Awards would help to soften things considerably. 7

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THE BIRTH OF ALLY McBEAL

A person might think that David was busy enough getting The Practice up and running, keeping an eye on Chicago Hope, having a home life with Michelle and the two kids, and stealing away a little time to work on a new screenplay. But about the same time as The Practice was having its first season David was approached by the executives of the Fox television network. Although he still hadn't created a real hit, David's star was shining pretty bright, and with each year the once-upstart fourth network was becoming more ambitious and mature. The people at Fox were pretty savvy to ask David if he would create a show to run right after their long-running prime-time soap Melrose Place. They wanted a show that would hold onto the same audience that tuned into Melrose; young women from i 8 to 34. Another hour would really give them something to watch while the guys were glued to Monday Night Football, Until now, David hadn't created a specifically directed "girl's show," although the female numbers for all of his creations were pretty good. It was a challenge that David couldn't resist.

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And he didn't disguise what he was trying to create. What could be more appealing to young women than a character about their age, with problems similar to their own? Likely he had some honest talks with his wife Michelle on the subject, a woman who, despite beauty, talent, and professional success, had suffered much unhappiness in love before meeting David. And then he came up with the idea of a young woman lawyer, attractive, who was good at her job but a disaster at her personal life. While she was fun to be around, she herself was sometimes depressed about her life situation — or more specifically being single. David instinctively understood that despite years of talk about career possibilities for women and other subjects of equality and liberation, most women felt that the secret to happiness was love. A love that in the nineties was becoming increasingly hard to find, and even harder to commit to. The "genesis" of the character, David would say, was the idea of "someone not afraid to be weak." A woman who, as one of her failed dates tells her, says to herself: "I want, I want, I want." From the beginning, David knew that the real subject of the series would be her inner life, a subject traditionally more easily exposed in a good novel than on television. He would need to go beyond the usual method of simply showing the drama; somehow he had to show what was going on inside Ally's head. For that he came up with two basic techniques. One was as old as movies and was often used when adapting novels to the screen: the voice-over. He would let us hear Ally's voice as she thought, letting us in on her true feelings whether serious or trivial, generous or mean-spirited. The second technique was fantasy. Possibly borrowed (as many critics noted) from the HBO show Dream On, Ally would have sudden vibrant fantasies — being thrown by a forklift into a dumpster as a boyfriend drops her; her

breasts growing bigger — that would not only show her sudden, often ironic feelings, but would add to the comedy. (Actually, David envisioned the show as a drama with comic elements but it would come to be considered, including by the Emmy Awards, as a comedy.) About the fantasy, David would explain that until now all his scripts had been heavily word-oriented rather than visual. His characters were known for talkingo and talking, if articuo' lately. The fantasy moments would take advantage of the medium by communicating thought in a way that was purely visual. Of course AllyJ would need an interestingo situation that would allow for entertaining stories to develop around her. So she would work in the same firm as the boy-nextdoor she was supposed to marry but didn't, the boynext-door having married some other beautiful woman instead. She would have a roommate, a character not originally conceived as being played by a black actress. Of course there would be plenty of legal cases, but they would serve more to heighten the debate over love, romance, sex, and fidelity than points of law. If the character of Ally McBeal had been created by a woman instead of a man, there would no doubt have been far less controversy surrounding her. Certainly it is a wonder that it is a man who has had the insight and the courage to reveal the secret thoughts of so many contemporary women. But like many artists, David has been reticent about revealing just how he does it. All he has really said is that he doesn't work hard at thinking like a woman: "I try to incorporate some things that may be more germane to women than men in drawing women characters. But, for the most part, the dirty little secret is that I fail to distinguish them. The flaws or the strengths that I look for in drawing male characters, I do the same things for female characters." This, however, sounds less O

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than completely frank. Sure, like any novelist he draws on his own knowledge and experience and taste for his female character. (For example, Ally's favorite book — Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King — is much more likely to be at the top of a man's list than a woman's.) But Ally doesn't talk like David's male characters. Neither Billy nor John Cage want to get married before saving the world. Her romantic hopes are different, as well as her grievances and jealousies. But he has also made some more credible statements. "Sometimes a character can be professionally very strong and capable, but emotionally weak. Ally is very, very honest and straightforward. Sometimes to her own fault." Yet even this isn't completely true. In fact, Ally lies all the time. She lies to Georgia when she says she doesn't want to sleep with Billy. She lies to the university professor's widow about her late husband's feelings for Ally. She lies to John Cage about not wanting to go on a date with him. In other words, she gets through life by bending or hiding the truth — just like real people. He has said: "I am not inviting people to compare their lives with her. If they do, they will be offended. She does say some outrageous things, tasteless things, sometimes heroic things." True enough. He has said: "For me, it's fun to write a character who doesn't always say nice things. I've always seen Ally as a person who says the wrong thing. She has a tremendous capacity for sticking her foot down beyond her esophagus. Hopefully, the audience is still rooting for her, even though she's not doing the right thing." We are, at least most of the time. Many journalists writing about the show would come to trace Ally's television lineage. They would draw a line from spunky, hopeful Anne Marie of That Girl, to Mary Richards of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (doggedly hard working, a mixture of submissiveness and sudden asser-

tiveness), to the brassy liberation of Maude, to the dominating, male-like authority of Murphy Brown. Most of those journalists would declare Ally a throwback to some paleolithic era of womanhood, a giant step backwards for woman's equality. But David wanted a character who could acknowledge that successful women are full of fears about their position in society. That society has told Ally that she can have everything she wants — career, love, family, great looks, fabulous clothes. It sounds good to her, but it's not, at least so far, what life is delivering.

SHORT UNISEX

SKIRTS

AND

BATHROOMS

After pitching the idea successfully to Fox, David holed up to write the pilot script. Handing it over, he expected them to raise all sorts of vehement objections. The one he expected to hear first and foremost was that in this age of political correctness and greater gender equality they couldn't make a show about a young career woman unhappy because she didn't have a man in her life. David was never naive about the reaction Ally might get. But instead of complaining, Fox gave David the green light to make the pilot. Taping the pilot is a large investment, the cost being much higher than for any other single episode. The reason is simply that for this one show all the sets must be built, the costumes purchased or created, the cast and crew hired. (Of course, if the pilot is picked up by the network these costs become spread out over the show's run.) Built at Ren-Mar Studios, where The Practice was also made (David's two shows virtuallv took the studio over), the sets included the law offices, Ally and Renee's apartment, the bar where the lawyers would hang out after work, and a

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courtroom, with a hallway and judges' chambers. All of these were usual enough: all except for the law firm's unisex bathroom. In real life, unisex bathrooms probably exist only in co-ed college dormitories. The idea of a law firm with one is outrageous and incredible, and yet David managed to make it work. The seed of the idea must have been planted when he watched those Hill Street Blues episodes and heard the characters speak with unusual candor as they relieved themselves at urinals or washed their hands. And David knew that people feel vulnerable in bathrooms, and not just when their pants are around their ankles or their skirts are hitched up. Usually the only adult males and females sharing a bathroom are couples; the unisex bathroom makes all the characters intimate with one another, even if uncomfortably so. David would also discover all sorts of uses for the set. As a site for sexual encounter, for eavesdropping (one never knows who is hiding in a stall), and for the revelation of oddball character traits, such as John Cage's "dismounts" and his remote control toilet flusher (he likes a fresh bowl). Talk about bathroom humor! David knew he had created an unusual place for characters to meet. "Plus," he said, "I was intrigued by the notion that Fish would have a unisex bathroom." So it said something about the games Fish likes to play with people. The production designer, Peter Politanoff, created a modern, neutral-tone set of halogen lights and stainless steel. He also gave the bathroom men's and women's doors, mostly to allow for separate entrances and exits to aid in the drama of meetings and partings. Gil Bellows, the actor who would be cast as Billy, said, "It's like the kitchen in most people's houses at parties. It's the place where the characters get together. So you have incredibly moving scenes taking place next to a urinal." Dyan Cannon, whose character

Whipper Cone would offer herself to Fish in one of the cubicles, said, "There's no safe place at that office. There's no privacy anywhere. You can get in a lot of trouble in that bathroom." But this is one idea of David's that is unlikely to start a trend in real offices. Calista Flockhart, the eventual star of the show, said with disgust about the possibility of a real unisex bathroom: "You wouldn't catch me dead ., " in it. But one fashion that did start a trend was Ally's short skirts. David Kelley's conception was of a woman whose emotional life was desperately unfulfilled. Yet he didn't want to telegraph her insecure emotional state by her clothes. If anything, he decided that Ally would be a more careful dresser, someone always wanting to look her best. In a way this bold display of her legs and figure, besides being a sign of her vanity (a trait she would admit to herself), would be a sort of inverse reaction to her unhappiness. As Ally would think to herself in one episode, the more depressed she became the shorter her skirts got. Fashion experts quickly took notice of the Ally influence. No less an authority than Richard Martin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York traced the origin of Ally's hot outfits back to the sexy office look of Heather Locklear on Dynasty in the 19808. Of Locklear he said, "She created this strange television version of the corporate woman, which is very sexual within some kind of template of business attire. . . ." Loree Parral, the show's costume supervisor, had the job of actually dressing the actress who would be chosen to play Ally. She chose Armani suits, DKNY lycra tops, Laundry skirts, Bebe T-shirts, and jackets from Parallel. She saw Ally not as someone who was label-obsessed, but who simply liked good clothes and had fun mixing and matching. Those micro-mini skirts would annoy not only the female characters on The Practice in the crossover episode.

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A lot of real women lawyers complained that they could never get away with showing off so much leg in a court — the judge would throw them out. (Some lawyers, though, did begin wearing shorter skirts.) But these complainers were foolish in their search for absolute realism on the show. Did judges really ask people to show their teeth? Would two lawyers actually get up and begin dancing in the middle of a trial? Can a lawyer really ask a jury to "repeat after me"? Realism be damned, these moments were all funny and revealing. Ally's hemline was not the only fashion in the show to receive close scrutiny. Her pyjamas, in which she lounged with Renee and danced with the ooga-chucking baby, suddenly began flying off department store shelves. Made by Nick & Nora, a New York-based company, they began being written up by newspaper fashion columnists, who liked to point out that both Michelle Pfeiffer and Calista Flockhart wore them at home.

CASTING

CALL

For the cast of The Practice, David wanted actors who looked like "real" people. For Ally McBeal, he needed more glamor and pizazz. These people might not be happy, but the audience should still secretly want to be one of them; they should make unhappiness look appealing and even seductive. That seductiveness would come from more than just looks, of course. The actors would have to have natural appeal and charisma. And while serious drama would be part of each episode, the actors would need real comic ability. Not like the cast of a sitcom, which uses a broad and repetitive comic style, but rather the more subtle comic skill of theater and film actors.

Greg Germann

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Ally's law firm would be founded by two partners with the purpose of making lots of money and having fun at the same time. The overriding tone of the firm would be set

Greg Germann and Lisa Nicole Carson F1TZROY B A R R E T T / G L O E E P H O T O S ,

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by the younger, more aggressive one — fast-talking and sharp-tongued Richard Fish. A man who found something to laugh at (sudden, high-pitched "Ha!") in every situation. Who considered his dubious pronouncements on life (often sexist) profound enough to be called "Fishisms." Whose ambitions seemed limitless, although his own legal skills were reputed to be negligible. A man who, despite his cynicism, was helplessly in love with a much older woman, Judge Whipper Cone. Fish would have some trouble staying faithful, however, due to his attraction to other older women's wattles (that flap of skin under the neck, in case you don't know), especially that of the United States Attorney General, Janet Reno. David chose thirty-four-year-old Greg Germann for the part. As a child, Germann was the class clown, the one — as he lamented — whom all the girls wanted, but only as a friend. He mostly grew up in Austin, Texas, where his father was working on his graduate theater degree and directing plays on campus. In fact, the first time Germann wanted to act was when, at the age of about five, he saw his brother in a play written by their father. Germann majored in theater at the University of Northern Colorado and then, like other members of the cast, headed for New York. On Broadway he played in Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues and originated the 1990 role of John Hinkley in the Stephen Sondheim musical, Assassins. (He can be heard on the cast recording.) In the mid-1980s, he began finding work on television and in film. Among his movie credits are o Clear and Present Danger, So I Married an Axe Murderer, and Once Around. He made numerous television appearances, including a 1986 appearance on L.A. Law which would have been his first encounter with David Kelley. In 1994 he won his first continuing role on the short-lived Sweet Justice. After that came two years playing the none-toobright Eric on 'Ned and Stacey from 1995" to 1997. In that

last year a son, Asa, was born to Germann and his wife, Christine Mourad. Germann had ambitions to make his own movies, and in 19973 short independent film that he wrote and directed, Pete's Garden, was shown at the prestigious Sundance Fes-

tival. He has since written a full-length screenplay. As Richard Fish, Germann would make the character surprisingly appealing. Despite his male chauvinism, his sometimes cruel punchlines, his amusement at the romantic dilemmas of Ally, Billy, and Georgia, Germann would bring out his character's own vulnerability behind the hard shell. And with his shining mischievous eyes, a perpetually half-open expectant mouth, and an adrenalin-soaked brain that could deliver a rapid outpouring of words, Germann seemed an actor born to speak David Kelley's staccato dialogue.

Peter MacNicol Richard Fish's partner, John Cage, would not appear in the pilot, showing up in the first regular episode when he is charged with soliciting a prostitute. Officially, the part began as a continuing guest or "special appearance" role rather than a regular one, but his appearances would gradually increase and in the second half of the season he would quietly become a regular cast member. Certainly the most oddball character on the show, Cage was a checklist of unusual behaviours: long pauses between sentences, an inability to smile (a problem which would send him to a therapist), a nose that whistled, a tendency to hum under his breath or mutter "Poughkeepsie" to control his anxious stutter. His catchphrases ("this troubles me") and odd habits would reveal a man more settled into an inflexible character who was unlikely ever to change much. He was not a nineties type. His suits were conservative and seemed

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MacNicol in a high school production of Ten Little Indians C O U R T E S Y SJITH P O P P E L Y E A R B O O K A R C H I V E S

to emphasize his short stature and narrow shoulders. He had a generally forlorn air, like a lost puppy, and seemed not to quite fit into the youthful firm's high-energy antics. Yet he was their heavyweight litigator, with a series of bizarre and surprising courtroom tricks — wonderfully unrealistic and totally winning — that could sway any jury. He seemed in some ways the most dependable and trustworthy among them, the least defensive — and therefore most vulnerable. David filled this role easily, calling on the Chicago Hope alumnus Peter MacNicol. Originally from Dallas, MacNicol had first become noticed by the public in the much-acclaimed film Sophie's Choice. He had since been a

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very active actor, often getting character roles, without ever reaching the star status he seemed to deserve. A devout Christian who was reticent and even humble by nature, MacNicol did not like playing the part of a movie star, which may account for his low profile. "Acting is

MacNicoI in Mel Brooks' Dracula: Dead and Loving It CASTLE ROCK E N T E R T A I N M E N T

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about covering up traces of who you are and just being the character," he has said. With his curly hair, high forehead, fine lines around his eyes, and pursed thin lips, MacNicol made the character of John Cage into something of a lovelorn and eccentric professor. David's lines made him sound both wise and naive in about equal proportion, and MacNicol invested such a tremendous sympathy in the role that he brought it fully to life. He also would use his brilliant comic ability to effect, often deploying a small facial expression, a lilt in the voice, an odd walk or body tilt to make a point that was both funny and emotional. His shortness of stature, emphasized by suit sleeves just a touch too long, added to a vague resemblance to Charlie Chaplin's tramp. It would be easy to argue that Cage was simply the nicest and most likeable of all the characters, even if he was the least glamorous. Or perhaps because of it. And the episodes that featured him somehow seemed to rise above those that didn't, as if in writing him David found greater focus and dramatic purpose for his ideas.

Gil Bellows John Cage and Richard Fish might be the partners of the firm, but they would not be a part of the central dynamic giving the show its ongoing tension and interest. That dynamic would be drawn as a triangle, and if the bottom two points belonged to two women, Ally and Georgia, the top was held by Billy Thomas. Billy Thomas would be in the possibly enviable position of being loved by two women at the same time, his wife Georgia and his ex-girlfriend Ally. And Billy himself would love them both, Georgia as his chosen mate, and Ally as his childhood friend and the lover he left behind. His yearning for Ally, Georgia's jealousy, and her competitive

relationship with Ally, would continue to catch him in a dangerous, if admittedly interesting set of circumstances. Six feet tall, thirty years old, with large dark eyes, Gil Bellows was the most obviously handsome male cast member. Originally from Vancouver, he left at eighteen to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles. Then he too went to New York, where he sometimes auditioned for parts opposite a young actress named Calista Flockhart. While still in his very early twenties, he won some guest television roles at those auditions. But the role that first got him some attention was the young prison inmate doomed to a bad end in The Shawshank Redemption (1994). The following year he played Sarah Jessica Parker's live-in boyfriend in Miami Rhapsody, and he continued to act in Love and a .45, Looking for Richard, and other films. Just before winning the role of Billy, he was getting a lot of parts, although not always in films attracting attention. Dinner at Fred's, SnowWhite: A Tale of Terror (a Showtime film in which he received third billing after Sigourney Weaver and Sam Neill), and The Assistant (for which he lost twenty pounds to play the lead role of a depression-era homeless man) all came out in 1997. As Billy, Bellows was the most emotional male character on the show, his voice often trembling during confessions of his feelings, as if he might break into tears. As Ally's o ' o J oldest friend, he would act as her confidante, advisor, and the booster of her morale, even though his own continuing feelings for her sometimes got in the way. It was friendship that would get him into hot water with Georgia, who could never be sure what secrets the two of them shared or how secure was her owrn position with Billy. But Billy would also be one of the guys, staring at the curvaceous delivery girl along with Richard or sharing a joke and a cigar at the bar.

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Courtney Thome-Smith The background for Georgia, Billy's wife, was not at first given quite the same attention as the other parts. She was, first and foremost, the woman Billy married instead of Ally. And the actress who David cast for the role was not the one that audiences eventually saw, but instead the actress Anna Gunn. Anna Gunn actually taped the pilot before David decided that he had made a serious mistake. Not that he didn't think Gunn a fine actress (he would eventually offer her a continuing role in The Practice), but in order to act as a counterweight to Ally, Georgia needed to have more star presence. He didn't have to go far to find who he wanted; Courtney Thorne-Smith had just left Melrose Place, the show that would lead in to Ally McBeal. Actually, David had already worked with her back in 1989 when she appeared as a Los Angeles Laker Girl on an episode of L.A. Law. (She had to wear a minuscule leotard.) Not only was she a striking, statuesque woman, but Thorne-Smith was already well known. And David realized that casting her would be a crafty move, enticing the fans of Melrose Place to check out the new show. Thorne-Smith had originally planned to take a year off from television. She felt tired after playing the role of Alison Parker, an alcoholic ad agency employee, since the premiere of Melrose Place in 1992. Born in the San Francisco Bay area, she had appeared in a number of films with adolescent appeal, from Summer School to Revenge of the Nerds II, But after leaving Melrose Place new movie offers failed to come in; she was suffering the usual problem of being overly identified with her previous role. So when her agent called to say that David Kelley wanted to see her, she was glad enough to go. Now thirty, Thorne-Smith was the more usual sort of

male-fantasy beauty than the woman who would be cast as Ally. A voluptuous figure, blond hair, a full mouth. Perhaps her big jaw was unusual, but it helped to make her face more interesting. While the part that David offered her was a supporting rather than a starring role, she was happy enough to take it. It would be her job to make Ally's rival a woman the audience could respond to, sympathizing with the position of someone not sure of her partner's love.

Lisa Nicole Carson David was not immune to being influenced by television tradition, and he well knew that a show in which all the characters lived or worked in the same environment could become claustrophobic. It was always good to have at least one character who belonged by some different connection — the nosey or best-friend neighbour in many sitcoms, for example. For Ally McBeal, it was Renee Radick. Renee would be Ally's roommate, allowing for latenight talks (often while eating Ben and Jerry's ice cream out of the carton) and even a sleepover or two in the same bed for comfort. Because Renee was also a lawyer — a district attorney — she could also figure in some of the legal stories involving criminal cases. If Billy would be Ally's greatest support, Renee would be her challenger. Egging her on to take bigger risks, to let her emotions out, to be the aggressor on a date, she would constantlyJ try oo J to open up Ally's uptight and prudish nature. She would be almost a sexual opposite to Ally, looking for fun and pleasure rather than permanent romance, worshipping indulgence in all things. o o Unusual for television, Lisa Nicole Carson already had a continuing, if irregular role, on the series ER, as Dr. Peter Benton's ex-girlfriend and the mother of his son. Born in Brooklyn, Carson was a natural dreamer, a fantasizer who 7

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needed to ground herself: "Otherwise I'd be singing, acting, and dreaming all day. I'd pretty much live on Fantasy Island." Perhaps some of that need came from a rocky childhood, for her parents split up when she was fourteen, leaving her to live with her father in Florida. Despite being called a "nigger" by other students, she became a high-school cheerleader and a big shot in theater. But she took only one year at a local college in acting before dropping out to turn professional. Her father disapproved; he wanted her to become a nurse. Carson moved in with her mother who lived in Harlem, another world altogether from the one she knew. Instead of taking acting classes she went to auditions, getting off-Broadway roles and spots in touring companies. In 1991 she did a TV movie pilot, Divas, as a member of a singing group, but when it wasn't picked up she became soured on TV. Then came films —Jason's Lyric, Devil in a Blue Dress with Denzel Washington. "Lisa Nichole Carson stands out," o ' declared Newsweek of her latter role, " . . . a lusty woman who riotously enjoys her one-night fling." Then came Eve's Bayou with Samuel L. Jackson. In fact, her film career was doing so "well that she told her agent that she didn't even o o want to see any television offers, unless it was from ER or Chicago Hope. Amazingly, the creators of both those shows came calling. Carson moved to L.A. in July '97. She would play Renee with a mischievous light shining in her eyes and a leer often on the verge of breaking out on her sensual mouth.

Jane Krakowski Another character type that David drew on for the show was the assistant or secretary. Like Roxanne on L.A. Law, the desk clerk on N. Y.P.D. Blue, the housekeeper on so many sitcoms, or even Rebecca the office manager on David's

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Jane Krakowski and Gil Bellows LISA R O S E / G L O B E P H O T O S , I N C .

own The Practice, this supporting character usually has practical skills that the others lack and helps them as only a clever underling can. But by creating the secretary Elaine Vassal for Ally McBeal, David turned the role on its head. Elaine (her last name means "humble servant" or "slave")

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lives to undermine Ally in work and love, or at least to interfere enough to make things more interesting. If Renee would be a character embodying female hedonistic desire, Elaine would be another sexual type altogether: the predator. A self-proclaimed "slut," she would offer herself to virtually every man who walked through the office doors, none of whom seemed to take it up, as if afraid that she might swallow them whole. But behind the lascivious grin of this siren trying to lure men to their doom was a woman in terrible need of attention. The mask would rarely slip, however. Jane Krakowski was twenty-nine when she got the call to fly to L.A. for her final reading of the part. Next to her on the plane was another actress also trying for a role, Calista Flockhart. The two had known each other back at Rutgers University; Calista's roommate had been Krakowski's best friend. They went to the hotel together and wished each other luck. From Parsippany, New Jersey, Krakowski was influenced, like some other cast members, by parents: her mother was a college theater teacher and her parents performed in the local community productions of musicals. She went to Professional Children's School in New York and at the age of fifteen won the role of a troubled teenager on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow, playing it for two years. Her Broadway debut at eighteen was made on skates — in Starlight Express — but she first got real notice, and rave reviews (not to mention a Tony nomination), for her part in the musical Grand Hotel. After that came more theater, television, and film roles. For her audition in front of David Kelley, Krakowski wore her tightest sweater and a Wonderbra. She got the part. As for her college friend Calista wasn't even sure if she wanted the part that she was trying for — Ally McBeal herself.

NOTHING TO LOSE THE LIFE OF CALISTA FLOCKHART

As David Kelley well knew, the success or failure of Ally McBeal would depend on the actress who played her. No matter how good the writing was, the audience would come to see this actress as Ally, and either they would take to her or they wouldn't. (He may not have anticipated the actress actually influencing the role, so that he would begin to write the characterfor her.) Many were considered, and David E. Kelley Productions even went into negotiations with one — Bridget Fonda. Fonda was a good actress, attractive,' the right age, and a ogenuine movie star who o o could bring instant glitz to the show. But negotiations went nowhere, probably because Fonda didn't really want to do a television series. Dozens of other actresses read, but none of them seemed right. The show's producers, including Jeffrey Kramer, a close associate of David's, kept hearing of a New York theater actress named Calista Flockhart. Her impressive list of stage credits piqued David's interest too, but as Kramer later recalled, "We were told that she just wouldn't do television." Once again the stigma of television looked like it might defeat them. TV was simply less 7

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prestigious than movies or theater (even though theater paid slave wages in comparison), the hours were notoriously gruelling, and actors had to typically commit themselves to a series for five years. And then afterwards, an actress might be so closely associated with that one role, that no other producers would hire her. Courtney ThorneSmith was only one of countless actors and actresses who had suffered that fate, only she had been lucky. On the other hand, things were changing. More actors were moving from film or theater to television or vice versa, such as George Clooney of ER, John Lithgow of Third Rock from the Sun, and practically the entire cast of Friends. As the day to start shooting the pilot drew nearer, the producers started feeling desperate. They sent the script to Calista Flockhart's agent and hoped for the best. In New York, Calista reluctantly read the script. Theater was her first love, and she didn't mind doing the occasional movie role, but television sounded like a long, if lucrative prison sentence for an actress who liked diversity. But as she began reading she simply fell in love with the part of Ally. So she agreed to come out to Los Angeles, taking a cab for the airport as soon as the matinee performance of the play she was in finished. It was just one week before shooting was supposed to begin. The rush and the time change dazed her and she hardly felt her best when she walked into the audition room at Ren-Mar Studios on Cahuenga Boulevard. Calista had chosen a simple, elegant lavender suit to wear, something she thought would be Ally's taste. "She scurried into the room looking a little frazzled and yet exuded strength and confidence," David Kelley recalled. "That was something I was looking for in Ally — smart and sophisticated but also capable of being an emotional mess." Calista read for David and the other producers, as well as some Fox brass. She thought the audition went badly,

but outside the studio doors she met up with one of the producers. "Cheer up," he said, announcing that she had won the part. "Oh great," Calista frowned. "Now I've got to move."

"MOST BEAUTIFUL" "I haven't got anything to lose, in a way," Calista said after being offered the role. "If it doesn't work out and I go back to New York, I have a lot more money than when I started." Later she said, "It was a big commitment. Somewhere in my gut I had a feeling this show would do well. I was such a big believer in the writing. It was a hard choice, and yet not hard." Five-foot-six, slim (some would say skinny), with a round face, almond eyes, and pouty lips, Calista is pretty without being a conventional beauty. An unconventional beauty to some, certainly. Perhaps the best description of her has been penned by a writer for Harper's Bazaar: "Her arms are as thin as broom handles, and her face is like a big floating, moonlike opal above her small, almost spindly frame." But there is something arresting about her, an electric presence that David and the others felt when she walked into the room. And there is a sharp intelligence to her quick movements, her high, feminine, yet firm voice. Calista Flockhart was born in Freeport, Illinois, on November 11, 1964. At least that is the date most often cited, as Calista herself refuses to tell her age. She was named after her great-grandmother; "Calista" means "most beautiful" in Greek. Her mother Kay was a school teacher. Her father Ron worked for Kraft Foods, which constantly relocated him and the family as he was promoted up the corporate chain. She was — and is — close to her parents, who would receive much pleasure watching their daughter become famous in the role of Ally. "We can

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see a lot of things that sort of look like her," her father would say of the show. "She uses the phrase, 'Excuse me, please?' She's used that since she was a kid." As the family packed up for Minnesota, then New York, then New Jersey, the young Calista found rootlessness hard. "Whenever you move, I think you lose your history," she said resignedly. Always the new girl in school, she had to learn to adapt, to fit in — and still be prepared to move on again. "I can pack a bag quickly, and I have learned to say goodbye easily." People were always having trouble with her name. They would say things like, "Are you from some Indian tribe?" Sometimes Calista would just say her name was Carol to make life easier. To this day if someone mispronounces her name as "Calistra" or "Calypso" after she has corrected them once, she makes a decision not to like them. The one constant setting for a girl who was something of a tomboy was Boone, Iowa, a rural area where she visited both sets of grandparents every summer while growing up. "You should have seen me when I was a kid," she remembered. "I was one big head and no body." Being the newcomer on the block didn't stop her from doing what she liked best, putting on plays. She gave her friends small parts but always kept the lead for herself. Naturally being a person who liked control, she was also the director. At junior high in upstate New York, she played flute in the school band but didn't show any particular talent for music. It was really only after the next move, to Medford, New Jersey, that Calista began to come into her own. For the first time Calista felt as if they were settled in this slow-paced town set between farms and pine barrens. At Shawnee High School her mother pushed her to try out for the cheerleading squad. She made it and for the first time had a truly public outlet for her dramatic side. Her best jump, she liked to boast later, was the "spread eagle," and when the cheerleaders formed a human pyramid she

was the girl at the top. "I was very passionate," she remembered. "When our team would lose, I would cry." She also sat on the student council. Her one disappointment was going to the prom with a boy who wasn't the one she wanted to be with. It might have been a moment from the life of Ally McBeal. After high school, Calista went on to Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, where she majored in fine arts and fell in love with acting and Shakespeare. While still in school her professional career began, as she earned roles in regional theater and even landed an occasional spot on a soap opera. After graduation, and encouraged by her mother to pursue acting, she headed to the mecca of American theater, New York City, where she shared a two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise with three roommates. Crowded, to say the least, but it kept her share of the rent down, which was necessary considering that acting in an off-off-Broadway show might bring in as little as $400 for eight weeks. She made some extra money teaching aerobics and at one point survived off a case of ravioli sent to her by her older brother Gary. Times might have been hard but they were more often exciting, and Calista was young and ambitious. She came to feel that if any place was home, New York was it. In 1991 one of the roommates adopted a dog, leaving him one weekend for Calista to look after. She fell in love with the mixed terrier, whose name was Webster, and soon the dog became hers. She would eventually take Webster, her only real companion, to Los Angeles.

IF SHE CAN MAKE IT H E R E , SHE'LL MAKE IT ANYWHERE As she later said, Calista wras "very deeply in love with the theater." It didn't take long before she had a chance to

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Calista at a sophomore punk night C O U R T E S Y SETH P O P P E L Y E A R B O O K A R C H I V E S

show what she was made of. In the fall of 1989, the season after her university graduation, she won a part in an off-Broadway play called Beside Herself. Written by Joe Pintauro and directed by John Bishop for the well-known

Calista with other members of the student council in her senior year C O U R T E S Y SETH P O P P E L Y E A R B O O K A R C H I V E S

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Calista as a senior varsity cheerleader COURTESY SETH POPPEL Y E A R B O O K ARCHIVES

Circle Repertory Company, the play ran in a small theater on Seventh Avenue in the Village. In the play four women actors on stage at the same time all played the same character at different stages in her life. Calista, who looked several years younger than she was, played the character as a late teenager. Among the cast was William Hurt and an eleven-year-old girl named Melissa Hart, who would later star in Sabrina,the Teenage Witch. Hart remembered Calista as being rather jittery at the beginning and very critical of her own performance. But she made time to take the young Hart under her wing, teaching her acting exercises as well as breathing and stretching techniques. Critics compared the play to Tennessee Williams but gave it pretty mixed reviews. The powerful Frank Rich of the New York Times considered it overly sentimental. There

gg

was nothing mixed about his opinion of Calista's performance: "Ms. Flockhart, in her New York debut, shows unusual promise. She brings consistent emotional clarity to messy post-pubescent effusions. . . ." Even the acerbic John Simon of New York magazine, a critic almost impossible to please and who dismissed the play itself, called her a "gifted young actress." It was an auspicious start. More plays followed. Death Takes a Holiday with Christopher Reeve (before his riding accident) and Blythe Banner at the Williamstown Theater Festival, All for One at New York's Ensemble Studio Theater, the much-praised Mad Forest at the New York Theater Workshop, and Sophistry with Ethan Hawke. This was steady and widely varied work, the best kind of training ground for a young actress, but it provided only a bare living and the future looked very uncertain. "There were definitely times when I thought, 'What the hell am I doing? I'm getting older. I haven't had any success. I've done what I love. I've been in lots of plays, and I've worked with a ton of great actors, but you can't really make a living doing that.' And at a time when even my friends were encouraging me to change professions, my parents never did. They never said, 'Get a day job.' And then came the performance that won her real public attention for the first time. The year 1994 was going to be the fiftieth anniversary of Tennessee Williams' groundbreaking play, The Glass Menagerie. To celebrate, the highly respected Roundabout Theatre Company decided to present an anniversary production. It was to be directed by Frank Galeti, who had already won a Tony award for his extraordinary production of The Grapes of Wrath. Galeti cast Calista in the lead role of Laura, a part that truly challenged a talented actress but was rich material for someone who liked emotionally deep and complicated roles. It is interesting to note that in writing about the production,

the New Yorker critic John Lahr pointed out that The Glass Menagerie marked the movement of American theater away from larger political and social issues and towards what he called the theater of "self-involvement." Perhaps in some way Ally McBeal, whose characters are so entertainingly self-absorbed, is a distant literary descendant of this play. If the critics had already been good to Calista, they were ready to use her performance of Laura to declare her a major actress. "One of the most difficult roles for a young actress is that of Laura in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie" wrote a later critic in Time. "The shy, crippled girl at the center of the play, Laura is as fragile as the glass figurines she collects. . . . Calista Flockhart . . . ogave a O beautifully posed and tender performance as Laura, winning your heart and breaking it too." Variety stated that the production "leaves an audience member with something like the shivering sense of astonishment and pity. . . ." It called Calista's performance "extraordinarily risky, intensely felt," and declared it "the leading role she had been working toward during several remarkable seasons Off Broadway." Yet another critic wrote: "Calista Flockhart's Laura is near perfect, her pathological shyness so organic that it is painful to watch." Calista won an Actor's Equity award for her performance. She got equally fine notices for a Hartford Stage performance of Romeo and Juliet the next year; the New York Times called her Juliet a "luminescent performance." More plays followed, along with a Tony nomination for a 1997 production of Chekhov's Three Sisters. That was just about the time that David Kelley called, and her recent theater successes couldn't have made the choice to try television any easier. But while there are numerous great "classic" roles for an actress to play, it is not so often that a great contemporary role such as Ally comes along, a role that speaks in the voice of current times. O

O

QJ

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FACING

THE

CAMERA

Like most theater actors, Calista had a prejudice against television but was more willing to try for movie roles. Besides the prestige factor, there was the practical consideration of movies being only a short-term commitment: an actress could earn a lot of money for a few weeks' work and then hightail it back to the theater. Calista's first movie was actually for the pay television station HBO, in which she starred in The Secret Life of Mary-Margaret: Portrait of a Bulimic. Calista was no doubt cast because of her acting abilities, but she also was thin enough to look like someone who just might have an eating disorder. In fact, even before the anorexia controversy broke out, Ally McBeal's critics would accuse the show of promoting an image of excessive thinness as a feminine ideal. Calista also starred in Drunks, getting to play yet another dysfunctional personality, a "Camel Light-smoking alcoholic," as Us magazine put it. She and a handful of more famous actors — Faye Dunaway, Richard Lewis, Amanda Plummer, Dianne Wiest, and Lisa Gray Hamilton from The Practice — all played characters at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The actors worked for scale in order to o get o the low-budget ensemble piece made and it was eventually bought by another pay-TV channel, Showtime. For her first feature film, Calista made it into a prestigious production — the Robert Redford-directed Quiz Show. While the film was much praised, her own role was brief. She won a larger, supporting part in another hit — The Birdcage directed by Mike Nichols. But the stars of this adaptation of a French film were definitely Nathan Lane and Robin Williams hamming it up as a gay couple who ran a drag club, with Gene Hackman just behind them as a U.S. senator whose daughter wants to marry Robin Williams' son. Calista, who played the daughter, showed an elegant

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Calista in The Birdcage with Gene Hackman and Diane West GLOBE P H O T O S , I N C .

comic timing. She looked much younger in the film than she would as Ally, with longer hair and a rounder face 'with wide eyes. But both she and the actor playing her fiance were merely the excuse for the comic plot. (An Ally McBeal fan watching the movie now might easily imagine the final marriage sequence as a kind of Ally fantasy.) A larger role in a smaller film of the same year came in Milk and Money, with Calista as the love interest in a romantic fable of sorts that critics found less than believable. Her most notable feature role to date came the following year, with the fall 1997 release of Telling Lies in America. Written by joe Eszterhas, a writer better known for Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and other hits and misses of questionable taste, it was a surprisingly personal film about a young Hungarian immigrant trying to fit in at a Cleveland high school during the rock-and-roll sixties. Calista played a young woman working in the same supermarket where the boy had a part-time job. With a sixties flip hair-do, and quietly intense readings of such lines as "Why do you gotta blow smoke all the time?" the actress truly seemed to

belong to another era. She had an almost sombre charm as she helped to make the young boy into a man and tried to save

him

from

the

influence

of

a

sleazy

radio

disc

jockey,

played by Kevin Bacon. Of all her film roles to date, this one shows how different Calista can be from the character of Ally. The film received good reviews (a "surprisingly sweet coming-of-age story," wrote People) but it played to modest business. Calista had been up for some flashier roles, but each time another actress was chosen instead. Courtney Love beat her out for The People vs. Larry Flynt while Cameron Diaz won the role in My Best Friend's Wedding. For someone who admits to being competitive, these near misses could not have been easy to accept. Without doubt the part of Ally was the best ever offered to her outside of theater, and despite whatever doubts she had about television, she could hardly have turned it down or prevented herself from being excited about playing it.

GO

WEST,

YOUNG

WOMAN

Calista packed up her possessions into two suitcases and a dufflebag and along with the dog Webster made the long flight from New York to Los Angeles. She was in her very early thirties, but just how old would become a matter of dispute in the press, as Calista stubbornly refused ever to tell her age. (Even men she dated for long periods never knew.) She found a place to live in the Hollywood Hills, but after the life she had made for herself back in New York, she was bound to feel like a stranger in a strange land. "There was one point when I moved to L. A., and I thought, 'Oh my goodness, all of the people I know here, I pay. I felt very young and innocent and sort of ignorant about the whole Hollywood thing, and I didn't

Gary Grant and -wife Dyan with baby Jennifer

have any real friends when i first arrived, it was very dark aiici weird. You have these friends, but they're agents and managers and lawyers, and they're all sort of working for you." Even at the best of times, Calista wasn't the sort of person to have many close friends, and now she was about to take on a work schedule that did not allow for the kind of after-hours camaraderie of New York theater life. Like her character Allv, she would lead the single life,' only J* O without quite so much despair. Her romantic past included two long relationships and two shorter ones, but she was used to being alone. As she became famous, the tabloid press would naturally begin linking her romantically with various men, including Matt Damon, whom she had never even met. Not that she liked being single, however. "Who wants to be alone," she said after Ally began to air. "I think there's a big difference between what people want and what they need. Like, I don't need a man. And 1 don't need a family. But that doesn't mean I don't want it. I identifyj j with the biological clock ticking." The clock might, be ticking, but her career was definitely/ o cV drowning out the sound. "Katharine Hepburn really made a choice," Calista mused. "She wasn't sure whether she wanted a career or children, and she finally decided that she would have a career and that it would be unfair to have children. I mean, really, what do you do? You have a career, then yet married and have a babv and ijo back to work so the kid can spend all the time with a nanny? What's the point in that?" Calista's somewhat solitary nature was only encouraged by the move to Los Angeles. Later, the invasion of the press onlyj made her more inward. "I'm somewhat insvchoticallv j private," she asserted. People tended to assume that she was a delicate creature because of her looks and voice, an assumption she found condescending. She especially hated O

*'

O

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it when people acted protectively towards her. "It used to send me into this rage." But that was like her, having big emotional reactions to things so that the people around her sometimes watched in disbelief as she blew her stack. Her own attitude was remarkably accepting of herself; that was just the way she was, and people would simply have to deal with it. In any case, she was not going to have much time to worry about herself. For most of the waking day, she needed to become Ally McBeal.

MAKING

ALLY McBEAL

Greg Gcrmann, cast to play the character of Richard Fish, knew several of the other actors from the New York theater scene. And like them, he recogni/ed just how well written was the pilot script. "So," he joked, "with all that going for us, I was certain we were doomed." The crucial filming of the pilot took place in the pale yellow building called Ken-Mar Studios on Cahuenga Boulevard, on a sound-stage next door to The Practice. The episode (given the number i o i to designate it as the first season and first episode) had to reveal the backstory, set up the show's basic situation, and introduce the characters and their relations. At the same time, David wanted to introduce some storv lines that would play out as the season went on. The audience would learn that Ally McBeai and Billy Thomas (his last name changed by David from "Quinn" at the last moment) had been childhood boyfriend and girlfriend, that Ally had followed him to law school ("1 didn't even want to be a lawyer," she revealed in a voice over), but that he had switched schools when his euo was bruised after not makingo the Harvard Law o Review. Then the two lost touch, only to meet up again in j

i

^

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the pilot after Ally makes a sudden decision to switch to the hot young law firm of Cage/Fish & Associates. The reason for that switch introduced a subject - — sexual harassment - that would come up frequently as a subject on the show, often in surprising variations. At her firm, a senior partner named Billings grabbed her butt while Ally stood on a library ladder. (Billings would return later in the season, and the knowledge of his out-of-control impulses would be used by Ally and Georgia against him.) An angry Ally encounters a Harvard classmate, Richard Fish, who immediately offers her a job at his firm. She accepts, only to discover that her old beau Billy works there already. When Billy suggests they go for coffee she has a fantasy of the two of them going at it in a hot-tub-sized cappuccino cup. Only after docs she discover that since seeing him last he has married Georgia. Another fantasv: arrows piercing her heart, in imitation of St. Sebastian. A couple of other details in the pilot are worth mentioning. One is a fantasy moment in which Ally imagines she has larger breasts and, indeed, her breasts begin to grow. Both fantasy and voice-over are much more important elements in the pilot than they would be later in the season. The second is a small, revealing moment in which a preoccupied man with a high forehead bumps into Allyon the street. His mumbled apology isn't enough for Ally, who gives him a verbal tongue-lashing. "Sorry! You didn't even look up!" she scolds, suddenly exposing her own high-strung nature and allowing her unhappy emotions to be displaced onto a stranger. This might have been simply a nice dramatic way of exposing Ally, but David is a master of exploiting his own scenes and the altercation will later haunt AllyJ when she is accused bys a law review board of instability and causing discredit to the legal profession. David Kelley, by the way, is a man who likes to have fun with casting cameo and guest star roles. He w r ill often call

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Jeffrey Kramer with David Kelley (right) LISA R O S E / G L O B E PHOTOS, INC.

on actors known to audiences for previous roles that cause interesting reverberations with his own story. In this case, however, he had a private bit of fun, letting the man in the street be played by Jeffrey Kramer, a former actor and now producer of both Ally McBeal and The Practice. David could

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not have anticipated that Kramer would become fodder for the news tabloids when the National Enquirer would claim that Calista Flockhart and Kramer, age fifty-two, were having an affair. The tabloid also stated that Calista was a friend of Kramer's wife, from whom he was recently separated and who didn't know about the relationship. Well, this was the sort of attention they could expect all too much of in the future. Courtney Thorne-Smith as Georgia was not the only late edition to the pilot. So, amazingly, was Vonda Shepard. The

singer's voice is heard not only on the driving pop theme song "Searchin' My Soul" (which she wrote), but also as a way of expressing Ally's emotions, and as the leader of the house band at the bar where the lawyers go to unwind after work. Possibly the first resident singer on any television drama, Vonda Shepard seems so integral to the show's design that it is hard to believe that her role was actually shot and spliced in after the rest of the pilot was finished. In fact, David's original choice for theme song was a sixties pop tune called "Tell Him." In a later first-season episode he wrould make a joke of this when Ally is asked by a therapist, played by Tracey Ullman, to pick a theme song for herself. Ally chooses "Searchin' My Soul" but the therapist rejects it: "Bad song. Stinks!" Instead, she makes Ally choose "Tell Him." (Vonda Shepard herself cracked up when she watched this episode at a screening with David Kelley and the cast.) During the pilot filming, the cast had its first opportunity to work with David and the rest of the staff, as well as one another. Naturally the male cast members would be asked by the press what they thought of their star, Calista. "Great legs," Greg Germann boasted. "A beautiful pair of lips," intoned Gil Bellows. Courtney Thorne-Smith, another beautiful woman, recognized something deeper; she remarked on Calista's "confidence and grace." In fact,

Calista, the relatively unknown lead, had won over Courtnev, the Mehose Place star, from the very first taping. Courtney was surprisingly nervous on the set and after her first significant scene, Calista placed her hand on Courtney's arm and said, as if she and not Courtney was the TV veteran: "Now, is there anything I can do for you?" As for Calista herself, she discovered that acting for television could be a painfully self-conscious process. In her first love, the theater, an actor doesn't get to see herself perform. She simply goes out and does it, the performance existing between her and the audience. For television the takes are short, requiring one to constantly slip in and out of character. And everything is taped, to be scrutinized afterwards — a brutal experience for a self-critical actor. And as she would discover later, there were practical differences. For example, every week a new script would have to be memorized, requiring hours of work outside of the long shooting days. Fortunately the scripts were frequently brilliant and required the stars to actually act rather than just walk through their parts with exaggerated expressions. But as she and the cast would soon learn, there was virtuallyJ no life outside the show. Life was television. Of course, they were also going to become famous, as the stars of a hit series. But they didn't know that yet. THE

FOUR-DAY

SCRIPT

A television show does not simply go on the air, at least not if the producers expect it to get any attention. A lot of effort has to go in to attracting the attention of the press before the premiere. The more buzz, the more curious viewers who will tune in to that first episode. David understood this well enough and for Ally McBeal he took the unusual step of having his glamorous wife Michelle Pfeiffer accompany him to a big summer promotion party

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at the Derby, put on by Fox for the upcoming season. And the buzz indeed was startingo to o prow louder,' in part r because Ally McBeal was a new David Kelley show, someone the critics sometimes praised and sometimes kicked around but who almost always surprised them out of their complacency. But also the concept of the show — a woman who was bright, good-looking, successful, and miserable — already started ringing some bells — bells of recognition and bells of warning. But for David, promotion was a side issue. He now had not one but two shows to produce and write, an experience he had found exhausting and difficult when he had tried it with Picket Fences and Chicago Hope. And he had to have several episodes of both Ally McBeal and The Practice written before the start of the season, so that taping could always be a few steps ahead of air dates. His primary job was to stay in his office and write. Just like that first draft of From the Hip, he wrote his first drafts in longhand on yellow legal pads; later in the season his thumb would go numb from holding the pen so much. His preferred schedule was to give himself four days for each script; longer than that and he wouldn't experience the needed adrenaline rush that came from an impending deadline. Shorter, say two or three days as might happen close to the season end when time started catching up to him, and he might miss certain neat connections that a script's story offered to him. The Bochco method on which he had cut his teeth, with writers and producers sitting around a table collaborating on stories, turned out to work against his natural talents and inclinations. David liked working alone, in complete control, and found — like many novelists — that only by actually writing could he fully work out his ideas and discover the truth about his characters. It was not surprising that he found it difficult to pass on his vision, assigning

a show to another writer. He simply didn't have the ability to delegate. If during a script conference or read-through with the actors a script turned out to have a problem, he preferred to ask everyone to leave the room while he fixed it. While he was well aware that making it to the end of the season was a "marathon" that can burn a writer out, he just couldn't help it. In order to write the legal stories for both his shows, David had to keep up-to-date on recent court cases. For Ally McBeal, though, he was hardly concerned with strict realism,' somethingo that viewers and critics didn't always J seem aware of. His judges could be as eccentric as he wanted, Ally and John Cage could suddenly get up and dance — many strange things could happen and not destroy the credibility of the show, as long as they illuminated character. And David was perfectly happy to accept the television convention that cases go immediately to trial and only take hours instead of weeks or months before a verdict is in. After the O.J. Simpson trial, Steven Bochco declared that people would never again believe in a legal show in which cases are begun and finished during a single episode. For that very reason he created the show Murder One, whose first year centered on a single trial. But Bochco turned out to be wrong, and David knew it all along. The industry could not help but take notice of David's remarkable productivity. Jamie Tarses, president of ABC Entertainment which had The Practice on its schedule, called David "one of the miracles of television." As he explained, "Nobody writes every episode of a series. It's something that defies explanation, except to say it is attributable to genius, and I know that's not a word you throw around easily talking about television." Over at the home of Ally McBeal, Peter Roth, president of Fox Entertainment, expressed a similar awe. Roth had been the one to

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first hire David to create Picket Fences. "This is not a guy who writes everyJ episode because his ego demands it. This i O is a guy who has such a vision of the characters he's created that he's afraid to let them Ogo,' for fear theyJ might be O misrepresented." (Roth, by the way, would show up in a brief bar-scene cameo as a guy who claims to run a network.) What impressed Steven Bochco (whose own new series, Brooklyn South, would end up being cancelled at the end of the year), was not David's output or his cultural hipness but its voice. "Anybody can tap into the cultural Zeitgeist — that's not so hard," he insisted. "It's that David focuses those issues through his own very specific point of view. You could give me ten TV scripts with their covers torn off and I could recognize his work in a second. His voice is that powerful." As for David himself, he preferred not to probe too deeply. "I know what I'm doing is considered unusual," he said. "But it doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me." Indeed, observers noted that as the season went on David continued to seem relaxed and unstressed, if somewhat lacking in sleep. Although writing two shows simultaneously was a double burden, it had the positive effect of re-invigorating his creativity as he alternated from one to another. "To the extent I'm not feeling in a particularly romantic or whimsical or funny mood one day [to write Ally McBeal], I can always go over and kill somebody on The Practice." What also kept him going was that, like a novelist, he found himself exploring his characters a little more with each episode. "So the characters in the show have an odd way of fuelling me, not draining me." He found the experience of writing Ally McBeal akin to writing a novel in weekly instalments. Any other insights, David would rather leave to the armchair psychologists. Like many artists, he seemed to have a suspicion of analyzing his own abilities. "I look at

mvself the same wav I look at television: as long as there's an image up there in the mirror, fine. Don't start looking at the wires behind because something will go wrong. So I tend to sort of stay out of the analysis of why I write and what I write." -'

J

SHOOTING

O

THE

EPISODES

But the script, of course, was only where an episode began. It is true that in both film and television, writers tend to be underappreciated, and the praise due them given instead to directors and actors. Nevertheless, reading a David Kelley script for Ally McBeal requires an experienced imagination in order to sec what the final product might look like. The director, set designer, costume people, and other crew created a visual life for each episode barely• hinted at 1 on the page, while, the show's composer, Danny Lux, and the songs chosen by David for Vonda to sing added instant emotion and fullness. As for the actors, those extraordinary people who put aside their own personalities to embody the characters, they made David's words more than just clover or even wise. They Ttiarle them into the voices of Ally, Billy, and the rest — into the expression of their personalities, feelings, sudden thoughts, angers, disappointments. They made the words come alive. And what the words didn't say, the actors conveyed bv their eves, their mouths, their bodies. David began the process of making each first-season episode by having a "tone meeting" with the director. Like all shows, Ally McBeal and The Practice both employed several directors over the season, each one responsible for maintainingo a consistent look. The reason for so many directors was a practical one. An episode takes much longer than just its shooting time to make, requiring

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several weeks of both pre- and post-production. As the shows needed to be shot one right after another, directors worked simultaneously on their episodes, each at a different stage. At the tone meeting, David went through the script scene by scene, explaining what the tone or feeling should be. For Ally McEeal the meeting lasted about two hours, twice as long as for The Practice. It was much more difficult to convey the right tone for Ally, which mixed comedy with pathos in almost every scene but which also relied on wild theatrics at one moment and subtle inflection (such as a strange smile from John Cage) the next. The shoot itself demanded fourteen-hour days on the set. No wonder cast and crew so often begin to feel like a family. On Ally McBeal, which despite its title character is close to being an ensemble show, the actors shared an unusual number of group scenes together, whether around the boardroom table, in the courtroom, or at the bar. And virtually all the actors had intimate one-on-one scenes with each other as well. Calista soon found out that her life consisted of rising at 5:30 a.m., driving to the set (stopping at Starbucks on the way), working, going home to walk the dog, then memorizing lines tor the next day before going to bed. She adopted an expressive acting style, allowing herself to show the full range of Ally's inner life. "In real life people have big emotions," she said. "People tend to believe that in film or TV you have to act smaller [than on the stage], but I don't believe that." Lisa Nicole Carson moved back and forth between the show and her other job over at ER. Greg Germann looked forward to reading the next script, never able to predict what David would have in store from them. "Everything from the writing to the cast, you're constantly challenged," he said. "And it makes you do your best work." He was thrilled to find his character, the "confident, guileless,

unapologetic" Richard Fish, having an affair with Dyan Cannon who played Judge Whipper Cone. "I thought, 'Wow, what happened to her career — from Gary Grant to Burt Reynolds to Greg Germann. She must be so depressed!' " Courtney Thorne-Smith said at the end of season one, "This first year was an extraordinary experience, in the writing, the energy and friendliness of the cast, the unity of the crew. I don't think I would have made it if it hadn't been for that." Of course there was a lot of fun on the set. Lisa Nicole Carson and Calista laughed together all day long when they filmed the art-class scenes for the episode titled "CroMagnon" in which the male models were almost naked on the set. Jane Krakowski, the scheming secretary Elaine, was overjoyed when she got a chance to belt out a sultry version of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" during the Christmas episode. One of the producers had heard Krakowski on the radio (she can be found singing on tribute albums to both Burt Bacharach and Stephen Sondheim) and told David. For Calista, being the star of the show did often seem to get on her nerves. On the one hand, she found people pampering her and being overprotective, which drove her crazy. On the other hand, she sometimes felt like a mere product for sale. Once during a conversation with a couple of publicity people she began to choke on the cereal she was eating. The two kept yakking away at promoting the show, oblivious to her condition. As mentioned, the filming of each episode did not end the work to be done. Because of the importance of the music soundtrack, as well as the voice-over and fantasy sequences, the show required a good deal of post-production work. The fantasies alone required two special effects people, John Cazin to arrange for unusual stagings and Mike Most to do the computer work. For example, the

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long tongues dropping out of Billy and Richard's mouths when looking at the sexy delivery girl were created solely by computer animation. So was Elaine's expanding head as she talked on and on. But Ally literally putting her foot in her mouth required something simpler — another actress's foot, the rest of her body being off-camera. (Calista found another woman's toes in her mouth a decidedly unpleasant experience.) Sometimes Most and Cazin had to work together, such as the scenes in the episode called "The Playing Field" in which Ally imagined herself swimming through her underwater office. Cazin filled the office set with smoke and filmed it; by tinting the image, he could make the smoke look like water. Then Calista was taped "swimming" in front of a blue screen. On the computer Most wedded the two pieces of film into one. As the shooting progressed and David produced more scripts, he began to change Ally in subtle ways. Responding to a sense that viewers considered her too whiny, he began making her more optimistic and less of a complainer. One newspaper critic noted the change positively. Henry Mietkiewicz of the Toronto Star wrote that her "self-pitying whine" in the first episodes was annoying but that she quickly matured, a transformation that made her like " Cinderella." Interestingly, Mietkiewicz favorably compared David to his old mentor Steven Bochco,' notingo that while Bochco's dramas had mostly been successful, his comedies (Total Security, Public Morals) had flopped. David had the talent to succeed at both. Another, perhaps more significant, influence on the show was the actors. David found himself writing to suit Calista's nature in particular, even adopting some of her expressions. "He's very open to suggestions," Calista said. "He comes down to the set quite often to raid the popcorn machine, so you can always grab him and talk to him. He's very approachable." While agreeing that Kelley did listen

to the actors, Greg Germann found him more distant. "There's not a lot of interaction," he revealed. "He's like the Wizard of Oz on the set up there in his office — only when you pull that curtain open, he really is this big figure controlling everything. So maybe 'approachable' isn't the word." David also used certain of Gil Bellows' favorite phrases. Bellows, who found his door always open, had talks with David about Billy's supposed moral integrity and just how far the audience would accept the idea of him being in love with two women at once. Others, such as Jane Krakowski, were content to let David take their characters wherever he saw fit. In time, too, David began to rely less and less on voiceover to reveal Ally's thoughts. He found it too much a "device" and too easy to rely on instead of finding a more inherently dramatic way of revealing her.

THE

MAKING

OF

AN

EPISODE

How much does one of David Kelley's scripts change as it undergoes the process of being made? Taking the episode called "Forbidden Fruits" as an example shows many fascinating and revealing differences between the "First Draft" script and the actual finished episode. The script, dated January 27, 1998 (just 3£ days before the episode aired) was not David's actual first draft, but the first one that he delivered to the producers, director, and network executives. "Forbidden Fruits" centers on a civil action in which a man named Bepp sues an American senator for interfering with his marriage by initiating an affair with his wife who then divorced him to marry the senator. This question of breaking up a marriage brings to a boil Georgia's jealousy and anger over Billy and Ally's continuing flirtation, forcing a confrontation between them

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all. The episode's humor comes mostly from John Cage's courtroom antics and the decision of Richard Fish, not known for his litigation skills, to try a case in court. In the script, David included sound effects (the sound of Richard's internal confidence as a "clank clank") as well as the dancing baby's appearances, all of which made it into the episode. So did the songs listed for Vonda Shepard and other music played as evidence during the trial. (There was one change here; in the script, David called for the Sinatra version of the song "Hidden Persuasion," but in the episode Vonda Shepard sang it.) Perhaps the most obvious changes were the countless ones made by the actors. They added and dropped words, inverted sentences, and changed perhaps half the lines in some way that made them flow more easily and spontaneously. The second most obvious change was a number of scenes and lines dropped from the original script. Some were dropped before shooting and others were left on the editing-room floor. Among them were a conversation in which Cage and Georgia tried to convince Richard not to appear before the judge, and another in which the senator argued that he should be allowed to take the stand. Nuts and bolts stuff, though written with David's usual pizzazz. Quite a few scenes had their last line or two dropped; writers have a tendency to give scenes a more definite ending than they need. More significant were the two extra scenes that David added to the script before shooting. One had Richard in the unisex bathroom preparing himself for court. John Cage, after a bad stall dismount, gave Richard some pointers on deportment before the judge. Richard tried to summon up the same bells of confidence in his mind that Cage hears, only to get the clanging — and a sound that might have been a small fart. The point of this new comic

scene was to emphasize how unusual it was for Richard to appear in court and what a fool he might make of himself. Another, even more important scene, was slipped in just after Billy told Ally off for making remarks in court about people not being able to deny their love for one another. (Ally's words had upset Georgia.) In the new scene Ally stormed into Billy's office to tell him off for telling her off, but then the two became serious and quiet. This change in mood did a much better job of setting up the scene following in which Ally found Georgia in the bar and confronted her head on about her fear that Ally wanted to steal Billy away. The most intriguing — and frankly amusing — script changes were three small moments that affected the character of Ally herself. In court Ally went up against Anna Flint, a lawyer with a notoriously winning smile, and told the audience in a voice-over: "That is a smile." But in the original "First Draft" script David had written an additional voice-over line that the episode left out: "I hate not being the prettiest one in the room." Did he decide that the line made Ally sound too catty? David also included a fantasy moment in his script that didn't make it into the show. When Georgia asked Ally what would happen if she and Billy were stranded on a deserted island, the script called for Ally to imagine the two of them making love on a beach. In the final show Ally just opened her eyes wide and slid them to the side; the audience was left to imagine what she was thinking. Pero o haps the cut was for budget reasons or David thought it would undermine the essential seriousness of the moment for Georgia. One last change involved a jaw-dropping line in the script. Lying in bed with Renee and thinking about Billy and Georgia, Ally was supposed to say: "I can always tell when people are talking about me, my vagina itches." To

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which Renee would respond, "Don't be asking me to scratch it." But in the finished episode the word "fibula," a bone in the shin, was substituted for "vagina." Had the network censors objected? Did Calista Flockhart suggest that even Ally would never say such a thing? Did David himself think he had gone too far?

FIRST

REVIEWS

On Monday, September 8, 1997, the pilot episode of Ally McBeal first aired. The reviews began appearing on that same day and David and the actors must have been pleased. Some of those reviewers were even more glowing than for The Practice. Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly gave it an "A" rating. "The only freshman show this fall that creates its own genre," he wrote. It wasn't the much ballyhooed fantasies that appealed to him, but something more serious: "the series' true attraction lies in its meticulous, even celebratory portrayal of the churning private life of a single professional woman. . . ." Ally, he decided, was a cross between the Cosmo girl and a Ms.-style feminist. And he praised Greg Germann as the best supporting actor of the season. People Weekly was only a little less enthusiastic, calling the show "fast-paced, funny, touching, romantic, and surprising. Please note that we did not add 'realistic.' " The reviewer called Calista "enormously winning" and noted how the structure of the show allowed for both legal stories and personal ones. A writer in the New York Times, not a regular critic but the novelist Olivia Gold Smith, noted that the show proved that "women can be funny and pretty at the same time." Being a writer herself, Smith was quick to hold up to acclaim David Kelley as the one responsible. The fans

thought they were in love with Ally, she wrote, but instead they really ought to have been chanting, "I'm in love with the writer. I'm in love with the writer. I'm in love with the writer." More praise followed. The Vancouver Sun called the show "an offbeat charmer full of wry wit and slightly skewed wisdom" and crowned Ally "an Audrey Hepburn character for the '908." Fortune magazine insisted that the show was a more realistic depiction of twentysomething life than Melrose Place or Friends. But that praise was not unanimous. The first negative reviews gave a hint of the kind of split that would soon grow into a chasm between the show's friends and foes. In an early article about the show, Time waffled in its opinion. A "simpering drag, but not hopeless," the writer called Ally. Her character seemed "hollow and calculated," with problems that were too false to identify with. But the show did have its winning moments and might improve over time. This was mild compared to the Philadelphia Enquirer which heaped scorn on the pilot, finding the premise annoying, the fantasy sequences foolish, and the acting poor. The reviewer even called Calista a "prissy Plain Jane"! This difference of opinion centered on the question of Ally herself. While some lauded David's depiction of a single woman, those who didn't like Ally seemed to take her as a deep personal insult. One was Tom Carson of the Village Voice: "Ally McBeal's contempt for women is about as loathsome as TV gets." Another was Alyssa Katz in The Nation who admitted holding a "grudge" against David for creating a male star (Dylan McDermott in The Practice) who dealt with hard-hitting issues and a female star (Calista in Ally McBeal) whose subjects were far lighter and more frivolous. These were not just gripes about a show that certain critics didn't think enjoyable, but something far more serious — and frankly interesting. It was

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David E. Kelley and Jerry Seinfeld © PACHA, CORBIS

criticism that reached down into people's values, into their ideas about male-female relations, into their worldviews. And while some of these reviewers wrote outside the commercial press, their animosity to the show would soon catch on with mainstream critics.

DAVID

KELLEY

HAS

A

HIT

The pilot episode ranked number thirty-six in the Nielson ratings for the week, with a total number of just over seven million viewers. It was certainly a solid enough start from which to build, although the show slipped in the next few weeks to about six and a half million viewers. Market analysts at the Fox network had told the executives that the show would grow slowly and so they were happy enough to order the final nine episodes that would make a first full season. The important point for the network was that those ratings were a 7 2-percent improvement over previous programming in the eighteen to forty-nineyear-old group, and even a better improvement in female viewers. A healthy 83 percent of Melrose Place fans were sticking around to watch Ally McBeal. Like his other shows, David hoped that the audience would grow slowly over time. He hardly expected a sudden leap. But what turned Ally overnight from a moderate success to a suddenly talked-about hit was one thing: the dancing baby. A staff member of the show first saw the computeranimated image on the Internet and suggested to David o oo that it be used on the show somehow. Created in 1996 by Kinetic, a software firm in San Francisco, along with Unreal Pictures of Palo Alto, California, "Baby Cha-Cha," as the makers called it, was a diaper-clad infant of indeterminate sex which danced in strangely adult motions. (The motions originated in computer-scanned adult movement.) Its purpose was simply to advertise the companies, but boy did the makers get more than they bargained for. As often happened for David, someone's offhand notion became inspiration. He quickly wrote an episode in which the baby appeared to Ally as a kind of hallucination, a manifestation of her biological clock ticking. It danced to

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the "ooga-chuckka, ooga-chuckka" rhythms of the 19705 hit Hooked on a Feeling. The episode, entitled "Cro-Magnon," aired on January $, 1998. The word had leaked out about it beforehand and the episode leapt over thirty other shows in the ratings that week, bringing in almost nine million viewers. Suddenly everyone was talking about Ally McEeal, articles appeared in magazines and newspapers, and jokes about the dancing baby made their way into late-night monologues. But one episode does not make a hit. Nor, for all its novelty and questionable cuteness (for there is something grotesque about an infant gyrating like an adult), does a dancing baby. What hooked the viewers and caused them to tune in again was the quality of the whole episode. "Cro-Magnon," in which Ally falls for a male nude model with a larger than average penis, was simply one of the funniest, most pointed, and charming episodes to date, not to mention one of the most sexually provocative. It was also one of the most story-rich, with Billy suddenly worried about whether he was sexually satisfying Georgia, John Cage and Ally defending a young man charged with punching someone for insulting his date, and a betting pool on a boxing match that highlighted other differences between men and women. And the final scene of Ally dancing in her pyjamas with the baby was irresistible not because of the baby, but because of Ally. As if by divine intervention, two more events occurred to shine an even brighter spotlight on the show. The first was the Golden Globe Awards, held just after the airing of the "Cro-Magnon" episode. The show had two major nominations — for best comedy and for best female actor — but no one seriously expected the show to win. In the best comedy category, the show was up against two blockbuster sitcoms, Seinfeld and Mad About You, both of which were the kind of straight comedies rather than comedy-dramas

that usually win. As for Calista Flockhart, she was still a television newcomer rather than a well-known star. The cast met at Jane Krakowski's apartment and took a limousine together to the awards ceremony. And sure enough, when the best female actor category came up Calista's name was called. She had fantasized about winning without really expecting to and was so completely "floored," to use her word, that she went the wrongo wav ' J to the stage. When she finally reached it, a television reporter remarked that she looked as if she had just been shot. Given Calista's ambiguous feelings about television and stardom, it was not really surprising that she enjoyed the feeling of winning for about ten minutes before wanting to go home — a feeling made worse by the fact that unlike the married actors on the show, she didn't have anyone to share it with. And then the show won again. David was used to winning awards, but this one must have been particularly sweet as it was for a show of his own creation that looked like it might be a hit. He thanked "that little woman with the funny name," a phrase which inadvertently offended Calista's mother who was watchingo the broadcast at home. The second event, coming just one week after the awards, was Ally McBeal's first major cover story — with Calista herself on the cover of Entertainment Weekly. In a green slinky spaghetti-strap dress, plucking a flower as if counting "He loves me, he loves me not," she looked lovely if somewhat anorexic. Rather than just raving about the show, the article fanned the flames of controversy: " . . . not since thirtysomething has a series so divided the nation, with half the viewers enthralled, half aghast." It revelled in comments from real women lawryers, wrho seemed as divided as the rest of the country. By the week of January 19, Ally McBeal was Fox's highest rated program. Its audience actually exceeded that of 7

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Melrose Place by a million viewers a night. Newspapers all over the country were saying, like the Orange County Register, that "Ally is already an icon for young working and dating women who face shifting codes of love, loyalty, work, ethics, and 'gender-appropriate' behavior in the real world." In Ally's supposed hometown of Boston, a Monday-night viewing party was being held every week at a popular restaurant called Legal Seafoods. Viewers Voice, an organization devoted to keeping favorite TV shows on the air, voted Ally McBeal "Favorite New Show." And the ratings went up. Almost steadily, so that by early March eleven million people in America were watching Ally McBeal every Monday night. On March 2, The New York Times ran a story on David on the front page of the "Living Arts" section. The story began: "It's Monday night in America. It's David E. Kelley night again on television." The Times called Ally McBeal "the one unquestioned breakout hit of the television season" and noted that David's work, both in quality and quantity, was reaching "legendary status." David himself told the Times: "The whole success of Ally depends on people getting emotionally involved with her. If you tell me it's working, it doesn't surprise me that people have invested in the character because investing in her is the only way it will work. But I am surprised that it caught on this quickly." And it kept catching on. In that same month Ally McBeal rose into the top twenty-five shows, with an amazing fourteen million viewers. Two-thirds of its fans were women, but that still meant a lot of men liked it too. Networks began telling producers to come up with shows like Ally McBeal. The New York Times reported that two women television executives in their thirties confessed that they only wanted to watch shows with characters like Ally, who reflected their lives. Soon the first Ally McBeal rip-off was being promoted for the next fall season, a sort

of Ally-goes-to-college called Felicity. Even older established shows, especially those like Homicide and Law and Order which didn't attract a lot of female viewers, were adding young women characters like Ally to their casts.

ALLY

MEETS

BOBBY

No wonder that David was anxious to do a pair of crossover episodes between Ally McBeal and The Practice. Not only did he consider writing such episodes a pleasing challenge; he knew that they attracted media and audience attention. In this case, it was The Practice that was bound to benefit. At the time that David got the okay for the crossover, though, this benefit wasn't as apparent. Ally was doing better in the ratings than its sister show, but it was not yet a full-fledged breakout hit. David wanted to schedule the crossover for the night of April i 3, but ABC pushed for it to happen during the May sweeps period, when advertising rates are set and shows look for gimmicks to attract a larger audience. In the end both shows ran, one after another, on April 27. As the date approached, and it became clear that The Practice and not Ally McBeal was going to reap the benefits of the twin episodes, a minor skirmish broke out. Affiliate stations of the Fox network, which showed Ally, were suddenly mad as hell about it. They complained that Ally viewers were beingo encouraged to turn the channel away o J from their stations at the end of the hour and over to rival ABC to watch The Practice. One executive complained, "This is ridiculous. We're helping ABC build a show that is of no benefit to Fox." But while the affiliates made noises about pulling the Ally episode off the air, it was just that — noise. They were hardly about to lose their hottest hour of television.

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David himself had more practical things to worry about. He had to write the episodes (using a writing partner as he often did for The Practice) and then had to help in the logistical nightmare of shooting two shows in which actors from both casts were required on the others' set, and both sets were required for taping of the other's show. Twenty staff members, from line producers and designers to assistant directors, had to work it out like a military campaign. David ended up having to rewrite scenes so that an actor didn't have to accomplish the impossible task of taping two shows at the same time. Not surprisingly, while ABC hyped the evening with plenty of on-air promos, Fox completely ignored the event. And just as expected, the crossover was a big boost for ABC, bringing over Ally McBeal fans and giving The Practice its largest audience yet — almost fourteen million viewers. In fact, the crossover success was partly responsible for ABC'S decision to give The Practice a better Sunday-night time-slot. The story of a woman who murdered her husband with an axe and then under hypnosis claimed to be Lizzie Borden began on Ally McBeal while the trial took place on The Practice. It was almost strangely disorienting to see two characters from Ally, Billy and Ally herself, transported from the fast-moving romantic comedy of their own show to the far grimmer world of The Practice. They even looked different under harsher lights and surrounded by more muted colours. The only real comic moment, one that was sure to delight Ally fans who did switch channels, occurred when The Practice's Lindsay and Helen looked Ally up and down. When Helen told Ally that she couldn't find skirts as short as that, Ally replied haughtily, "They're not in yet, but they're coming back." And how did she know? Helen wondered. "I'm wearing one," Ally deadpanned. As for the drama, it centered not just on the sensational

trial but on the clash of values between Ally and Bobby Donnell. "You're disgusting," Ally sneered at him after Bobby instructed Eugene to make it look as if the accused woman's therapist-lover might have done the murder. Bobby's equally harsh reply: "That's exactly why you came to me." Later a teary Ally said to Billy, "Criminal law is not my world and ! don't want it to be." Well, the fact is that criminal law can be dirty sometimes and it is certainly often unpleasant, although (as Bobby's lawyers can attest) it brings its owrn exhilarating pleasures. What Ally felt most of us would feel, but in the final scene, when it has become clear that in fact Bobby was right about the therapist, she apologized to him. A dirty job all right, but somebody's got to do it. AllyJ might not have liked criminal law, but as a subo sequent episode of her own show would reveal, she took a mighty big liking to Bobby Donnell. Ally and Billy would return to Fish/Cage, where lawyering was supposed to be fun and everybody was supposed to make shovelfuls of money. But the lawyers in that grungy office of Donnell and Associates would continue to work late into the night, taking on those clients no one else wanted, trying to hold onto the flickering flame of their idealism. And sometimes even having private lives. The first season of Ally McEeal ended in mid-May with its popularity still soaring. But even though the show went into reruns for the summer hiatus, the noise and controversy surrounding the show did not end. If anything, it just grew noisier. In Julv the Emmy Award nominations were announced and as one newspaper headline shouted, "Newcomer Ally McReal Hailed at Emmys." The show garnered ten nominations, onlv one less than the leader frosier and highly unusual for a new program. Among them were best comedy and best actress in a comedy. But the show had caused another stir even before the J

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nominations. In June, Calista Flockhart as Ally made the cover of Time, the last face in a row of feminist icons running from Susan B. Anthony to Betty Friedan to Gloria Steinem. And under Ally was the headline: is FEMINISM DEAD?

It seemed as if Ally McBeal was no longer a fictional character in the mind of the public and the press, but an actual living person. Love her or hate her, she was now a part of our lives. And we couldn't wait for her to come back from holidays.

SEARCHIN'

VONDA'S SOUL THE MUSIC OF ALLY MCBEAL

The truth is that most of us go through life as the main character in our own drama. We imagine a camera following us about, recording our happiness and our misery, our far too rare moments of passion and our far too frequent humiliations. And along with this ongoing movie of ourselves is, naturally, a musical soundtrack. What is pop music, after all, but a kind of soundtrack for our lives? In the car, in restaurants and stores, even turned on low while we make love, music accompanies us everywhere. And so we associate, depending on when we grew up, the Beatles or Elton John or Celine Dion with a formative time in our lives. It is part of David Kelley's genius to recognize this simple truth and to give Ally McBeal her own soundtrack, a musical inner voice underlying the emotions she feels. David had used music significantly in the film To Gillian on Her 3Jth Birthday, but as a doorway to a nostalgic babyboomer past rather than as an expression of the present. For Ally McBeal, he found himself drawn to songs more for their lyrics than their associations. "Ask the Lonely." "Hooked on a Feeling." "He'll Have to Go." As a writer

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first and foremost, David imagined employing the songs to comment, if sometimes ironically, on what Ally was going through. But using the original recordings of songs from the fifties, sixties, and seventies, would have taken away from the show's contemporary feel. He needed a voice in keeping with the current times, a woman's voice, one whose constant presence would become part of the show's pulse and rhythm. He found Vonda Shepard.

GOING

N O W H E R E

When Vonda Shepard was fourteen years old she wanted to be a scientist. Born in New York, she and her two sisters were brought up in California by their father after their mother left the family. Very early on she switched her interest from science to music and began performing, taking to the road while still in her teens. At eighteen, Vonda was performing in clubs around L. A. With an ambitious desire for a record deal, she made a demo tape and sent it around. It seemed a stroke of luck when Warner Brothers Records offered her a contract, but the label refused to release a record. Finally her debut came in a duet of "Can't We Try" with the Canadian-born singer-songwriter Dan Hill. The single made it to Billboard magazine's Hot i oo top ten and Vonda hoped that now her own solo career would take off. It didn't. The single didn't bring her much personal attention and she went on playing small gigs. Finally Warner Brothers released an album called Radical Light. It was slickly produced in a manner that Vonda herself didn't like; the sound just didn't reflect her personal feelings about music. But the album included one number, "Searchin' My Soul," that would eventually bring her fame.

Radical Light sold less than six thousand copies and Warner Brothers "released" her from her contractual obligations. In other words, they dropped her. Now without a label or a manager she was once again playing small clubs, carrying her electric piano herself through the New York rain only to perform for an audience of two or three dozen people. She also toured for a while as a backup singer for Jackson Browne and Rickie Lee Jones, decent gigs but not likely to bring any attention to her abilities as a solo act. There was just "nothing going on" in her career, as she would say later. Near broke, still unknown, and to make things worse with a romantic relationship that was going down the toilet, she couldn't have felt much more depressed. Perhaps it was time to face reality and quit. What renewed her musical spirit was the decision to do an independent, or indie, album. One in which she could honestly express herself through the kind of folk-rock sound she felt closest to, with songs about being down but still hopeful. After her success a journalist would describe her sound well: "an ideal almost lost since the late 'yos: the seasoned but yearning white-soul chick who is unabashedly emotional and not always angry." And so in 1996 her album, It's Good, Eve, was released by the small Vesper Alley Records. It received good reviews, including an "A" rating in Entertainment Weekly which wrote: "piano-based, baby-faced, supple-voiced singersongwriters rarely get any better than this." The album still didn't sell well — only about nine thousand copies — but at least Vonda felt artistically satisfied. Maybe she could find the spirit to slog it out for a few more years.

FROM

HIT

SHOW

TO

HIT

CD

By coincidence, both David Kelley and Michelle Pfeiffer were fans of Vonda Shepard before they met one another.

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In fact, Michelle and Vonda had been friends since 1982 when they'd first met. In February '97, a little more than half a year before Ally McBeal would premiere, the nowmarried couple went to see Vonda perform at an L. A. club called Billboard Life. The club used a big screen behind the performer to project her image and Vonda later thought that seeing her on the grainy screen must have given David an idea of what Vonda might look like as part of the visual texture of a television show. When David eventually called Vonda up to ask whether she might want to contribute to a new show he was creating, he was quiet and low-key. He didn't say just how large a part she would play but he did tell Vonda that her music inspired him as a writer. And just how thrilled was she? Vonda screamed and said yes immediately. And so Vonda Shepard joined the show, not as an actress but in the unusual role of house singer. David said, "The soul of Vonda's sound — and her lyrics — seemed so commensurate with this character and the theme of this show. It just seemed like an organic thing to include her music." In other words, if it hadn't been Vonda, it would have been nobody. For every script of Ally McBeal that David wrote, he attached a "Song List," favoring classic pop tunes, with their clear and emotional lyrics. He drew on such hits as Dusty Springfield's "I Only Want to Be with You" and the Bee Gees' "I Started a Joke." But he also used a good number of Vonda's own songs, not just the theme track "Searchin' My Soul," but also "The Wildest Times of the World," "Maryland," and many others. Some Vonda performed in the bar frequented by Ally and company, giving her a natural presence on the show so that her voice seemed to belong. An attractive but certainly not a delicate woman, with long dirty-blond hair, brown eyes, pale skin, and full lips, she didn't look like an actress but somehow

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Vonda Shepard V F S P E R A L L E Y E N T ./ S H O O T I N G S T A R

more real. Other songs were heard on the soundtrack as the background to an emotional scene. One of Vonda's own, most touching songs, "One Hundred Tears Away," even became the title of an episode which dramatically builds to the very end when Ally is walking down the street crying and Vonda sings. J o o

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And so Vonda became a classic example of a long-struggling artist who suddenly appears to the public as an overnight success. As the show's audience grew, so did her fans. Each Monday night millions heard Vonda sing. They even heard her speak, if briefly, when she introduced first Renee and then Ally to tell their dirty jokes in one episode. As if the show wasn't already receiving attention, there was a new avalanche of press attention for Vonda. During the summer break she began touring to sell-out crowds. She made appearances on The Rosie O'Donnell Show and Live with Regis Si^Kathie Lee. "I feel an excitement from the audience, like they're sharing in this phenomenon," she said. By then word was already out that an album of Vonda Shepard's songs from the show was being produced. A bidding war among record labels began as early as January, with the rights finally going to Sony for a reported $3 million. Vonda produced it herself, agreeing to a mix of her cover versions of famous songs as well as some of her original material, all but one of which had been used on the series. The one, Vonda's own "Will You Marry Me?" hadn't been sung on the show yet but David liked it so much that he had already decided to use it as the inspiration for a second-season episode. Another singer might have balked at the title and cover of the CD. Called Songs from Ally McBeal, it featured a photograph of Calista as Ally, with Vonda's own image only on the back. But everyone agreed that this was the best way to sell it, given the enormous success of the show. Vonda was only grateful for all that was happening. As she wrote in the liner notes, "Vonda would like to thank the wonderful kindhearted David E. Kelley for giving me this tremendous opportunity. You're my hero!" What better way to launch the CD than on the show itself? A video of "Searchin' My Soul" was shown instead

of the usual opening credits on the May 4 episode, with the CD being released in the stores the following day. The demand by the press for interviews was so high that Vonda had to do two at a time. In the first week the CD sold 143,000 copies and hit number seven on the Billboard hit list. In Canada it quickly went gold, selling ^0,000 copies. As a Billboard columnist wrote, "Searchin' My Soul" was "in line to become the first summer anthem of the year." (He was right. I heard it played on radio stations from New York City to Nova Scotia.) Vonda was shocked, amazed, and thrilled. Vonda's life was now "pretty crazy." She was thirty-four, still single, "a hardworking woman with no relationship, and her personal life is kind of shaky." But she was enjoying the success which, after all, had taken twenty years to achieve. Indeed she thought of those years of despair in a calm, almost spiritual way. "It all leads to this point, and it all makes sense now."

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BUT IS SHE GOOD

FOR WOMEN? THE FEMINIST DEBATE

In February 1998, Calista made her first non-Ally acting appearance since the show began. Along with Glenn Close, Whoopi Goldberg, Winona Ryder, Uma Thurman, and Marisa Tomei, Calista took part in a benefit reading of a feminist performance piece called "The Vagina Monologues." (Sample line: "You cannot love a vagina unless you love hair.") Calista seemed a natural to attend, and not only because the work was written by Eve Ensler, the stepmother of Dylan McDermott. She was a natural because the character she played had become such a talking point for the issue of feminism and women in America. The star-studded and rather glamorous event was called by The Village Voice "the most important and outrageous feminist event in thirty years." But it was used in a very different way by Time magazine in their cover story, "is FEMINISM DEAD?" — as a sign of feminism's decline. And for Ginia Bellafante, the author of the Time article, the presence of Ally McBeal only highlighted that slide into ignominy. Bellafante argued that feminism, once such a valiant force in American politics and life, had been reduced

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to either a few glamorous events or had been reversed entirely. She wrote, "feminism at the very end of the century seems to be an intellectual undertaking in which the complicated, often mundane issues of modern life get little attention and the narcissistic ramblings of a few media-anointed spokeswomen get too much." She charged feminism with becoming "wed to the culture of celebrity and self-obsession." While admitting that some feminist battles had been won, women still made less money and didn't have the top jobs that men did. Nor had daycare yet become an important political issue. "Instead, much of feminism has devolved into the silly," she complained. "Ally McBeal is the most popular female character on television." Bellafante called Ally "ditsy," insisting that Ally considering her own problems bigger than other people's simply because they were hers was "offensive." Being a woman these days had been reduced to being sexual and attractive — to having the power to attract a man. The article ended: "But is Ally McBeal really progress? Maybe if she lost her job and wound up a single mom, we could begin a movement again." The article caused a lot of talk but in truth it wasn't terribly convincing. The ideas seemed cobbled together, the assertions overly strident (not to mention humorless). Nevertheless, there were many others who believed that Bellafante had a point. Entertainment Weekly had already suggested accusingly that the show "sneakily explores male preoccupations . . . by filtering them through a female protagonist's perspective." Newsweek wrote that "Ally is the quintessential postfeminist. She has all the professional advantages Mary [of The Mary Tyler Moore Show] never had, but unlike her more traditionally feminist sitcom sister, she doesn't want to make it on her own." Elaine Showalter, the well-known feminist critic and Princeton professor, seemed to positively sputter with anger. "To me, she seems

like an anorexic, self-indulgent little munchkin. . . . She is the little shiksa baby dream goddess." Nor were the critics solely women. Here is Terrance Rafferty in the men's magazine, GQj "TV'S Ally McBeal wants to be the thinking man's sex kitten — if only she had a brain." Some commentators did come to Ally's defence. Daphne Merkin of The New Yorker called the Time article a "yawn" and ogushed about the show. "I love AllyJ McBeal, To J my mind, the show is one of the best written on TV, and actually manages to make prime-time entertainment out of the drama of the inner life." Brushfires of debate erupted in cities and towns all over. Take, for example, my own home city of Toronto. First the show was attacked by Mark Kingwell, a popular philosopher and author: "Ally McBeal is perhaps the most regressive female presence on television since Edith Bunker,' a walkingo time bomb of sham equality and invited sexism." (This seems to me a misunderstanding of Edith Bunker, but let's go on.) He was followed by critic Elizabeth Renzetti in the Toronto Globe and Mail: "What, I'm supposed to buy twitch-faced little Ally McBeal as an icon for the nineties? Please. . . . If Ally . . . is indeed a role model for this complex age, it suggests that every woman would really like to be a petulant, self-absorbed bag of tricks." Renzetti was in turn offered a rebuttal by another critic, Shirley Knott, in the same newspaper's television supplement. Why could men enjoy watching Seinfeld without needing to emulate Jerry, while women couldn't enjoy watching Ally McBeal without being expected to want to be like her? But this reasonable response was drowned out by columnist Donna Lypchuck, who wrote in the weeklynewspaper Eye. She called Ally "another terrifying, sick, twisted male proj ection of what a modern woman of the 9o's is, you know, really like." Ally was clearly a male creation, she insisted, because "she exists in a state of

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relentless eroticization." Only by having a baby, Lypchuck added sarcastically, would Ally ever overcome her "obsessive compulsive behavior, paranoia, low self-esteem, manic depression, and delusions of grandeur." Ally McBeal was not a show to encourage subtleties of expression.

LOVE

AND

OTHER

QUESTIONS

While every viewer has a right to make up her or his own mind about Ally McBeal, it is interesting to note a few characteristics of these attacks. The first is how personally offended the critics are, as if Ally were a challenge to their own personalities and lives. The second is that they all assume that Ally is intended to be, or is taken by her audience, as a role model — a woman to emulate and a life towards which to aspire. Emulate a woman who knocks people over in order to catch a wedding bouquet? Who wants to sleep with a man simply because he has an oversized schlong? Who is so annoyed at another woman in a supermarket that she sticks out her foot to trip her? Who compensates for depression by showing off her legs? Who is deeply offended because a date doesn't "paw" her? Who do they think she is, Murphy Brown? The simple truth is that we can be fascinated by Ally, we can even "love" her if we choose, while sometimes feeling appalled or even embarrassed by her actions. After all, don't we feel that way towards the real people in our lives? The third is their overriding awareness that Ally McBeal is written by a man. Indeed, they seem to resent this fact most of all. It is interesting to imagine what they would make of the show if it was written by someone called

Darlene Kelley instead of David. That a man would even dare presume to create such a character sends them into howls of anger. There is, of course, a long and honorable tradition of great women characters created by men. Tolstoy created Anna Karenina, Thackery made Becky Sharp come to life in Vanity Fair. James Joyce made the wonderful Molly Bloom in Ulysses while John Irving conjured up the forceful Jenny Fields in The World According to Garp. And David Kelley has given us Ally McBeal. While there is nothing wrong with examining these characters as creations of men, and even searching for "hidden" male values, it seems absurd to condemn them because of it. In fact, I don't see why a feminist can't do a perceptive analysis of Ally McBeal without shouting about its dangerous influence on impressionable young women. I suppose we might as well add a fourth. I hesitate to repeat the old cliche that feminists have no sense of humor, but in this particular case one does have to wonder. None of the critics seems to understand that Ally's outrageous behavior is intended to make us laugh. Hell, it Joes make most of us laugh. She is like a Freudian id without a superego to keep it in check. She says and does things that the rest of us don't have the nerve to. She allows her selfishness — that part of ourselves we do our best to mask — to blossom like a spring garden. As a male viewer, although I love eavesdropping on Ally's life every Monday night, I certainly wouldn't want to live with her. In fact, I completely understood why Ron Cheanie, Greg Butters, and other men broke off their relationships over the first season. Ally was just too high maintenance for them. Billy was probably right to marry Georgia, who is less surprising and fun but a much more pleasant woman to live with day-to-day. It seems quite possible that Ally doesn't really have the attributes necessary O

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to share her life with a partner. Attributes like the ability to compromise, to easily forgive small transgressions, to put someone else's interests before her own. But Ally does dream of sharing her life. And the final and simple truth that the critics don't seem willing to accept is that most people have the same desire. Most of us don't want to live alone; for single people, male or female, gay or straight, the central perceived cause of unhappiness is the fear of never finding someone to love and be loved by in return. The audience for Ally McBeal knows that; that's one of the reasons they watch it. Will Ally find love? Will they? This question of love does not have to be viewed as a feminist issue. It can be thought of in larger, human terms. None of us, no matter how good at our jobs or how many friends and hobbies we have, or what valiant causes we fight for, feels satisfied without love. Married people think about this too; they ask themselves (just like Georgia and Billy), does my spouse still love me? Is our sex life growing stale? Politics be damned, sometimes we just care about our own hearts.

"I'M JUST A FICTIONAL CHARACTER'' For the last (if not final) word on the issue, let's hear what both Calista Flockhart and David Kelley have had to say about the woman that the former portrays and the latter has created. Indeed, it was Calista rather than Kelley who responded most visibly to the feminist trashing of the show. She found her picture on the cover of Time to be a rather "surreal" experience. "I thought it was ridiculous. I'm just a fictional character." And yet she was not shy about calling herself a feminist and naming Gloria Steinem as a real role model

"For making us take college for granted." Nor was she afraid to offer some social criticism of her own. "What are we supposed to do? It's so elusive, and the oppression is so subtle and confusing that it's much more insidious than it used to be. We have so many choices. We are women who are told, 'You can have it all! You can have a career; you can have a husband; you can have a child!' And suddenly, now, if you don't do all of that, you're a failure." Although Calista claimed to be "not that much like my character," she nevertheless shared some of her traits. And she understood the character's desires. "Somebody once asked me about one of my lines on the show: 'I want to change the world; I just want to get married first.' She was like, 'How could you say that?' But it's true. I'd like to change the world, but I'd also like to get married and have babies. Being loved is a basic human need. Who wants to be alone?" Not feeling identical to Ally didn't stop Calista from accepting her. "I embrace everything about Ally. Maybe it's because I'm playing the part, but I don't particularly see her as a whiner. One week she's tough, the next she's really weak. I love that. She's human." On another occasion she seemed positively annoyed by the attacks against her character. "Look," she said, "just because Ally happens to be a woman, all of a sudden she's expected to be this politically correct role model. But this is an individual character — she isn't intended to represent all women. The show isn't saying that all women lawyers are neurotic or vulnerable or wear short skirts." Nor has she been afraid to support the man behind the show. Instead of resenting the fact that a male was developing the character, she pointed out what an achievement that was. "It's refreshing that a male writer has so beautifully and accurately gotten inside a woman's head. Really, he's right on the money. David does not pull any punches."

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Kelley himself has been somewhat reluctant to answer the charges against him, at least directly. That was not a result of cowardice, but because he thought of his character as an individual, rather than as a representative type as the critics did. "You don't want to be burdened with the responsibility of representing a gender," he said. "When we first heard that women all over are identifying with her, we just went, 'uh oh,' because you know some of the things you're going to have Ally doing you don't want perceived as being your assessment of womankind. This is just Ally." Perhaps it is Calista, however, who has offered the most mature response to all the sound and fury. "For me," she said, "anything that produces controversy and thought and argument is doing its job. It's waking people up." Well, it wasn't quite the last word. The feminist issue would die down to a few warm embers, only to ignite into flames again during the start of the second season — and in a far more personal way.

ALLY McBEAL EPISODE GUIDE SEASON ONE

101 Pilot O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

09/08/97

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley James Frawley Richard Riehle (Jack Billings) Pat McNamara (Ralph Lyne) David S. Dunard (Judge Hupp) Paul Collins (judge Williams) Michael Laskin (Henry Thorton)

The pilot episode of any show has a heavy burden on its shoulders. It has to introduce the characters and give the audience a quick sense of what sort of people they are. It has to establish the premise. And it has to be a satisfying episode in itself, with one or more story lines, humor, and drama. Ally McBeal has more backstory to reveal than most shows, and it is a 6 good thing that David Kelley decided to use voice-over to reveal 6 J Ally's thoughts. Actually, the voice-over is used slightly differently

here, not merely to reveal what is passing through Ally's mind at the moment but also to allow her to give us her memories, much in the way a novelist uses first-person narration. And unlike most future episodes ("The Affair" being an exception), these memories are accompanied by visual flashbacks. So Ally tells us of her early love for Billy Alan Thomas, how she followed him to law school, and how he transferred from Harvard to Michigan, leaving her behind, all the while establishing the use of the voice-over device. But David Kelley has another device to establish — Ally's fantasies — and he does so in a bold manner. Ally and Billy having sex in a giant cup of latte, a quill of arrows piercing Ally's heart, Ally's breasts growing bigger, Elaine's head enlarging, Ally shrinking in a chair at a meeting — all of these make this the most fantasy-rich episode of the season. Not only do they reveal Ally's slightly crazy inner life, but they also add to the visual pizazz and humor of the show. The pilot must also get Ally to the firm of Cage/Fish & Associates where she will go to work for Richard Fish, an old classmate remarkable mostly for his desire to make lots of money. The plot that propels her there also sets up a sexual harassment case against Jack Billings, a lawyer at her previous firm who grabbed her buttocks. This is the first of what will be a whole line of sexual harassment cases, not to mention the many other cases that deal with sex, fidelity, love, marriage, and also friendship — cases that reflect the show's overriding themes. Of course what also must be established is the uneasy triangle of Ally, Billy, and Georgia who works at another law firm. The conditions of their relationships are neatly summed up by Ally telling Billy she still loves him, Billy telling Ally that he still loves her but loves Georgia also, and by Georgia and Ally admitting that they hate one another. The stage is set for the drama and comedy to follow. This being a show about lawyers, the pilot episode also needs a trial and a judgment. Ally not only wins her case (representing a smutty magazine), but helps land a new big client. Her winning record, by the way, will go unbroken all season (talk about fantasy!). "The more lost you are, the more you have to look forward to," thinks Ally as she walks home alone at the end of the day. The life of a single woman is an adventure and even glamorous, if not always happy. And we have embarked on that adventure with Ally McBeal.

i©2 Compromising Positions O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

09/1^/97

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Jonathan Pontell Tate Donovan (Ronald Cheanie) Phil Leeds (Judge Happy Boyle) Dyan Cannon (Judge Whipper Cone)

Does true love mean unwavering fidelity? Is perfect honesty a requirement for a genuine relationship? Do men and women want sex for different reasons? These and other questions are addressed in no less than four story lines in this rich, funny, and touching episode that challenges many of Ally's assumptions about romance and morality. As elegantly directed by Jonathan Pontell, everything about this episode seems to be moving, from the opening shot of gliding high above Boston, as if the eye of God were looking down at the little dramas about to be performed below. The second shot is an overhead of Ally in bed, the pale room flooded with soft early morning light. Most viewers are unlikely to notice a telling detail: although she lives alone, Ally sleeps on one side of her big bed, as if unconsciously believing that someone will one day occupy the other side. In fact, the other side of the bed has several pillows piled on it, almost as if Ally were trying to imagine the presence of a body there. One might expect that the introduction of John Cage would be done with some fanfare, but Kelley surprises the viewer with understatement. During a brief scene in which Richard explains that Cage was arrested in a car with a prostitute, Cage himself says not a single word. Played with wonderfully subtle and pathetic comic precision by Peter MacNicol, Cage seems too stunned, demoralized, embarrassed, and just plain slow-thinking to speak. Whipper Cone (Dyan Cannon) is the first person in the episode to defend prostitution, or at least to dismiss it as a serious crime. Whipper is, of course, Richard's girlfriend. His attraction has always been to older women, but Whipper just may be the great love of his life. (Either that, says Elaine with her claws out, or she's just the "latest relic of the month.") He confesses to being sexually aroused by older women's wattles, the loose skin hanging from the neck, and while most viewers will find this just a tad strange, Kelley is not afraid to show the peculiarities of sexual desire. Ally faces a moral dilemma when she witnesses a client, Ron Cheanie, kissing Whipper and agonizes over whether or not to tell

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Richard. Asking Billy for advice, her former boyfriend reveals his own dirty little secret: at his bachelor party before the wedding to Georgia, Billy had sex with a prostitute. That Ally takes the infidelity personally reveals how emotionally attached she still is to Billy. All these assaults on Ally's belief in true love and fidelity make her extra-sensitive to Richard's attempts to hook the client Ron Cheanie by using Ally as bait. Flirting with him strikes her as being a kind of prostitution too, and in a melancholy and rather beautiful line, delivered with wistful sadness, Ally says, "Sometimes I feel I'm just being unfaithful to love itself." Billy is the second to defend prostitution in the episode, and the third is Cage himself who claims that hiring a prostitute is morally superior to picking up a woman at a bar by misrepresenting one's intentions. Some critics take these arguments to represent David Kelley's own opinion but in doing so they ignore Ally who, while listening to Cage's defence, fantasizes throwing up into a toilet. Even though she softens her judgment a little when Cage confesses to sometimes going years without having sex, she doesn't change her view. She does, however, decide that being absolutely truthful in a relationship is not always a good thing. She not only helps Richard and Whipper to reconcile, but she prevents Billy from telling Georgia about the bachelor party prostitute. The truth isn't always the best thing when it only causes pain. More important for her is the conviction that couples can work things out and stay together. "I have to take that with me when I go to bed at night, even when I go to bed alone," she says with surprising decisiveness. She will not easily be shaken from her faith in love, although the future will sorely test it.

103 The Kiss ORIGINAL AIR DATE: 0 9 / 2 2 / 9 7 WRITTEN BY: David E. Kelley DIRECTED BY: Dennie Gordon GUEST STARS: Tate Donovan (Ronald Cheanie) Richard Riehle (Jack Billings) David Spielberg (television station executive) Alaina Reed Hall (Judge Elizabeth Witt) Kate Jackson (Barbara Cooker)

The opening of "The Kiss" is a startling, seductive close-up of Ally running her hands over her behind in a new pair of tight jeans. On first thought, viewers (even while feeling lust or envy) might suspect the shot to be exploitive of Calista Flockhart's skinny but appealing body. Perhaps it is, but the shot also brilliantly and ironically summarizes one of the themes of the episode: women's bodies and how they (and we) use them. The reason for the new jeans, which Elaine is helping her to choose, is a date with Ron Cheanie, the potential client of the firm from the previous episode. While Ally can't hide from herself her attraction and interest in Cheanie, she also knows that Richard Fish is using her as bait to hook some lucrative new business. The episode's courtroom drama takes up a good part of the hour. Barbara Cooker, a television news anchor, is suing a television station for wrongful dismissal. An attractive woman now in her forties, Cooker was fired when the station decided she was too old to be an object of sexual desire for its male viewers. This subject of exploiting female beauty resonates with the Ally—Ron Cheanie relationship. To make matters more interesting, the station is represented by Jack Billings, the walrus of a man who once sexually harassed Ally at her old firm. Georgia asks Ally to join her as co-counsel, knowing that her presence will distract the notorious letch, Billings. Isn't this a kind of exploitation of Ally's looks as well? There is another, more playful way, that Kelley has complicated the question of exploitation. For in the role of the fired news anchor he has cast none other than Kate Jackson, a woman who once starred in the first of what came to be called the "jiggle" shows — Charlie's Angels. Created by Aaron Spelling (who made a specialty of such television fluff), Charlie's Angels had three beautiful women supposedly fighting crime. And what has happened to these three stars as they have grown older? They have found acting jobs few and far between. David Kelley, so attuned to the subtleties of male-female relations, must know just how many single viewers will identify with Ally's first-date anxiety attack as she anticipates going out with Ron Cheanie. During this lovely scene, which only later can we see as the ironical disaster it turns out to be, Ally dances in a coy and seductive manner, moving close to Ron, chatting, deliberately letting him smell her, all the while thinking how easy it is to snare a man's desire. The first dance, she tells us in voice-over, is "foreplay," a sort of tribal rite in which the two partners speak but don't bother listening to what the other is saying. Despite her desire to meet Mr. Right, Ally treats Cheanie as just a typical example of his sex rather

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than an individual, and she in turn accepts the woman's role as enticer. Outraged by Cheanie's goodnight peck on the cheek, Ally rants at Renee in the post-date analysis: "What he did was rude. . . . Why can't he be a man and just paw me a little? I am a sexual object, for God's sake." This is just the sort of funny, uncomfortable dialogue that Kelley excels at. Should we laugh or be shocked by Ally? Is she an anti-feminist throwback created by a male writer who wants to validate men's worst impulses, or is he an empathetic genius, a sort of Gustave Flaubert of television, who understands women better than they understand themselves? Only later does Cheanie confess that he was scared off by something Ally said during their dance, just when he wasn't supposed to be listening. Just like the hero of Ally's favorite book, Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, Ally is a person who goes around saying, "I want, I want, I want." Cheanie fears he will never be able to satisfy her. Well, he will not be the only man this season who is intimidated by her needs. Kate Jackson proves herself a very able actress, projecting a genuine intelligence and thoughtfulness. Kelley gives eloquent voice to both sides of the case, however, and implicates us by having a station executive say that the television audience (hey, you mean us?) has the "attention span of a gnat." A nice touch is the way the case bonds Ally and Georgia together as two attractive women who know their looks benefit them and who may secretly be afraid of being cast aside like Barbara Cooker one day. (Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Cooker rhymes with "hooker;" all women, the episode implies, have to sell themselves in one way or another.) The women win their case but at the end of the episode the camera shows Barbara Cooker alone in the bar, reminding us that for most people life is not a fairy tale with a happy ending.

104 The Affair O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

09/29/97

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Arlene Sanford Tate Donovan (Ronald Cheanie) Jerry Hardin (minister) Brett Cullen (James Dawson) Kathy Baker (Katherine Dawson)

Until this episode Kelley balanced the comedy and the more serious drama pretty evenly, although even during the serious moments the

comedy was barely a line or two away. "The Affair," however, is different. It shows how unwilling Kelley is to settle on any fixed pattern for the show, and how courageous he can be in exploring Ally's life and character, even if she does not always come off as a heroine. In fact, in this episode we discover that she once came close to becoming that classic female villain, the homewrecker, when as a student she had a long affair with a married law professor. Adultery is, of course, one of the great themes of literature, opera, and more recently, film. It has everything going for it: sex, passion, secrecy, pain, betrayal, and, almost inevitably, tragedy. The story of Ally's relationship with Professor Dawsori and the pain it caused his wife is dark and compelling and requires almost the entire hour to play out. Professor Dawson's wife, not knowing that Ally was the woman her husband had an affair with, asks Ally to be a pallbearer. Almost hysterically afraid of being discovered by the widow as the lover of her late husband, Ally thinks only of protecting herself. "It wasn't that bad what I did," she cries to a disapproving Billy. "/ was in a monogamous relationship. / didn't hurt anybody." She is deceiving only herself. The widow Mrs. Dawson is an important role, the real emotional center of the episode, and Kelley has wisely chosen Kathy Baker, his accomplished lead from Picket Fences. Baker is almost the exact opposite of Ally in her stillness, her barely raised voice, her seemingly permanent expression of grief. And Katherine Dawson's inner sadness is beautifully externalized by mournful strings playing a brief thematic melody by the show's composer, Danny Lux. The brief, sepia-tinted memories of the affair are presented with a straight romantic sornbreness that is truly moving. But while adultery is the subject, the underlying themes of the show are trust and faith. Ron Cheanie is well aware that Ally has gone to Billy and not him with whatever crisis she's facing this week, and while he works hard to respect her post-lover friendship with Billy he does say to Ally during a conversation at the bar, "If you and I are going to progress you're going to have to let me in." Unless she can learn to trust him, unless she wants to trust him, their relationship will never amount to anything. Poor Ally finds herself trapped by the sins of her younger self when Katherine Dawson, finally seeing the truth, appears at the office to confront her. Although Mrs. Dawson doesn't want to speak about what happened between her husband and Ally, she feels a terrible need to understand. Her husband was a good person, Katherine Dawson says, and not someone with an unfaithful nature.

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That could only mean that he must have been in love with Ally. Did he then not really love her, his wife? Her emotional crisis feels very real, and so Ally's response — to leave her there while she flees to Billy's office — makes Ally seems almost juvenile in comparison. Even so, most viewers care and like Ally enough to hope for a way out. Billy tells her that she cannot tell the truth — that the professor loved Ally and not his wife — making this the second episode to assert that lies are justified if they protect people from emotional suffering. Only as the episode continues does it become clear how Ally's affair has raised the fragile emotional issues of trust and faith, not just for Mrs. Dawson, but also for herself and Ron Cheanie and for Billy and Georgia. In the bar, Georgia asks Billy to tell her Ally's secret, but Billy has promised Ally not to tell anyone about the affair. "But I'm your wife," Georgia says, forcing Billy to confront his own conflicting loyalties. Can he be faithful both to Ally and to Georgia? All Billy can do is assert his happiness and love, which Georgia accepts, if only for now. It takes a while, but meeting Mrs. Dawson forces Ally to confront the repercussions of the affair. Perhaps she overcompensates by condemning herself solely, saying that what she did was worse than what John Dawson did as he at least took a risk. Ally did not even consider the feelings of other people. "I put pain in that house, Renee," she finally admits. And in this moment the episode finds little to romanticize about adultery and the hurt it causes. When Ron Cheanie dumps Ally for the second time it is because she has not helped him to believe that trust will grow between them. The mournful string music that has accompanied Mrs. Dawson now plays for Ally, linking them together.

105 One Hundred Tears Away O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

IO/2O/97

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Sandy Smolan Phil Leeds (Judge Happy Boyle) Keene Curtis (judge on board) Carol Lacatell (judge on board) Zeljko Ivanek (judge on board) Audrie Neenan (Mrs. Clarkson) Dyan Cannon (Judge Whipper Cone)

Surely David Kellev must have known that Ally McBeal would be a controversial character from the very start. Her volatility, intense emotional highs and lows, unsatisfied desires, assertiveness alternating with vulnerability, and her self-consciousness as an attractive woman have made viewers feel intensely protective or almost equally contemptuous of her. And after allowing us to get to know Ally in the first episodes of the series, Kelley does something quite astonishing. He confronts Ally's detractors head on. How? He puts her on trial. Not for any crime, but for her mental fitness. The episode opens late at night with Ally picking up some groceries in a supermarket when she has an argument with a woman over a can of Pringles. The woman's resentment of Ally's good looks and financial status ("you pissy little thing, pushing your cart in your Calvin Klein outfit") along with Ally's aggressive stubbornness (and let's face it, doesn't Ally carry with her a sense of entitlement, of deserving everything she wants?) turns the argument into a clash of female images. Triumphant, the woman takes the Pringles and moves on. But almost without realizing what she is doing, Ally sticks out her foot and trips the woman. Ally is not only arrested for assault but — in a classic Kelley complication — charged with shoplifting a tube of contraceptive jelly. With Renee's help, Billy gets Judge Boyle to withhold finding on the case for one year at which point it will be wiped off the books. But he reports Ally's action to the Board of Bar Overseers, an inquisition-like tribunal which has the authority to suspend a lawyer's license for unbecoming behavior. The real drama of the episode is Ally's hearing before this board, and the parts that various characters play in the profile of her that emerges. As past events are recalled and accusations made about Ally's personality, she is forced to defend herself from the charges — just as David Kelley might feel obliged to defend his creation from his critics. But in his dramatized version, David Kelley gets to have a sort of perverse fun with those critics. By keeping the three board members in darkness he gives them a Satanic look; and by their speech and conservative appearance he recalls the notorious House Committee on UnAmerican Activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Having her hotheaded mistakes made into debating points before the board has a crushing effect on Ally. "Sometimes," she thinks to herself in voice-over, "I'm tempted to become a street person, cut off from society." No doubt many viewers can empathize with this feeling of not fitting in and so wanting to withdraw completely.

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Kelley, however, adds another line: "But then I wouldn't get to wear my outfits." As always, he presents her as equal parts superficial and profound. Ally confesses to Billy why she wanted the contraceptive jelly. For her, this aid to sexual intercourse was a symbol of hope. Hope that she might suddenly run into Mr. Right, the man she was meant to love. This is another Kelley trademark: using a mundane, or even a slightly comical or titillating object, as the embodiment of a deeper emotion. Whipper Cone swoops in to charge the board with hounding Ally for being a woman. "A man acts passionate we call him impassioned," she declares. "A woman? She's emotional. . . . Why don't we just admit it? She stands most guilty of being female." Billy too defends her, but his own trembling words emerge from his love for her. Kelley does not shy away from defending Ally's very womanhood, but makes it the very reason for this attack on her mental fitness and turns it back at her accusers. The episode is also about loyalty, underlined by the McCarthy hearing atmosphere, as Whipper, Billy, Richard, Renee, and even Elaine prove their fidelity to Ally. The board finds in Ally's favor and the friends celebrate at the bar. But just because Ally's not crazy, it doesn't mean she's happy either. The disturbing events have shaken her and made her feel even more alone. And so in perhaps the most poignant ending of any first-season episode she walks alone down the dark street weeping while Vonda Shepard sings how happiness is just "A Hundred Tears Away."

106 The Promise O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

IO/2J/97

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Victoria Hochberg Jay Leggett (Harry Pippin) Rusty Schwimmer (Angela Tharpe) Jamie Rose (Sandra Winchell) Michael Winters (Judge Herbert Spitt) Michael Bofshever (Judge Allen Stephenson) Brooke Burns (delivery girl)

This is only the second episode featuring John Cage and it isn't a coincidence that episodes including him are always superior.

Somehow when he's there the stories are both funnier and more solemn. The title of the episode refers to that promise that romantic people like Ally make to themselves when they are young: that they will marry only for true love. It is a powerful and centrally important belief for Ally — in a way it's her faith — and something she tries to hold onto in spite of the reality around her. But is this insistence of hers noble or foolish idealism that simply won't accept the world as it is and make the best of it? This week brings us two legal cases, along with the beginning of another that won't heat up for an episode or two. Both cases are introduced around the conference room table in a morning meeting reminiscent of the opening of so many episodes of L. A. Law. The less important one has Ally and John Cage defending a high-priced prostitute named Sandra Winchell who happens to be a former lawyer. The second has Ally on one side of a dispute between two ice-cream stores. The case itself turns out to be unimportant, except as a little joke (ice cream being fattening). What is important is Ally's opposing counsel, a seriously obese man named Harry Pippin. Harry Pippin is very, very heavy, with no visible neck and a painful waddling gait. His infatuation with Ally begins when an anxiety attack drops him like a shot elephant to the floor and Ally has to give him mouth-to-mouth to save his life. In a weirdly sexual image, the camera takes on the viewpoint of the unconscious Pippin so that we vicariously experience the approach of Ally's open mouth. The only problem is, Pippin is about to be married to a large woman named Angela. Pippin falls for Ally, but, unable to reciprocate Pippin's feelings, Ally is forced to face her own prejudices and, by implication, the seriousness of her belief in love. What is the real depth of this emotion, the viewer might ask, if Ally can only fall for a man who is tall, dark, and handsome — someone like, say, Bobby Donnell of The Practice (whom she does indeed fall for later in the season)? And yet we all have these preconceptions of what our mate ought to look like, and the sad fact — which Kelley faces unblinkingly — is that few slim people would be willing to date a fat person. Nevertheless, Ally tells Harry Pippin that it is wrong for him to marry Angela only because he has "limited options." We all have the right to go down that wedding aisle with someone we truly love and want. Ally's words about true love might be thrilling to hear, but Angela quickly brings her down to earth. A fat man like Harry doesn't have that kind of choice, and by holding out for true love, he may end up alone. This is one of the reality lessons that Ally must

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undergo this season, but what is right for Harry Pippin (whom she persuades to marry Angela) is not necessarily right for the more privileged, desirable, Ally. She at least will hold out for the person she "loves more than life." As for the prostitute on trial, John Cage defends her by arguing that women use sex all the time to get ahead. Some women sleep their way up the corporate ladder. Many women won't marry a man who doesn't have a sufficiently high income. "The truth is," Cage intones, "sex has always been a currency for women." There is of course truth in this, but it is not the only truth, although Ally takes it as yet another attack on her romantic idealism. She mistakes Cage's argument for his own opinion on relations between men and women, and expresses her despair when the prostitute is declared not guilty by the jury. (As a character in another episode says, John Cage has a talent for getting juries to disregard the law.) "The world is no longer a romantic place," Cage tells her. "Some of its people still are, however. Don't let the world win, Ally McBeal." This is a beautiful sentiment, although a dangerous one to live by. The world, after all, is hard to defeat, and those who try are inevitably subject to disappointment. Cage's words, though, are more important for revealing his insight into Ally's character so that she looks at him in wonder. The moment is a small step towards the special friendship that slowly grows between them. The third story, or rather its beginning, starts when Richard and then Billy are mesmerized in the office by the appearance of the firm's delivery girl, a young blond woman in jeans and a white shirt which show off her ample breasts. Once again the power of women's attractiveness will become subject for scrutiny.

107 The Attitude O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

11/03/97

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Michael Schultz Jason Blicker (Rabbi Stern) Andrew Heckler (Jason Roberts) Steve Vinovich (Jerry Burrows) Brenda Vaccaro (Karen Horwitz) Brooke Burns (delivery girl)

It is hardly unusual for television writers, who need so much material, to borrow occasionally from novels, movies, and other TV

shows, not to mention the day's headlines, and David Kelley is no exception. For example, the Ally McBeal episode "The Blame Game" opens with an airplane suddenly losing control, looking remarkably similar to the opening of an episode of Thirtysomething. (The Thirtysomething episode, in turn, may have been inspired by a John Cheevcr short story.) In this episode Ally wants to go out with a district attorney named Jason Roberts, only to be turned off when during dinner together he gets salad dressing on his chin. Ally's revulsion seems more than coincidentally reminiscent of Charles Grodin in the movie The Heartbreak Kid when he decides to divorce his wife after watchin? her messilyJ consume an epg salad sandwich. o oo But it is very well done — and very, very funny — as the romantic music playing in Ally's head screeches to a halt each time the creamy Italian lands on the poor sap's chin. The Heartbreak Kid, about a Jewish man falling for a beautiful gentile woman, may have inspired Kelley in another way. In "The Attitude" a dispute over Jewish marriage law brings Ally in contact with a rabbi who asks her on a date. (Here, though, the point-ofview is with the beautiful gentile woman, Ally, rather than the Jewish man.) First, though, Ally insults not only the rabbi personally but also the Jewish religion, calling its laws "hoopla" and ridiculing the rabbi'syarmulke (cap) and his prayer shawl. For a sophisticated woman living in a major city and working in a profession that has long attracted Jewish people (and for someone whose favorite novelist, we might remember, is Saul Bellow) Ally knows remarkably little about Judaism. Nor is she very tolerant. Intolerance, however, is at least in keeping with her character. As for the rabbi, his calling Ally a "bitchy little thing" seems rather unlikely, as does his asking a gentile woman out on. a date (and to a Jewish wedding, no less). Realism shmealisml Although Ally changes her mind and agrees to go out with the rabbi, it never happens in a future episode. Perhaps Kelley lost interest in the idea or didn't want to deal with the question of religious conversion. This episode is most notable for bringing Georgia into the firm of Cage/Fish & Associates. It seems somehow appropriate that she switches firms because of an event that is a mirror image of the one that brought Ally over. Georgia is taken out of the litigation department of her own firm not because of sexual harassment but because a partner's wife is jealous of her husband working alongside a beautiful woman. "Part of marriage is accommodating your partner's feelings even when they're unfounded," the partner tells Georgia, but despite her own jealousy of Ally, she isn't buying it and decides to sue. (Wrongful dismissal suits will become a staple of

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the legal cases on the show.) The suit gives David Kelley a chance i legal skills shine more brightly than they have up to let John Cage's to now, from his bathroom preparations to his peculiar stalling tactics. And we find ourselves drawn closer to the television as his almost whispered but absolutely confident voice presents his beautifully reasoned arguments.

108 Drawing the Lines O R I G I N A L AIR DATE:

I I / I 0/97

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Mel Damski Cristinc Rose (Marci Hatfield) Stan Ivar (Jason Hatfield) Mark Metcalf (Jason Hatfield's attorney) Sandra Bernhard (Caroline Poop)

While David Kelley is always inventive, his best episodes of Ally do have some characteristics in common. They almost always take titillating risks, they are marked by moments of genuine emotional poignancy, and they are usually fast-moving — shifting between two, three, or even four story lines. "Drawing the Lines" has three stories, all of which are neatly introduced in the first sequence, culminating in what is likely the show's most notorious scene. That Ally's instruction to Georgia on how to drink the first cappuccino of the day is intended to be erotic is overt enough; Ally herself describes it as "foreplay." We gaze voyeuristically (as do Billy and Richard from the doorway) at their parted lips and wet tongues and listen to their eventual orgasmic moans. What I suspect really lies underneath the controversy is that the two women appear to be mimicking not sexual intercourse but the performance of fellatio (the licking, the foam, the final gulping). What apparently angers some feminists is that Ally is really showing Georgia how to service and satisfy a man. No wonder Billy and Richard look so enraptured. David Kelley takes this comic incident and makes it the catalyst for an emotionally deeper story. It seems that watching her has made Billy yearn for their former sex life. "It's not a good feeling to be married to a person who I am in love with and still not be over another," he confesses. This is his most open declaration to Ally, but it turns out to be one of those moments when someone else's strong emotions cause Ally to bring down the drawbridge. "Yeah, I hate

when that happens," she quips. At such moments it can be hard to like her, and later the two ex-lovers agree to draw boundary lines. Marci Hatfield is in dispute with her very rich and soon to be ex-husband. But Mr. Hatfield denies having verbally revoked their pre-nuptial agreement and Richard encourages Ally and Georgia to use dirty tactics. Even more interesting is the story of Elaine's legal complaint against the firm, signed by most of the secretaries, stating that a "hostile working environment" is being created by the busty delivery girl whom the men keep staring at. "I think that there is something a little desperate about you," Ally tells Elaine. The lawsuit is just a way to attract attention and "it makes you look sad." Elaine's triumphant grin turns to a trembling mouth and glistening eyes. This is one of those moments where David Kelley penetrates the glossy surface of a character to reveal the vulnerability underneath. Note, however, that Elaine will recover quite nicely from this emotional punch by next week. The simple fact is that the show relies on Elaine to be a comic type, the girl who "can't say no" as actress Jane Krakowski has described her part, and David Kelley can risk treating her seriously only on rare occasions. Although the secretaries decide against walking out, Richard feels that the firm is just not fun anymore. The theme of boundaries runs through the episode (see Ally's speech to Elaine on how you draw the line on what women can wear in the office) and it seems that the workplace cannot exist without them. Ally and Billy, however, decide to erase the boundaries of their friendship that they've just drawn, and the two shake hands and then awkwardly draw away, as if afraid that their touch will cause something more to happen. Without boundaries, their friendship is always in danger of becoming something more.

109 The Dirty Joke ORIGINAL AIR DATE:

11/17/97

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Daniel Attias Keene Curtis (Judge Johnson Hawk) Brooke Burns (Jennifer Higpen, aka deliverv girl) Sandra Bernhard (Caroline Poop) \J

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David Kelley is not a joke writer. He is a marvellous comic writer, yes, but that is a different thing. Nor does he write sitcom-style

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punchlines. The humor of his scripts emerges from character and situation and at its best has the effect of further involving the viewer in the story. But telling jokes — that is something else. And so are the kind of jokes that we like. Kelley finds a way to shed light both on his character of Ally McBeal and on the relations between men and women by fashioning a plot about joke telling. Ally tells Renee that whenever she walks into the unisex bathroom while Richard is telling a dirty joke, he immediately shuts up. Renee's advice is to tell a dirty joke of her own; that way Ally will become a member of the club, a sort of honorary male. But when Ally asks Renee to tell her one, Renee tells her a joke that I won't spoil by repeating here except to note that it involves a woman without any arms and legs and that the punchline is, "You're screwed now." And how does Ally respond to the joke? Does she prove that she is not the Julie Andrews type everyone believes? "That was disgusting," Ally moans. "That joke wasn't funny, it was sick." (Actually, it seems to me that Ally is right and that Kelley makes a little error here. What Renee tells is not a dirty joke but a sick joke, another category altogether and with a very different appeal. Dirty jokes are about sex, but sick jokes are about cruelty.) Part of Ally's difficulty is that she has trouble separating reality from fiction. And so she cannot accept that the cruelty performed on the armless and legless woman in the joke is, as Georgia says, "a made-up thing." Kelley doesn't pursue this idea but perhaps it is at the heart of Ally's problems. Not only does she refuse to accept reality, but she cannot always truly separate it from her own inner life. In any case, Renee challenges Ally to get up and tell a joke at the bar if she herself does it first. That night a little unnoted event occurs: Vonda Shepard has her first lines in the series as she introduces Renee to tell her joke. Of course Renee gets a big laugh and a nauseous-looking Ally goes up the next night. She makes a serious mistake by declaring that "one of the last vestiges of gender bias is the dirty joke"; who wants to watch a comedienne with a political agenda to prove? The delivery girl has hired the same lawyer that Elaine used, Caroline Poop (played by Sandra Bernhard who was no doubt chosen in part because of her reputation for being gay) and it is almost shocking to realize that until she says it, the name of the delivery girl has never been mentioned. She is suing the women of the firm for sexual harassment, but Ally tricks an admission out of her at the deposition. That neither Billy nor Richard nor Caroline

Poop realizes what Ally has done is pretty hard to believe; this is one of those times when David Kelley has to put blinkers on the other lawyers in order to work the surprise in the plot. Richard, meanwhile, doesn't know if he can trust Ally to defend the firm, saying that while women hate other pretty women they also identify with women who are victims. "Women want other women to be destroyed," he asserts. "But as women, they don't want to be the actual destroyers themselves." Whether or not this chauvinist nonsense also happens to contain a grain of truth is left for the audience to argue over. (As a side note, it is amusing to notice the fun that David Kelley has with characters' names. "Caroline Poop" falls into the slightly naughty word category, along with the occasionally appearing Judge Spitt. And then there is the pun category, which includes the artist Seymour [as in "see more"] Little.) In the episode Ally is frequently compared to Julie Andrews and at the end she and Georgia are dismayed to be described by Caroline Poop as exact replicas of the Skipper and Barbie dolls. Are these outrageous insults justified? Can attractive women never escape being compared to such shallow stereotypes? Whatever our conclusions, we should not forget to laugh.

no Boy to the World O R I G I N A L AIR DATE:

I 2/1/97

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelleyj Thomas Schlamme Wilson Cruz (Stephanie Grant) Amy Aquino (psychiatrist) Armin Shimerman (Judge Walworth) Harrison Page (Reverend Newman) Jennifer Holliday (choir singer) Dyan Cannon (Judge Whipper Cone)

David Kelley does not reject the traditions of television, but uses them to his advantage. Ally McBeal may be a groundbreaking show but that does not mean that Kelley needs to forgo the tradition of the Christmas episode. In fact he gives us two Christmas episodes. The first is the more traditional as it deals with issues of compassion, altruism, and those who are less fortunate. But it is a departure for Ally McBeal in subject matter, in Ally's sudden switch from self-absorption to caring citizen, and in the general tone of the show.

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It bends but does not break the show's usual style, proving that David Kelley is an unusually versatile and confident writer willing to stretch the boundaries (to borrow last show's theme) that he himself has created. And while most viewers might not want Ally McBeal to be this serious all the time, they can nevertheless be moved at seeing another side of her character explored both credibly and sensitively. "Boy to the World" is a night-time show of dark streets and lonely, twinkling lights. It opens with an aerial shot of Boston by night, the lights burning in the towers against the black sky, and then cuts to a quick shot of a couple of homeless people in a doorway, as if to tell us that this show is about a different Boston than the one we usually see. Even the music in the episode is different, subdued and mournful. In the main story Judge Whipper Cone, needing a public defender, assigns Ally to an indigent case. Ally whimpers, "I'm afraid of criminals." Little does she know how far she is going to travel from that fear. The accused is Stephanie (actually Stephen) Grant, an eighteen-year-old and rather sweet-faced transvestite charged for the third time with solicitation. Stephanie is clearly terrified of prison and quickly Ally's heart goes out to this emotionally delicate young person. "He's the most fragile person living in the harshest of worlds," she tells Renee. Ally's plan is to use an insanity defence, calling Stephanie a victim of "transvestite fetishism," but Stephanie at first balks. "I don't want to say I'm sick. . . . The reason I left home is because everyone called me sick." David Kelley doesn't do much to develop Stephanie's character, instead allowing the sympathetic actor Wilson Cruz (from My So-Called Life) to win us over. One of the loveliest bar scenes of any episode has Ally and Stephanie, now with a job at the law firm, dancing to Vonda's cover of "Jingle Bell Rock." David Kelley's real interest of course is not Stephanie but Ally and her eyes shine with a rare happiness, as if by reaching out to someone in need she has found sudden enlightenment. Altruism, it seems, is more than just doing good for someone else. It is a means to move beyond our own concerns and to fulfil deep inner longings by paradoxically projecting beyond ourselves. Ally finds love, but a different love from the one she is so relentlessly searching for. Alas, this seemingly happy Christmas ending turns tragic when Stephanie goes back to the street and is murdered by a "John." There is a touching final image of Ally in the morgue applying make-up to the dead Stephanie's face. The intensity of her concentration reveals love transmuted into grief.

The episode's other plot involves Richard Fish fighting with a Baptist Church over the memorial for Richard's late uncle who was a member there. Richard wants to speak about his uncle's eccentricities, including his hatred of short people, but the minister is afraid of offending the congregation. A judge rules in Richard's favor, declaring (in words that sound like David Kelley's own opinion) that political correctness is turning into a form of censorship. Richard makes his memorial speech and then the church choir sings a full gospel-style version of Randy Newman's pop satire "Short People" while the congregation sways and shouts "Hallelujah!" It is a marvellously funny and rousing scene, but what gives it weight is our knowledge that Richard is unable to express his feelings of loss for his beloved uncle. Behind even the comedy in this episode lurks real emotional substance, making this perhaps the most emotionally affecting episode of the first season.

in Silver Bells ORIGINAL AIR DATE:

12/1^/97

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Joe Napolitano Eric Pierpoint (James Horton) Katie Mitchell (Patti Horton) Amanda Carlin (Mindy Horton) Dyan Cannon (Judge Whipper Cone)

While this last episode of 1997 uses the office holiday party to make it a Christmas episode, marriage is the dominant theme. It even contains Ally's famous line about women being able to change the J o o world: "1 want to change it. I just want to get married first." Viewers may (i) laugh, (2) sigh with recognition, or (3) scream at the television. The court case in which one man and two women wish to legally marry each other is one of those that makes David Kelley appear more radical than he turns out to be. (And usually we are grateful for it.) In this case the husband and wife who want to bring a second woman into the marriage appear happy enough, even to a sceptical Judge Whipper Cone who visits their seemingly happy house. That the wife eventually confesses to being less than thrilled about these new arrangements is no great surprise. But this is one of those cases that gets Georgia, Billy, and Ally reflecting on their own lives. For Georgia has to reluctantly admit that the arrival of Ally on the scene

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has somehow been good for her marriage, opening Billy up. At the same time she resents that Billy tells Ally about their personal lives, an intrusion and perhaps even an infidelity of sorts that he is slow to admit or accept although he finally does. Marriage is also the reason for friction between Richard and Whipper — or rather Richard's reluctance to make a commitment. When Richard reveals why (his parents argued constantly), he joins Elaine and Renee in reaching back to childhood in order to explain his adult behavior. And when he offers to go for counseling he also joins other characters on the show who realize that their problems are serious obstacles to a fuller life. (Perhaps this is also David Kelley's way of saying that he does not raise these issues frivolously; while Ally McEeal is a comedy, in real life people sometimes need help.)

112 Cro-Magnon O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

1/^/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Allan Arkush Michael Easton (Glenn) Lee Wilkof (District Attorney Nixon) Michael Winters (Judge Herbert Spitt) Henry Woronicz (Austin Gil) Eddie Mills (Clinton Gil) Dirk Cheetwood (Dwayne Stokes) Nicolette Vajtay (Jill)

At first glance this episode, which gained a sudden large following for the show, appears to be named after the handsome male model with an impressively large penis whom Ally and Renee encounter in their sculpture class — as if he were some sort of neolithic throwback. But actually "Cro-Magnon" neatly captures the theme that is explored here in at least three ways. Human beings, despite our modern trappings, are still governed by the most basic instincts. This is rather a bold assertion for a show that presents some of the most sophisticated characters and situations on television. But perhaps the height of sophistication is being able to drop the mask of civilization and see what lies underneath. The legal case centres on a nineteen-year-old named Clinton Gill, the son of an important client. Clint has been charged with misdemeanor battery for punching another guy who insulted Clint's

date by calling her a liar and a slut. Ally's first inkling that something strange is going on inside her is a sudden fantasy of pressing her lips against this near-kid and unbuckling his belt. The defence that Ally and John Cage put up draws on ideas that in the 19905 might sound old-fashioned or downright regressive — ideas such as honor and chivalry. A man has a right to defend his woman and the woman has a right to expect it. Cage tells the jury members to act on their own basic human feelings and admit "you're glad he threw that punch." The jury does just that. But the desire to prove one's manhood has a dark side to it. When the male model, Glenn, asks Ally out at Starbucks, all the women at the office turn into a bunch of giggling schoolgirls, as Billy puts it. In fact, Billy is so thrown by the idea of Long John Silver (as Elaine calls Glenn) that he worries about his own sexual abilities and becomes impotent. Behind every warrior, it seems, is a very insecure man. As for basic human desires, Ally's hot sex with Glenn in her apartment — her first sex on the show — is intercut with shots of the other members of the firm watchingo a boxingo match and screaming a la Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull. These two carnal needs — lust and aggression — both need to find healthy expressions. Of course what brought the episode so much attention is the computer-generated dancing baby, a hallucination that keeps appearing to Ally and gyrating to the tune of "Hooked on a Feeling." Apparently we are to take seriously Renee's interpretation of it as a symbol of Ally's biological clock ticking and her desire to have a baby, although Ally herself resists the interpretation. At the end she finally dances with "Mr. Huggy"; she may not fully understand, but for a moment at least she simply gives in to whatever basic instinct her unconscious is trying to let out.

113 The Blame Game O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

1/26/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Sandy Smolen Michael Easton (Glenn) Harry J. Lennix (Ballard) Elizabeth Ruscio (Cynthia Pierce) Ben Siegler (Hoverless) Adrian Sparks (Katz)

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This episode's case, in which the children of a plane-crash victim sue the airline, is as good a time as any to reflect on what makes John Cage the firm's undisputed top litigator. Yes, he has his little tricks to distract juries and judges: a nose that whistles, a growling stomach, a pig call, or in this case suddenly dropping a model airplane so that it clatters to the ground. Yes, he will alter the tempo by taking a moment or will introduce himself to a witness and then dismiss him. And yes, his arguments are well-articulated. But all the lawyers on the show have a gift for rhetoric that any real lawyer could only envy. What makes Cage a winning litigator is, first and foremost, his relationship with juries. To them he seems like a favorite teacher, not intimidating or angry but affectionate and benign, and from him they hungrily seek approval. He not only addresses them intimately but gets them to repeat words and phrases, praising them like well-trained dogs. When needed he will offer a personal and poignant story of his own to win their sympathy. More often he tells them what they are really feeling, regardless of the law, and validates it for them. Although Glenn, Ally's one-night stand, was supposed to have left the country he turns up at the local Starbucks. (The coffee shop set, by the way, was provided by the Starbucks company.) In her usual conflicted manner, Ally is angry at him for not disappearing as he promised but also for not phoning. Another toss in bed raises an interesting question for this couple who seem to have nothing in common: what makes a good match between a man and a woman? Could a guy who claims to be a professional surfboarder really be husband material? This is not the first time that Ally is tripped up by the pre-packaged image of Mr. Right that she compares all potential dates with. Ally, however, doesn't have a chance to answer the question. Glenn becomes tired of being her "boy toy" and dumps her. (Viewers who like to keep statistics might wish to count the number of times Ally is dumped in the season.) Her response is to seek vengeance by getting Renee to help her do a "penguin" in which Glenn is left at the side of the road with his pants around his ankles. Ally and friends laugh hysterically but the trick isn't really funny (at least not to me); it's juvenile and cruel and makes Ally look mean and vindictive. Of course that's part of the point, for as the title says this episode is about blaming others instead of taking responsibility yourself. Given that theme, one might think that the firm would lose its court case, since the airline was not to blame for the crash. John Cage, however, finds another jury that pleases him.

ill Body Language ORIGINAL AIR DATE:

2/2/98

WRITTEN BY:

David E. Kelley & Nicole Yorkin & Dawn Prestwich Mel Damski Kathleen Wilhoite (Janey Bittner) Lawrence Pressman (Judge Harland Smart) J. Kenneth Campbell (prison superintendent) John Thaddeus (Michael Young) Linda Gehringer (Janet Reno) Dyan Cannon (Judge Whipper Cone)

DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

The credits for this episode reveal two significant changes. The first is that Peter MacNicol is no longer listed as a guest star; his name now appears in the opening credits, along with the rest of the regular cast. David Kelley must have realized that Cage was just too valuable a character not to be a regular. As well, this is the first of only two episodes this season not to be written solely by David Kelley. More than halfway into the season, and with The Practice to get out as well, Kelley must have needed some help. Viewers who don't bother to read credits, however, wouldn't notice a difference; this is a good episode that feels Kelley-scripted from beginning to end. Speaking of beginnings, Kelley has a particular talent for opening episodes with real flair. Often the scenes before the opening credits are miniature narratives in themselves, separate from the main stories and yet thematically related. They are most often funny and almost always revealing of Ally's character. And the opening of this episode, in which Ally and Rcnce are bridesmaids at a wedding (wearing the usual less-than-flattering bridesmaids dresses), is certainly one of the best. It shows how much fun Kelley has pushing his audience, daring us to be outraged by his characters' antics. Here Ally, after announcing that she hates weddings, suddenly elbows Renee out of the way, leaps over two other women, and slides across the floor to catch the bouquet. This is the kind of moment that drives Kelley's critics crazy and I for one can't help admiring his audacity. The wedding theme is carried on in the episode's main story, in which Ally and Georgia represent a woman who is trying to marry a convicted prisoner with a life sentence. Ally's various strategies, including flirting with the judge, culminate in a plan to get the woman pregnant through artificial insemination. There is a very

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funny scene in which Ally, taking the Tupperware container of sperm from the prisoner to the fertility clinic, is stopped by the police. The male cop sniffs the contents of the container without being able to identify it, but the female cop's look of recognition is priceless. The real point of the story, though, is Ally's wonderment at the fierce and persistent love that a woman can have for her man despite all obstacles. In spite of Renee's cynicism about marriage, voiced in a tirade against Cinderella and other Disney movies that end in happy-ever-after weddings, Ally remains a romantic. At one point she says to the prison warden: "If you want to be practical, would any marriage make sense?" Possibly not, but love, Ally sees here, is not about sense or logic. It is about a passion that defies everything in its need to be fulfilled. Marriage, of course, means commitment. And commitment is a word that Richard Fish has a good deal of trouble with. Whipper catches him at the bar touching the neck of none other than Janet Reno, the Attorney General of the United States (played by a good lookalike). In fact, Richard has trouble with more than just commitment; while he has a knack for laughing his way through life, it is at the expense of acknowledging the deeper emotions in himself. We already saw this in his inability to mourn properly for his late uncle. Here his suffering can't be suppressed but also can't find a way to express itself in remorse. Only when Richard learns to let down his guard and tell Whipper how much he loves her, does he win her back again. John Cage remains remarkably uninvolved with the main plots. Instead, he is caught up in "smile therapy," a form of healing predicated on the belief that smiling alone can make a person feel happy. The artificial grin that widens his face whenever someone says something that upsets him is truly an awful wonder to behold. There may be many ways to find inner happiness, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. This is the second episode which ends with Ally dancing in her pyjamas, as if David Kelley couldn't resist finding a way to repeat the scene. But this time she does it in public, on the street in front of her apartment house, with the snow falling from the night sky and her friends watching from the sidewalk. It's a rather pretty if unlikely moment, and perhaps a touch too exhibitionistic. But Kelley likes a picturesque ending almost as much as he likes a good beginning.

i i ^ Once In a Lifetime O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

2/23/98

TELEPLAY BY: STORY BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley David E. Kelley & Jeff Pinkner Elodie Keenc Steven Flynn (Sam Little) Brigid Brannagh (Paula) Phil Leeds (Judge Happy Boyle) Bruce Nozick (attorney) Richard Kiley (Seymour Little)

Television is an insatiable dragon, able to gobble up story after story and still bellow for more. That's why television writers know better than to throw any idea away — it can always be used, or used again, somehow. For the main story here, David Kelley reaches back to his second screenplay, To Gillian on Her 3Jth Birthday, about a man who is so heart-stricken at the death of his wife that he still "sees" and talks to her. If anything, however, he improves upon it. And as always, Kelley doesn't simply provide an interesting plot, but finds a way to challenge Ally herself. In past episodes we have seen how Billy, despite his love for Georgia, has a difficult emotional time being near Ally. He remembers their great sex life, he's jealous of other men, etc. But this is the first episode in which Ally truly faces her deep sadness about Billy having left her. Sadness not just because of not having Billy, but because she may never realize her dream of the one true and eternal love. Is there such a thing, the one person we are destined to meet and love forever? This episode gives Ally an actual example of just such a love in the person of Seymour Little. The legal case has Little, the most famous living American impressionist painter and a hero to Ally (who, we discover, was an art history major), fighting with his son for the right to control his own life. Played by actor Richard Kiley, Little is the elderly artist personified — noble yet cantankerous, iconoclastic and yet deeply feeling. He looks the part too, with his swept-back white hair, trimmed beard, cravat and rumpled clothes. Because Little talks to his dead wife and buys her gifts, his son has had the court deem him incompetent. The case raises interesting issues about parent-child relationships, authority, and the problems of aging, but they are all secondary. For Seymour Little is a man so devastated by the loss of his beloved wife that he now spends all his

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waking hours painting one portrait of her after another. (It is a nice touch that in the portraits the wife is portrayed as a perfectly ordinary looking woman of middle age; clearly Little loved who she was, not what she looked like.) It doesn't matter that Ally discovers her hero Little to be something of a chauvinist who nicknames her "skirtless." What matters is Little saying to her, "You've never known a once-in-a-lifetime love." Was Billy that person for her? She gazes at Billy longingly and in one fantasy sequence (which the viewer at first takes for real) Billy leans forward tenderly to give her a long series of hungry kisses. To Renee she calls this a "relapse," but it keeps her in an emotionally vulnerable and wounded state for the episode. Billy himself cannot help but pick up the emotional vibrations, but as the one who deserted Ally all that time ago his position is a little different. As he tells her in one late-night meeting, just when they seem to be doing well as friends something comes along "to tear the lid off." But in this episode he seems more defensive than anything, aware of Ally's feelings and his responsibility for them. Near the end of the episode he finally asks her to forgive him for having left her. "I forgive it," Ally says quietly. "But I'm still not sure I'll ever understand it." Well, maybe these decisions of the heart are never understandable. Kelley chooses to end the episode with a series of scenes — the artist alone in his studio with the paintings of his wife, Billy dancing romantically with Georgia, and Ally walking home alone — showing that, for the moment, this is where everyone is fated to be. The episode is considerably lightened by John Cage's preparation for his date with Ally, in which he worries about the first kiss, especially given that he has a problem with too much saliva. Of course this is not the first time that the first-date kiss has been a major subject on the show; see the Ron Cheanie episodes. If in the end the date turns out spectacularly unsuccessful, we can hardly be surprised. Surely John Cage and Ally McBeal both deserve to find their true loves, but they aren't going to be each other.

116 Forbidden Fruits O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

3/2/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Jeremy Kagan Dina Meyer (attorney Anna Flint)

J. Patrick McCormack (Senator Foote) Marty Rackham (Joe Bepp) Gary Bullock (Judge Kenneth Steele) Andrew Bloch (Colson) Elaine Giftos (Nancy Foote) Just how long can Ally McBeal thrive on the emotional and sexual tension between Ally and Billy? David Kelley has to know that the almost-but-never-quite-occurring affair can not go on forever. For one thing, it will eventually become stale. For another, it casts all the characters, who we are supposed to like, in a bad light. Does Ally want to be an almost-marriage-wrecker forever? Will Billy allow his wife to suffer doubts every night she goes to bed? Although the tension does not end with this episode, it seems possible that "Forbidden Fruits" will turn out to be the climax of this story line, a follow-up to the previous week's episode in which Ally herself finally came to mourn the loss of what had once seemed her true love. And the person who forces the issue into the open, who finally confronts it, is not Ally or Billy but Georgia. Just as Ally had to deal with her feelings in the last episode, and Billy has faced his own jealousy in the past, so now it is Georgia's turn. Senator James Foote, the firm's client, is being sued by a man named Bepp for interfering in his marriage. Foote romanced Bepp's wife, eventually winning her for himself. As in the previous episode, the case itself reverberates in the lives of Ally, Billy, and Georgia, as questions of fidelity, attraction, and true love become courtroom arguments. As a writer, David Kelley might allow both sides of an argument to be given their most articulate expression, but that doesn't mean his own opinion doesn't sometimes show through. A notable example occurs when Richard Fish, whose courtroom skills arc suspect at best, makes an opening speech to the judge in which he denounces the Supreme Court decision to allow the lawsuit by Paula Jones against President Bill Clinton to proceed while he was still in office. As Richard says, the court ruled that the suit would not interfere unduly with the president's ability to conduct the nation's business. Richard tells the judge, "They screwed up," and the spontaneous applause from the people in court seems to demonstrate that Kelley thinks most people are on his side. Adultery is another issue that Kelley has strong views on. Ally and company are defending a man who stole away another man's wife, and even while they respect the senator's feelings, it doesn't mean that they think it was right. In the episode called "The Affair"

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Ally finally realized that she had been wrong to have a relationship with another woman's husband. Here when the opposing attorney, Anna Flint, argues in her summation for the sanctity of marriage, Ally gets up and agrees. "People don't really respect marriage anymore," she says sadly. But does Ally respect it? Does Billy? In perhaps the most important episode of the first season for Georgia, she confronts Billy by saying, "You're still in love with her!" Sure her suggestion (or is it a dare?) that Billy and Ally spend a night together to find out what they really want is a crazy one, but it shows that underneath her despair Georgia is a strong-willed person. She doesn't want Billy on half-terms or to live in a compromised marriage; even as her eyes well with tears, her jaw remains firm. The conclusion of all this is that Georgia finally believes that Billy may have loved Ally first, but he loves Georgia best and chose her as his life partner. In the end Ally is the one in bed alone and while Ally might think differently (Vonda Shepard is singing "He'd Rather Be with Me"), we feel pretty confident that Billy and Georgia are in it for the long haul.

117 Theme of Life ORIGINAL A I R DATE:

3/9/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Dennie Gordon Jessie L. Martin (Dr. Greg Butters) Liz Torres (Hannah Goldstein) Dawn Stern (Jeannette) John Fink (hospital president) Paul Guilfoyle (attorney) Tracey Ullman (Dr. Tracy Clark) Dyan Cannon (Judge Whipper Cone)

The competition for Billy's affection might at last be over (although David Kelley could bring it back in the future), but that does not mean that all wounds have been healed and all emotions have been exorcised. What about the so-called friendship between Georgia and Ally? Is it possible they have no hostile feelings towards one another? In fact they do. And Kelley finds a very funny, inventive, and outrageous way to let them vent that hostility. As he showed in "Cro-Magnon," Kelley is well aware that basic and fundamental

human emotions — passion, jealousy, anger — are never smoothed over by civilized appearances but continue to boil underneath. In that episode the firm attended a boxing match. In this one they attend another, only the combatants are none other than Ally and Georgia. The match — actually kickboxing — is arranged by the instructor at the exercise gym where Ally, Georgia, and Renee go to work out. This odd form of kickboxing aerobics is intended to relieve tension but instead has the effect of actually increasing Ally's aggressiveness. Viewers might be concerned for Ally — next to Georgia in her exercise outfit, Ally looks pretty scrawny — but it soon becomes clear that both women are secretly looking forward to a chance to work out their negative feelings for one another. o o And is taking kicks and swings at a supposed friend really the right way to deal with such emotions? David Kelley seems to assure us that it is. He does so in the character of Dr. Tracy Clark, Cage's smile therapist whom Ally finally visits after yet another little episode of aggression causes her to throw a shoe, hitting Cage in the face. Dr. Clark is played by the brilliant comedienne Tracey Ullman, whose own comedy shows have always relied on sharp character parodies. Clark, with her insistence on each patient choosing a theme song, her blunt language ("Sounds like you're nuts"), and such devices as a recorded laughtrack to be used whenever a patient says something particularly naive, might seem like a crackpot. But Kelley has always liked to put wisdom in the mouths of eccentrics — witness John Cage — and Dr. Clark is one of them. Dream interpretation, childhood trauma, drug therapy — Kelley throws them all out. Hearing about the proposed match she says about Georgia: "She's a beautiful smart woman married to the man you love. Smack her. We don't deny human nature in this room." All right, so the match is nothing more than a sanctioned catfight or mudwrestling bout between two attractive women. Viewers can't help but sit at the edge of their seats as they watch Ally and Georgia trade furious kicks and punches while Billy watches in dismay. That they both go down on the mat is inevitable: Kelley can't allow a clear winner. That Ally and Georgia go for a beer together the next day shows how healthy an experience it is for them. Dr. Clark's therapy really does seem to work. The episode also includes the sad demise of Richard's relationship with Whipper Cone, brought about by his inability to resist the erotic attraction of power in the person of Janet Reno. This comes as something of a shock, considering Richard's declaration of love to Whipper after his first transgression with the Attorney General,

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and Billy may be right that Richard is deliberately running away from love. Whatever the case, once again Kelley tells us that fidelity may be tough at times, but a genuine relationship oflove and respect demands it. The end of one romance (at least for now), but the beginning of another. The episode's court case has Ally representing a handsome black surgeon named Greg Butters who used a pig's bladder to keep a patient alive and is now being sued by her. (This plot has an odd subtext in that the complaining patient, Hannah Goldstein, is obviouslyj -fJewish. Does the woman — who is obnoxiouslyj loud and unattractively fat — object to the pig because of her religion? She never says j so.)> While Allvj resists the doctor's invitations tor a walk or lunch, she, clearly desires him, and his thank-you kiss in the courtroom is more than just friendly. On the. verge of a new romance, feeling good after giving Georgia a few good punches and kicks, and even with her own theme song, Ally ends the episode on a high note.

118 The Playing Field O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

3/16/98

W R I T T E N BY: DIRECTED BY: G U R S T STARS:

David E. Kelley Jonathan Pontell Jesse L. Martin (Dr. Greg Butters) Josh tvans (Oren Koolie) Christine Dunford (Eva Curry) Wrenn T. Brown (attorney) Michael Winters (Judge Herbert Spitt) Tracey Ullman (Dr. Tracy Clark)

It is a man's world, isn't it? Otherwise, why would women wear ridiculous high-heeled shoes, paint their faces, and have their breasts enlarged? Or so argues Richard Fish in this episode about women asserting themselves in the world. All right, it is a man's world, but that doesn't mean women are the weaker sex, a disadvantaged group that needs protection. Or does it? Her new therapist, Dr. Tracy Clark, calls Ally a weakling for feeling less afraid just because, she's met a nice handsome doctor who might be husband material. Meanwhile, Georgia grows angryover a sexual harassment case in which a woman claims that she has suffered because her boss has slept with — and promoted — other women around her. It is one of those, cases (actually a hearing to

determine whether there is sufficient evidence for a trial) that allows David Kelley to explore an issue by stretching it to unlikely and — in Georgia's opinion — absurd lengths. But the real question being asked here is: are sexual harassment laws needed because women are weak, or does a woman's insistence on using them show how strong she actually is? Ally McBeal's encounter with a nine-year-old lawyer who looks even younger because of a hormone deficiency recalls a number of earlier Kelley scripts, from the "little person" lawyer on L.A. Law onwards. Being a child prodigy, Oren Koolie shares something in common with Doogie Howser, as Ally herself notes when she calls him "Doogie Munchkin." The character serves several purposes, however. He brings out Ally's maternal feelings, he keeps alive the professional relationship with handsome Dr. Greg Butters (who ran his car into the kid's client's car while gazing at Ally), and he teaches Ally that it might be possible to remake the world as you want it to be. This is not the strongest episode, especially after the previous week's; the ideas about women and power, and the arguments about sexual harassment, come out somewhat muddled. But in a woman's world, females don't have to wait for men to make the first move. And with inspiration from Oren Koolie and Dr. Clark, Ally finds the courage to let the doctor know how she feels. Instead of lettingo him o run away (he is a bit of a coward), she insists they let their feelings out. The result is a late-night romantic dance together with the promise, yet again, of more to come.

119 Happy Birtfadays Baby O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

4/6/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley/ Thomas Schlamme Jesse L. Martin (Dr. Greg Butters) Harriet Sansom Harris (Cheryl Bonner) Barry Miller (Mark Henderson)

The real problem of getting older is that as time goes on the body ages but the mind — well, the mind never really does catch up. And Ally, like the rest of us, grows older. In this episode she turns twenty-eight and like many people this age she is already anticipating thirty. It does not bring out the best in her; as she tells Renee, she has always felt that people who are thirty should "die already."

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And it makes her more vain as she worries about the decline of her face. But what really upsets her — what probably upsets all of us at these landmarks — are the unfulfilled expectations of our lives. For Ally they are that near-impossible mix of traditional and new female goals. She had expected to be married, pregnant, and on the fast-track to a partnership in the law firm. This is a perfect recipe for depression and it is no wonder that Ally would prefer it if people just ignored her birthday. But everyone has their own needs, including Elaine who organizes a special song for Ally at the bar. She sings a sizzling number about being a woman and is joined by Renee, the both of them in short vampish dresses. It is a pleasure to hear both of them sing, although Renee has the better voice — strong and sexy. This all seems to be in fun, especially when Elaine implies to Georgia the next day that after the song she took home a dozen men and bedded them all. But lest we think that Elaine is merely a tramp, Kelley gives her a second serious scene of the season to reveal the hurt little girl underneath. Near the episode's end Ally complains to Elaine, asking her how long will she keep up trying to be noticed. "Till I'm noticed," Elaine says, asserting that there are different ways to try to find yourself. Be careful before you judge another person, David Kelley warns. Elaine's song raises again the fascinating subject of music in the series. In this episode both her performance and that of handsome Dr. Greg Butters, who is persuaded to serenade Ally for her birthday, project a strong sexuality. (Greg has all the women in the bar swooning.) And when Renee can't control herself and goes on stage for a duet with Greg, Ally becomes angry and jealous and leaves the bar. In fact, the episode is the end of the romance with Greg as he finally tells Ally that he is moving to Chicago. That, he says, is why he hasn't wanted to sleep with Ally, but a man willing to sacrifice a relationship for a better job is hardly meeting her idea of true love. And if she takes out her anger by beating up an inflatable male doll, who can blame this sexually frustrated, lonely woman on the eve of her birthday? On the surface, Greg seemed the perfect guy: a handsome single doctor. On the surface, Ally's client Mark Henderson (played by Barry Miller, a fine actor best known for the film Fame) seems downright weird. His foot fetish drove him to sneak into the house of the woman he was dating and caress her foot while she slept, causing her to have him criminally charged. Henderson seems oddly like John Cage in some ways, and not just in a similar physical appearance between the actors. His language too is highly articulate and formal and he is one of those men lost in the maze of modern

dating rituals as he tries to follow the advice of Cosmopolitan and be both assertive and erotically surprising. Fortunately, David Kelley chooses not to give this birthday episode one of his wistful lonely endings, but has Renee buying balloons for Ally on the street instead. Yet there is a much earlier moment which must be quoted as it so neatly summarizes the show itself. Georgia, after listening to Ally's complaints with less than full sympathy, asks: "Ally, what makes your problems bigger than everybody else's?" Ally's straight response: "They're mine." She isn't really being arrogant because what she says is true for all of us. My problems are more important than anybody's. And so are yours.

120 The Inmates O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

4/27/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Michael Schultz Dylan McDermott (Bobby Donnell) Lisa Gay Hamilton (Rebecca Washington) Steve Harris (Eugene Young) Camryn Manheim (Ellenor Frutt) Kelli Williams (Lindsay Dole) (All of the above from The Practice) Kelly Connell (Dr. Peters) Isaiah Washington (Michael Rivers) Alaina Reed Hall (Judge Elizabeth Witt) Michael Brandon (District Attorney Dawson) Donna Murphy (Marie Hansen)

This is the first half of the crossover episodes with David Kelley's The Practice, in which cast members guest star on each other's shows and a murder trial that begins here finishes on the episode of The Practice airing the same night. David Kelley is not new to crossovers, nor did he invent them. But there is no question that it is a more usual practice to mix-andmatch shows with a more similar sensibility than these two. For example, Law &^0rder and Homicide, both essentially serious crime shows, have done crossovers. Ally McBeal, however, is a not-always realistic comedy with dramatic overtones while The Practice is a

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serious and even somber drama. Their styles, musical soundtracks, editing, and lighting effects are different. And what does David Kelley do? Does he try to hide these differences? No, he is far too clever for that. Instead, he actually highlights their differences and plays up the contrast between them as embodied in the working methods of the two law firms and the people who work in them. So when Richard Fish and John Cage visit the office of Bobby Donnell, Cage's nose whistles and he takes a moment while Fish manages to stroke Ellenor's wattle. And when Bobby and Eugene from The Practice visit Cage/Fish & Associates they encounter Elaine in the unisex bathroom (she claims to have dreamed about having unprotected sex with Bobby) and witness Cage's use of his remote toilet flusher. The murder trial that brings the two firms together (the woman killed her husband with an axe) is a sensational one more in keeping with The Practice than Ally McBeal. Ally doesn't usually show up at a murder scene (although she did in "Boy to the World" where she acted very differently) and her fainting, after getting blood on her hand, is not so very unreasonable. Nor is Ally's falling for handsome Bobby Donnell (in a Freudian slip she introduces herself to him as "Ally Donnell"), whom she eventually invites to the bar where she and her friends unwind after work. When Bobby shows up but merely watches from a distance we see what an outsider he is to this closed world that Ally lives in. The episode also includes a self-contained story in which Richard represents a restaurant being sued by a former waiter who was fired for not being gay. This is the sort of reversal that David Kelley enjoys and it allows Richard to make one of his increasingly frequent court appearances.

in Being There O R I G I N A L AIR DATE:

5^/4/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Mel Damski Isaiah Washington (Michael Rivers) Michael Easton (Glenn) Gibby Brand (Judge William McGough) Eric McCormack (Assistant District Attorney)

While viewers have to watch an episode of The Practice to find out the sensational conclusion of the Marie Hansen murder trial, Kelley

makes sure to provide an equally strong narrative link with this episode of Ally McBeal to assure some continuity for those who don't switch the channel. That link is the trial of Renee for assaulting her date when, following her lead, he became too sexually aggressive. The court trial, which threatens Renee's job as a district attorney if she's found guilty, isn't really about the facts of the case which we already know. It is, first, about John Cage's unusual trial behavior and Renee's total lack of confidence in him. In an attempt to distract the jury from a weak defence, he uses a clicker for his objections, wears shoes that make a scrunching sound when he walks, and "throws" his stomach grumble. And it is, second, about Renee's own behavior. Ally and Cage both know that even though the man might have been in the wrong, he was led down that path by Renee herself. Late in the episode Ally tells Renee that it was anger, not selfdefence, that caused her to beat the guy up and that her sexual aggressiveness is a serious problem. Only after a while does Renee admit this truth to herself, telling Ally a story about how the boys used to taunt her as a kid because she developed breasts early. The story is a parallel to a childhood episode told by Elaine in "Happy Birthday, Baby" to explain her own sexual behavior. Consciously or not, Kelley seems to be saying that sexual promiscuity or aggressiveness in women may not be natural or healthy but instead is caused by childhood trauma. Renee, by the way, is the third cast member to be charged with a crime, after John Cage (for soliciting a prostitute) and Ally herself (for tripping a woman in a supermarket). Putting a lawyer on trial is an interesting turning of the tables; viewers shouldn't be surprised to see virtually all the main characters have their day in court at some point. Her trial, though, isn't only for the purposes of examining her conflicted sexual needs. Just as important is the way it highlights how much she needs Ally's friendship — as much as Ally needs hers. It is the wise but solitary Cage who notes that this friendship is a rare one and to be envied. The closing shots, showing Ally and Renee in their pyjamas laughing and playing cards intercut with Cage alone looking out an office window, imply that not just romance but also friendship can overcome our loneliness. But friendship is at the heart of romance too. And Billy and Georgia need each other's support when Georgia takes a home pregnancy test that comes out positive. Neither is ready for such an event, but neither wants to admit the truth. Richard Fish gives a marvellous run-on speech enumerating all the trials to come for the future parents: no sleep, drooping breasts, worry over schools . . .

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Meanwhile Ally, while seeming to be truly over Billy now, can still feel a depressing envy at their good fortune. As usual, such trials of character do not always show her off to advantage. She seems mean-spirited and even cruel when she asserts to Billy that she doesn't care one way or another about the pregnancy. As always, David Kelley comes up with a comic way of dealing with a real, and difficult-to-admit emotion. On the advice of Tracy the therapist, Ally comes up with a theme song for her pain ("Wedding Bell Blues") and imagines the secretaries as a line of long-legged chorus girls. Inevitably, the pregnancy test turns out to have given a false positive. Georgia's emotional response — she weeps from both a sense of loss and self-loathing for worrying about their income — is very honest and no doubt easy for so many contemporary couples to relate to. But the experience, which at first seems as if it might cause only arguments and misunderstanding, brings Georgia and Billy a little closer. As for children, they are always possible for the future — say during year four when the show needs some new energy?

122 Alone Again O R I G I N A L AIR DATE:

£/ I I /$8

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Dennis Dugan Cynthia Stevenson (Hayley Chisholm) McNally Sagal (Mary Halliday) Michael Hagerty (Michael Huttle) Gibby Brand (Judge William McGough) Dabbs Greer (Vincent Robbins) Dyan Cannon (Judge Whipper Cone)

So far Ally McBeal has been remarkably free of the kind of comic gimmicks that have been minor blemishes on so many episodes of good television shows since Hill Street Blues. The only time Kelley comes close to resorting to such tricks are the various inventions that Elaine brings into the office: the face bra, the glasses with miniature icepacks attached, the "cool cup" for keeping men's sperm at the proper temperature. There was a particularly unfortunate moment in "The Affair" when Elaine tried her face bra on the mourning professor's widow; it was hard not to feel angry at David Kelley for subjecting his otherwise dignified character to this pathetic humilation. This episode, however, includes a new inven-

tion of Elaine's that is not only funny but speaks to the hour's theme of loneliness. It is a "husband CD" with all the sounds of a "'spousal relationship" so that a woman can pretend she actually has a man in the house: snoring, the ballgame on TV, eating noises, even a very loud fart. Not exactly romantic, but neither is marriage sometimes. The woman Elaine subjects these noises to is Mary Halliday who wants to sue her fiance for jilting her at the altar. This episode has two court cases, both of which while interesting in themselves are more important as projections of the emotional lives of the regular characters. In the case of Mary, the projection is Richard's own anger and pain for having been dumped by Whipper Cone. While Mary seems unsure of whether to use the courts for revenge or to simply seek therapy for her unhappiness, Richard encourages her to take the legal road to retribution. "In every person's life there comes a time when you have to go forth and be vicious." He argues that love is an illusion and that marriage is really about one thing only: money. The judge for the hearing turns out to be none other than Whipper herself, giving her and Richard a chance to trade some funny but truly mean snipes at one another. The series is often enriched by the way David Kclley follows up the emotional aftermath of significant events, rather than moving on as if thev never happened. The other court case brings John Cage together again with a lost love named Hayley Chisolm (charmingly played by Cynthia Stevenson), A bank robber whose eighteen-year sentence had only one month left is being tried for trying to escape by bouncing over the prison wall on a homemade trampoline. Viewers might be reminded of the spiritual tones of Northern Exposure as they hear this elderly and sympathetic man describe how he collected rubber bands for years and then felt as if he were flying when he went over the wall. (Indeed, the escape, shown as a memory, looks like one of the art performances performed by that show's disc-jockey philosopher, Chris.) The district attorney on the case, Hayley, is a delightful if kooky woman (to use Ally's word) who was John Cage's best friend at college and clearly adores him. That Ally and John have a special relationship is pointed up here in her sensitivity to him; she understands immediately that John is secretly in love with her. By urging him to finally declare himself to Hayley, Ally is doing some projecting of her own. She recognizes now that when Billy left her she let her own ego get in the way, stopping her from taking the risk of going after him. "Courage is knowing you can't not jump," Cage tells the jury,

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learning a lesson from the old prisoner and his trampoline. But even though he finds his own courage, he can't get Hayley's love. Nor does Richard win Whipper back (at least not yet) by recognizing his own anger and telling Whipper how much he misses her. This episode has perhaps the most forlorn ending of the season, with Renee and Ally sitting silently at the bar, Elaine tidying up the office, Whipper taking home a teddy bear for company, and a hollow-eyed Richard at a video arcade riding a motorcycle. While the previous episode emphasized the precious nature of friendship, this one leaves us with the sad truth that friendship alone cannot always overcome loneliness.

123 These Are the Days O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

£/l8/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Jonathan Pontell Willie Garson (Alan Farmer) Richard Schiff (Bernie Gilson) Phil Leeds (Judge Happy Boyle) Albert Hall (Judge Walsh) Lee Wilkoff (District Attorney Nixon) Dylan McDermott (Bobby Donnell)

It is remarkable that David Kelley made it to the season finale without losing the freshness and creativity of the show's beginning. Indeed, some of the later episodes are among the best of Ally McBeal's first year and the gradual moving away from the Billy-Ally lost-love plot has not caused a drop in temperature. At the same time it must be said that this final episode is a good one without being particularly special. The two court cases, one comic and the other serious and both highly watchable, drive the hour forward more in the manner of the old L.A. Law, without really touching the lives of the main characters. The cases do bring out the show's main themes, however: love and friendship. In the comic story, John Cage's cousin is tried for banging people in love on the head with a paddle. He is a self-proclaimed Cupid who helps people move forward with their feelings for one another, declaring that "Nothing bonds like a little crisis." In the serious story, a former street person wants to donate his heart to the dying businessman who befriended him but the hospital refuses to perform the transplant. Both these plots are winning in large part

because of the guest stars, whom viewers might recognize from N. Y.P.D. Blue and the short-lived Relativity. Perhaps because he wanted to continue the journey of Ally's love life without bringing another man into the story (there have already been Billy, Jason Roberts, Ronald Cheanie, Glenn, and Dr. Greg Butters, not to mention John Cage), David Kelley brings Bobby Donnell of The Practice back for a return engagement. We see that Ally has learned to be assertive about what she wants; she is the one who asks for a late-night office dance and later initiates their first kiss, saying, "I have a great imaginary world but sometimes I just need things to happen for real." Reality, unfortunately, has a tendency to deviate from the fantasy one imagines and Bobby tells her that he isn't ready to begin a new relationship. But Ally remains unscarred from this particular encounter. David Kelley plays a couple of little jokes in this episode that some viewers might miss the first time around. The first begins with John Cage's warning to Renee that she should drop the case against his cousin; after all, she never wins against him in court. And how many viewers have noticed that during the entire first season the law firm o of Cage/Fish & Associates has only lost one case (in "Silver Bells")? If that doesn't prove Ally McBeal isn't intended to be a realistic drama, then I don't know what does. The joke here is that Cage, after bragging to Renee, does lose. The final little joke — a bit of postmodern fun — occurs when Ally, dancing with John Cage, confesses that she would like to "erase" everything that has happened in the last year. The fictional Ally's life is, of course, only one year old, or rather one television season. And of course it can literally be "erased," simply by erasing the videotapes containing all the episodes. And yet we unabashed fans of the show cannot help believing that this exaggerated, sometimes stunningly foolish, but always winning character is very, very real.

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During the summer hiatus virtually all the cast members went off to do different film projects. Calista Flockhart went to Italy with Mrs. David Kelley, aka Michelle Pfeiffer, and Kevin Kline to film A Midsummer Night's Dream. She also made a stop in London to promote the British airing of Ally McBeal, where she was upset to discover that the British critics had merely picked up on the American feminist trashing of the show. David Kelley's own screenplay, Lake Placid, began shooting, with Bridget Fonda — his original choice for Ally — in a starring role. (Another screenplay, Mystery, Alaska, about a small-town hockey team, was already shot and scheduled to arrive at movie theaters early in the new year.) David himself couldn't afford much of a break; he had to start turning out scripts for the fall 1998 season. In August the show suffered a small but significant loss. Phil Leeds died. The actor had played Happy Boyle, the wizened old judge with an obsession for clean teeth and a soft spot for prostitution. He was eighty-two, a veteran stand-up comic as well as a performer in theater, film, and television. Leeds had been in the season finale in May, and in retrospect he looked tired and withdrawn. But on that same May night he had also been a guest star on no less than three other shows: Ellen, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Murphy Brown. He would be missed on Ally McBeal as one of the small band of character actors who helped David Kelley reveal the peculiarities that make up human nature. The first episode of the new season would be dedicated to his memory and in a later episode the death of Judge Happy Boyle would provide an opportunity to celebrate the actor's contribution to the show. Just before the start of that season in mid-September the 1998 Emmy Awards were broadcast on NBC. Ally McBeal was

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P ^or a nefty ten awards, competing in the comedy category against sitcoms like Mad About You and the last season of The Larry Sanders Show. Fans watched in the hope that it would win best comedy series, or that Calista would win for outstanding actress in a comedy and David would pick up a statuette for writing (the episode called "Theme of Life"). Tracey Ullman was also nominated for her guest appearance as the therapist and two directors had also been given the nod. But except for one technical award handed out earlier, the show came up empty-handed. In all likelihood, its designation as a comedy had robbed the show of at least two awards. On the other hand, it would probably not have fared any better in the drama category against such "serious" and therefore supposedly more significant fare as N.Y.P.D. Blue. Perhaps also the Emmy voters, like the viewers themselves, were firmly divided between supporters and detractors. This is not to say that David had a disappointing night. And not because Christine Lahti won for her role on Chicago Hope and thanked him. David must have been thrilled by the terrific success of his underdog show The Practice. First Camryn Manheim, who plays Ellenor Frutt, won for best supporting actress. "This is amazing!" she shouted, telling millions of viewers how she had felt like a misfit all her life for being overweight. Bejewelled and wearing a low-cut black gown, she won over the crowd by screaming, "This is for all the fat girls!" Next to win was John Laroquette for his guest role on the show. But the really big award came last, as The Practice won outstanding drama. While Michelle Pfeiffer sat beaming in the audience, David and the show's entire cast made its way to the podium. His long hair unruly, his face (becoming more gaunt in recent times) looking serious, David thanked his cast and crew. Of course awards are nice, but David was not the sort to bask in glory or even to pause before all the work he had to do. After all, the fall season opener ofAllyMcBeal was due to air the very next evening. Actually, he'd been working hard all

summer, writing for both his series. There had been some disruption as the shows moved into a new film complex called Raleigh Manhattan Beach Studios, on twenty-two acres of land in south Los Angeles. Twentieth Century Fox built it especially for David, who would be its primary tenant, but the studios weren't finished and he had to make do with a small temporary office on the third floor. Never one to rest with success, David spent the summer planning changes on both his shows. Bobby Donnell's father (to be played by Charles Durning) was going to show up on The Practice, and Lindsay Doyle and Helen Gamble would become roommates (shades of Ally and Renee). But he was looking forward to shaking up Ally McBeal even more by bringing a new lawyer into the firm, the icy and ruthless blond, Nelle Porter (with Portia de Rossi cast in the role). O

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Neither David nor any other member of the cast and crew of Ally McBeal was prepared for attention of another kind. For the Emmy Awards, Calista had worn a dress by designer Richard Tyler, and the size-two pink sheath fell so loosely from her shoulders that to many viewers she looked like a famine victim. Certainly there was no question that the already thin Calista had lost weight since the end of the first season. Jokes by comedians like Jay Leno on The Tonight Show (what does Calista Flockhart have for dinner? Three peas and a lima bean) severely stung Calista's feelings. Then in October, just after the start of the second season, the New York CBC affiliate television station ran a news story that Calista had entered a medical clinic because she was suffering from the eating disorder anorexia. The story was unconfirmed and never proved, but it started a flood of news reports as well as conversations around the office water cooler over whether Calista Flockhart was indeed anorexic. Calista herself responded with denials through her publicist and eventually granted People an exclusive interview in an attempt to

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put the rumors to rest. "I guess I don't know the exact definition of anorexia," Calista said candidly. "But I eat. I eat normally. I eat whatever I want, whenever I want. I don't have a messed up relationship with food." Was she convincing? Not to everyone. Anorexia is not only about weight. Among the symptoms of the illness are an obsessive fear of gaining weight, a false sense that one is too heavy, and the absence of three consecutive menstrual periods. Only Calista Flockhart and those closest to her could really know if she had a problem. And the press clearly enjoyed invading the actress's privacy by speculating so much about her. As one commentator, Karen Durbin, wrote in The New York Times, the "hysteria" in the media reached an almost unprecedented "pitch of meanness." As Durbin pointed out, "Ms. Flockhart is hardly the only young woman on television these days who looks like a line drawing." But some doctors specializing in food disorders publicly voiced concern that Calista was becoming a dangerous role model for women, especially those who were trying to recover from anorexia or teetering on the verge of it. Calista Flockhart, these women saw, was successful, rich, and thin. "This is the type of image that is shown to women from a very young age," one physician said. "It's part of the culture of thinness that pervades our culture." Although the commentators didn't seem to realize it, the question of anorexia was a more personal version of the earlier feminist debate that had culminated in the Time cover story. To what degree, some asked, was the image of Calista/Ally (the character and the real person becoming increasingly blurred) harmful to those who watched, especially women? Could the show merely be considered entertainment, as its creator claimed, or did its societal influence have to be taken into account? And was its influence really as negative as some believed? On September 14, Ally McBeal's second season began as 14.8 million viewers tuned in. That meant more eighteen to forty-nine year olds were watching Ally than Monday Night Football on ABC.

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201 The Real World '"WH

O R I G I N A L AIR DATE: 'WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: G U E S T STARS:

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9/14/98 David. E. Kelley Jonathan Pontell Richard Lee Jackson (Jason Treshem) Caitlin Dulany (Laura Jewell) Susan Krebs (Judge Kensington) Tracey Ullman (Dr. Tracy Clark) Nelle Porter (Portia de Rossi)

This first episode of the second season is most obviously notable for its introduction of Nelle Porter (played by Portia de Rossi), or "Sub-Zero Nelle" to use the nickname given to her by other lawyers. But there are some smaller changes as well, starting with the updated visuals on the credits and moving on to Ally's longer hair, which now falls in disarray on her shoulders, and her skin-tight tops and skirts. (Neither the hair nor the tight outfits are flattering, in my opinion.) And notable by their absence are Ally's inner-

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thought voice-overs and moments of fantasy, both of which became less frequent as the first season went on. Nelle Porter has the icy good looks and demeanour of a comicbook villainess, a sort of Cruella DeVille in a black bra and whiteblond hair. Whether she will really turn out to be a "bad" character remains to be seen. Her introduction as a new rainmaker for the firm creates a sudden alliance between the old-guard women — Ally, Georgia, and Elaine — who view this intruder with the same hostility with which the wives of a harem might welcome a new young bride. As Elaine quips, the fact that Nelle is attractive and smart is enough reason for them all to hate her. This jealousy is not very becoming, but it does offer countless plot possibilities. John Cage being "drawn" to her — an apparently self-destructive impulse — adds yet more. John and Ally are once again co-counsel on a case, this time in defence of a thirty-nine-year-old woman charged with "sexual battery" for having sex with a minor, a sixteen-year-old boy. David Kelley appears to have been influenced by another source again, this one the brand-new John Irving novel, A Widow for One Year, which was published in the very late summer of 1998. In Irving's novel there is also a young man who takes an older woman's sweater to bed with him and masturbates, later becoming the woman's lover. But of course Kelley has his own reasons for this tale of romance between youth and maturity. And it isn't just that Ally is the sort of woman attracted to boy-men, as viewers might first believe on seeing her stare at the handsome, preppy Jason. What she falls for, listening to him testify about the older woman's sadness, is his great sensitivity and his openness to intimate experience. That very openness is what made her love Billy when they were young, too. Men — real men, the kind Ally dates — have already become jaundiced by life, their emotions protected by a hard and impenetrable shell. (This is not true of John Cage, who is in many ways a boy pretending to be a man, and which may be why he and Ally have become such special friends.) John may have lost his last case of the first season, but he begins a new winning record here, once again using an insanity plea. But what he really does is convince the jury that a sixteen-year-old is perfectly capable of real, genuine, passionate love. Or as he says, "When it comes to love, there really is no law, is there." Following her feelings, Ally agrees to a date with young Jason and there is a thoroughly entrancing night sequence at Fenway Park (Jason's uncle is a groundskeeper) where Ally and Jason pretend to play ball on the illuminated field. (Note how youthfully Ally is dressed here, in

sweater, jeans, and sneakers, as if returning to an earlier time in her life.) But Ally declines a second date. Despite what Dr. Clark has suggested — that a love affair doesn't have to be forever — she resists the temptation. What Ally clearly needs, then, is a man with a boy's heart.

202 They Eat Horses? Don?t They? ORIGINAL AIR DATE: 9 / 2 1 / 9 8 WRITTEN BY: David E. Kelley DIRECTED BY: Mel Damski GUEST STARS: Lucy Liu (Ling) Wayne Newton (Harold Wick) James Sutorius (Daley's attorney) Albert Hall (Judge Seym ore Walsh) Mark Metcalf (Walden, Wick's attorney) Tim Thomerson (Daley) Stuart Pankin (Paul Handy) J. Karen Thomas (television reporter) Marty Levy (television announcer) David Ogden Stiers (Judge Andrew Peters) David Kelley seems to have tuned into the fact that viewers have become very fond of John Cage. Only Cage and Ally are prominent in the first two episodes of the season, the other regular cast members (Billy, Georgia, Renee, and Elaine) being relegated to very secondary positions. Richard Fish falls somewhere in between as he verbally spars with an attractive but "vicious" Asian-American woman named Lingo who is Nelle Porter's client. Now that Nelle Porter is a member of the firm, Kelley needs to prove that she really is a crack lawyer. He does so with his favorite kind of case, a sexual harassment law suit. Once again, he finds a new twist on the theme as Ling sues a radio and television "shock jock" named Harold Wick, whose titillating commentary on women as sex objects has — or so she claims — contributed to a hostile climate in the steel factory where she is manager. The case brings in Kelley's other favorite subject of free speech, a right which has a tendency to clash with such protections as sexual harassment codes. Without question Harold Wick is an ugly piece of work, at least in public. (Telling Ally how he wants to make her into his "nasty little whore" is just the most sleazy of his remarks.) Clearly he is

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modelled after the infamous Howard Stern, whose sexist and vulgar commentaries have often gotten him in hot water, a position that he seems — like Harold Wick — to relish for the publicity it brings. (The name "Wick," a euphemism for penis, is Kelley's little joke.) But just because some of us might not like what Harold Wick says, should he not have the right to say it? Nelle Porter's arguments to the contrary are quite ingenious. First, she compares the effect of Wick's words to secondhand cigarette smoke, the harm of which has been recognized by the courts in recent years. And second, she does not call for censorship of Harold Wick's show; she asks, instead, that he simply be held accountable for the effects of what he says. The judge, recognizing a possible truth, sends the case to trial. The real drama for Ally herself is a fear that the law firm is changing. Nelle's dirty revenge on Harold Wick— she calls a press conference implying that Wick is sexually impotent — rouses Ally to counter her influence by appearing as a guest on Harold Wick's show. In this viewer's opinion, watching Ally demean herself publicly to get back at Nelle (she lets Harold Wick verbally salivate over her) is misguided at best. And why Ally is touched when Harold Wick sends her roses is beyond me. The other trial, involving a restaurant that is sued for serving horsemeat, is notable mostly for introducing Frawley, a little toy horse who was John Cage's childhood companion. It also raises the question, if in a less than serious manner, of the difficulty lawyers sometimes face in making arguments that contradict their own personal beliefs. In this episode the attraction between Ling and Richard develops and it seems strangely believable that two people who seem to instinctively dislike each other so much might also recognize kindred spirits. Ally, Billy, and Georgia in the bar look on appalled as Richard dances with Ling while John Cage dances with Nelle Porter. Appalling, yes. But intriguing as well.

203 Fools Night Out O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

9/28/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Peter MacNicol Lucy Liu (Ling) Jennifer Holliday (Lisa Knowles, choir singer)

Harrison Page (Reverend Mark Newman) Gerry Becker (Attorney Stone) Kayren Ann Butler (jody Silver man) Lydia Look (Leigh Woo) Allowing actors to direct episodes of their own television series has become an established way for them to get a chance to work behind the camera. (One of the first was Betty Thomas, a regular on Hill Street Blues who now works exclusively as a director.) This episode has none other than Peter MacNicol calling the shots and he does a first-rate job. Indeed, it is a combination of Kelley's script and MacNicol's direction which gives this episode the same spark as the first season. While it is true that the Ally-Billy-Georgia triangle of love and jealousy can't fuel the show forever, the energy provided by this volatile triangle isn't easy to replace. Kelley has found a way to keep this particular flame burning without resorting to any new flare-ups of emotion between Ally and Billy. Instead, what he continues to explore is the meaning of that lost relationship for Ally's present life. The catalyst for Ally's sudden revelation about the end of her relationship with Billy is a case involving Richard Fish's uncle's minister, who first appeared in the episode "Boy to the World." Back also is Jennifer Holliday as the leader and soloist of the church choir, here so heartsick from having been dropped by the minister as a lover that she sings pop songs about love instead of hymns during services. Considering what dynamite Holliday was last season, it's easy to understand why the music-loving Kelley would want to give her a repeat performance and a new chance to sing, upstaging Vonda Shepard. (Holliday isn't as convincing an actress as she is a singer, but no matter.) A pleasing aspect of this story is the genuine emotional lives that Kelley gives to religious people like the minister, who arc not often seen on television as more than talking representations of their faiths. While pressing the minister to tell his former lover why he bolted, Ally puts the puzzle pieces together and realizes that Billy left her at Harvard Law School and transferred to Michigan because he met and fell in love with Georgia who was a student there. "He met you while he was still with me," she says to Georgia in dismay. What makes this realization even more devastating, turning to dust her idealized view of this first love, is the fact that Billy kept the truth from her. Her weeping is an unusually raw emotional moment for the show.

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A viewer might think that Georgia could not help feeling just a little superior. After all, Billy dumped Ally for her, a secret that she knew and Ally didn't. But instead, in a genuinely insightful twist, she feels that Ally has a right to be angry. Not only that, but how does Georgia know that Billy won't one day fall for some other beautiful woman who walks into the room one day, just the way he fell in love with her? Ally's own crisis has had the effect of making Georgia feel even less secure about her marriage. David Kelley has a good deal of distinctly male fun with the other case on this episode, in which the litigious Ling decides to sue the nurse of a plastic surgeon who performed breast implant surgery on Ling's sister. (The nurse passed off her real — and splendid — breasts as the doctor's work.) The television audience is allowed only a view of the naked backs of Ling's sister and the nurse, but Billy and the opposing lawyer have the pleasurable responsibility of doing a frontal comparison. Ling is a hard character to take seriously (if indeed we are meant to) and Richard's insight into her unhappiness may not move the audience much. Nevertheless, his glee when she agrees to go out to dinner with him is quite delightful — like a boy who has just asked a girl to the school prom. Without question the comic piece de resistance of the episode is John Cage dancing in the washroom to a Barry White song that he hears in his head. His disco movements, so ridiculous and yet so appealing, make him quite irresistible. Of course the actor Peter MacNicol had considerable help from the episode's talented director, Peter MacNicol.

204 It's My Party O R I G I N A L AIR DATE:

10/19/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

DavidE. Kelley Jace Alexander Lucy Liu (Ling) John Ritter (George Madison) Shawn Michael Howard (Ben) Lee Wilkoff (District Attorney Nixon) Albert Hall (Judge Seymore Walsh) Claudette Nevins (Christine Hollings)

This episode aired at about the same time that an unsubstantiated report about Calista Flockhart suffering from anorexia nervosa became hot news in the press. By coincidence perhaps, it opens with

one of those voyeuristic scenes that David Kelley occasionally subjects his creation to. Here we have Ally, preparing for a party that she and Renee are planning, dancing wildly — and enticingly — in the apartment. In her tight shirt and jeans she does indeed look thinner than in the previous season. Even the angles of her cheekbones are more severe. While one or two of the second-season episodes have seemed a bit thin up to now, with this one Kelley is gloriously generous with his delicious plots and revealing moments of character. The subject of the court case is George Madison, played by the gentle-eyed and very likable actor John Ritter. Sure, the hour follows the case of George's wrongful dismissal suit against a feminist magazine which fired him for being a Baptist (allowing Kelley once again to take a jab at political correctness), but Kelley is really interested in George as a possible love object for Ally. For once, Ally seems attracted to a man for the right reasons and not because he matches some demographic profile. The only problem is that George is already Elaine's boyfriend. (Ally's reaction to this discovery — condescension and jealousy towards Elaine — does not exactly put her in the most endearing light.) David Kelley enjoys the risk of taking a controversy and putting it front and center. In the first season he put Ally's very character on trial before a legal disciplinary board; in this one he focuses on just one outward symptom of that character: her short skirts. Judge Seymore Walsh, finding her skirt short enough to show a lack of respect for his courtroom, holds Ally in contempt when she refuses to alter her hemline. Viewers are likely to disagree in their judgment of Ally's contemptuous attitude towards the judge (she calls him a "pig"), but most will find Billy's continuing tone towards her to be extremely patronizing. Not only does he think an hour in jail will do her some good, but he gives one of his purse-mouthed speeches at her party about how self-centered she is. All right, Ally is self-centeredness personified, but Billy's personal anger over it reveals that he still wants to possess her. There almost seems to be a kind of sexual anger underneath his disapproval. Until this episode, Nelle Porter has been something of an intruder into the tight little world of Cage/Fish & Associates. But here for the first time she seems to become a part of things. Her spirited defence of Ally at the contempt hearing, during which she calls Ally courageous, is bound to win us over. And although Ally invites her to the party only at the last minute, and Nelle keeps to the periphery of the dance floor, she endears us by telling

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Ling how much she is coming to like her odd fellow workers. Renee and Ally's party is a terrific sequence; who, watching the dancing, wouldn't want to join them? The dinner party conversation turns into a tense ideological battle between the sexes, both sides clearly frustrated by their expected social roles, but in the end everyone remains friends. George Madison is among them and as he and Ally stare at each other over their respective dance partners' shoulders, we know that this is not the end of the story. And I didn't even mention John Cage's pet frog.

205 Story of Love O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

10/26/98

David E. Kelley Tom Moore John Ritter (George Madison) Josh Evans (Oren Koolie) Latanya Richardson (Attorney Yvette Rose) Kristin Dattilo (Laura Payne) Eric Christmas (Judge Maynard Snipp) Natasha Gregson Wagner (Hannah Puck)

This episode seems an appropriate place to reverse the usual order of analysis and begin with the comic subplot first — a plot which, over the course of four episodes, moves (or should we say hops) steadily into the forefront. While David Kelley has long shown a soft spot for peculiar animal stories, often involving nasty things happening to some helpless creature, in the past he has generally kept the actual animal offstage. But Stefan the tree frog was introduced last episode as John Cage began to train it for an upcoming competition. The notion of a trained frog might reach extremes of silliness, but lonely John's affection for the amphibian is perfectly understandable given the sort of boy-at-heart he is. That's why Stefan's apparent demise — he jumps into the toilet when Richard, Georgia, and Elaine try to catch him, only to be flushed down when John uses his remote control flusher — is so ridiculously funny and yet almost moving. (I did say almost.) Memorial services are becoming a favorite set-piece opportunity on the show, and the service that John holds for the departed Stefan begins with John playing the bagpipes. "I know he wasn't human,

but he was a little soul who touched me," John eulogizes. When Ally and the others fail to keep straight faces, John is naturally hurt. And in the end it isn't Ally, for all her trying, who makes John feel better but the increasingly sensitive Nelle Porter. Bringing him a new young frog, she tells him about the death of her own childhood pet hamster, thus adding to the number of characters who have reached back to childhood traumas to explain who they have become. "You're a kind person, Nclle," John says. If viewers began to like her last week, they probably think she's just swell now. The courtroom drama begins when Ally tries to help a young hippy woman crying on a street corner and ends up kickboxing her into a newspaper stand. In the past Ally might have simply fantasized about doing violence, but in this season some of the fantasies slip over into reality. So much for Freud's theory of repression. Ally ends up representing the woman, Hannah, who has been charged with assault for throwing her best friend into a trash bin. The girlfriend's sin? Sleeping with Hannah's boyfriend. Oreii Koolie, the kid attorney from last season, makes an appearance as co-counsel on the other side, and I for one could do without him. Ally's argument — that the woman deserved to be thrown in the trash — results in a rare decision against her client, but the award of a token one dollar makes it a victory. The real point, of course, is to highlight Ally's own dilemma: should she resist the approach of Elaine's boyfriend George even though she is strongly drawn to him? This does seem like material for a teen high-school novel, but Calista Flockhart and John Rittcr make it work by showing a strong natural sympathy for one another. The most poignant moment comes when the two meet in the street and as George walks away, demonstrating his wiggle walk for her, Ally laughs, puts her hands to her heart, and sucks in a sob. The emotion may not quite be earned (just how often can Ally's heart be broken?) but the actors pull it off. What is definitely earned is the moment when Elaine approaches Ally and tries to maintain her calm as she says, "You can have any man you want, Ally. Please don't take mine." David Kelley implies that Ally and Elaine are in different leagues and both of them know it. Come to think of it, this too sounds like material for a teen novel — the cheerleader who can take the boy away from her plain-jane friend. Maybe grownup life is just like high school after all.

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2oj Worlds without Love O R I G I N A L AIR DATE:

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

11/2/98

David E. Kelley Arvin Brown Dyan Cannon (Judge Whipper Cone) Jessica Harper (Sister Helen) Richard T. Jones (Matt Griffin) Kellie Waymire (Chrissa) Lee Wilkoff (District Attorney Nixon) Shea Farrell (priest)

Because episode 206 was held back by David Kelley for some reworking, number 207 follows 2o^. Most television producers pray for a controversy to bring some needed media attention to their show, but David Kelley seems to manage it without even trying. This episode was publicly attacked by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights which claimed that the show's "clear and intentional pattern of Catholic-bashing" reached its zenith here. The apparently offending story line has Ally and John representing a former nun who is suing the Catholic Church. The Church expelled the young woman after discovering that she had broken the vow of celibacy, having an affair with a man who runs a homeless shelter. This is really a wrongful dismissal case in disguise, with sex once again the issue of the day. Among the episode's supposed offenses is its denigration of the confessional, for it turns out that a priest has been secretly videotaping this sacred practice in order to sell the results to a television station as the "World's Naughtiest Confessions." Without doubt many people are angered when their faith is treated irreverently, and David Kelley seems to have less patience these days for the more severe restrictions of organized religion. But surely the answer for those viewers who don't want to see the Catholic Church criticized, even if in comic fashion, is to change the channel. For Ally McReal fans, the other plotlines on the episode are the real sizzle here. Stefan the frog reappears in the toilet, only to be tossed around between Georgia and Nelle, finally splatting against a stall door. Alive but in a coma, this poor abused frog (is there an organization of amphibian-lovers writing a petition at this moment?) ends up on life support. Yes, cruelty can be funny. The institution of marriage undergoes another test when Renee meets up with an old flame named Matt ("my Billy," she calls him)

who is now unhappily married. These two have never been able to keep their hands off one another. Now that Ally has developed a conscience (witness her refusing to steal Elaine's boyfriend) she can play the superior role, warning Renee to keep her hands off another woman's property. But Renee wavers and the outcome remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Richard is given an unusual test of his own when Judge Whipper Cone appears naked in his apartment; unfortunately Richard has brought Ling home with him and all hell breaks loose. (A body double was used for Dyan Cannon's semi-nude moment.) In this episode, resolutions are in short supply.

208 Happy Trails JL

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ORIGINAL AIR DATE:

11/9/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Jonathan Pontell Rob Schneider (Fitzy) Lucy Liu (Ling) Phil Leeds (Judge Happy Boyle) Dyan Cannon (Judge Whipper Cone) Jennifer Holliday (Lisa Knowles, choir singer) Melanie Chartoff (Joanne Poole) John Fleck (District Attorney Spicer) Louis Giambalvo (Harold Jordan)

In this second season, David Kelley has a lot of fun coming up with variations of first-season moments. In "Story of Love," for example, George Madison gets a face full of cappuccino foam when Ally runs into him. This episode begins with another version of what might be called "the bathroom stall invasion." In this particular case it's John Cage who violates Richard's privacy to ask advice on kissing Nelle. The image of two men crowded together, one with his pants still down, is both uncomfortable and funny. And Nelle overhearing the conversation gives the episode a pleasing symmetry since the hour ends with the very kiss in question. The main purpose of the episode, however, is to memorialize the late Phil Leeds and the character he played, Judge Happy Boyle. During yet another wrongful dismissal trial (a woman is fired because her skin is, yes, orange) Judge Boyle closes his eyes and his head slumps to the desk. These scenes were reportedly taped for the first episode of this season, "The Real World," but were not used.

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Here Kelley is his usual irreverent self despite the solemn occasion; one of the lawyers raises Boyle's head and then lets it thump back onto the desk. The surprise is how deeply a ffected everyone is, not just Whipper Cone who had a teasing relationship with her fellow judge, but all the lawyers as well. Ally seems to have wiped from her memory the fact that judge Boyle was one of her accusers before the Board of Bar Overseers. Only Georgia is sceptical about this collective grief. "He was a wacky little judge who amused us," Georgia says, wondering about Billy who seems the most upset. Eventually Georgia understands that it isn't Judge Boyle whom Billy is mourning, but his own late father who he should have seen more often. For the most part, Kelley has kept the show free of those easy moral lessons that television feels obliged to spoon-feed us. But the culmination of this emotional outpouring for Happy Boyle is a memorial service in the gospel church and a speech from Billy exhorting us to phone up our loved ones and take somebody we don't know well to lunch. Then comes the big gospel musical number, less effective or relevant than in earlier episodes. Far more amusing and fresh are Ally's attempts to get rid of a persistent suitor named Fitzy, played by Saturday Night Lives Rob Schneider as a kind of Bohemian nerd. Fitzy may be a fool (he takes Ally to a karaoke bar and brags about his sexual prowess), but any man who has longed for a beautiful yet distant woman can sympathize with his plight. Elaine takes Fitzy aside and gives him one of David Kelley's best set-piece speeches in a long time. "There's a difference between losing and being a loser," she says wisely, offeringO us a Ogreater truth than anything BillyJ said at the memorial -1 O service. The plight of another guest star — Stefan the frog — retreats back to the status of subplot here. Stefan finally wakes from a coma, only to have its owner accidently swat it out the window and onto a ledge. But things look up for the melancholy John Cage when the frog is rescued and John finally goes on that date with Nelle Porter. One day the show can do a special flashback episode on the subject of first kisses. Here Nelle must take the lead for the stuttering John, making this a perfect moment to note that the women on Ally McBeal are far more assertive than the men and much more willing to take risks for what they want. As far as first kisses goes, Nelle's is a very nice one indeed. Even more delightful is the way John dances down that Boston street set afterwards, a comic Fred Astaire whose feet have been made light with the wings of romance.

2OQ lust Looking O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

11/16/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY; GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley and Shelly Landau Vince Misiano Lucy Liu (Ling) Justin Theroux (Attorney Raymond Brown) Tony Plana (judge Warren Figueroa) Christine Ebersole (Marie Stokes)

Last season Ally and Georgia kickboxed each other to the canvas in one of the finest examples (outside of a psychiatrist's office) of releasing competitive and jealous aggression. In this episode the "sport" is female mud wrestling, and the emotion being expressed — not by the participants but by the audience — is much simpler: male sexual desire. As Ling puts it so eloquently, men are easy to take advantage of when they do their thinking with the "dumbstick." The mud-wrestling club belongs to Ling, a tax write-off that has turned out to be profitable. The unsmiling but charismatic Ling has figured in so manyJ stories this season that she is getting more work o o o than some of the regulars. The court case has a neighborhood group called Mothers Opposed to Pornographic Entertainment (MOPE) trying to shut down the club, but David Kelley doesn't bother to give its representatives much of an argument. Ling's performance on the stand is the real highlight of the case, even if her speech (women are exploited everywhere so why shouldn't they at least make good money for it?) has been voiced more than once on the show. Of course Kelley is not going to pass up the opportunity to sho\v us the mud-wrestling club, in which two women looking like Miss September and Miss August roll around in the goop. While the boy-dreamer in John Cage emerges as he pretends to be a spy at the club,' Richard wins the right to a wrestle and finds his nose wedged o 6 between two robust breasts before he goes down for the count. The insight gained from the experience allows Richard to make the following closing argument for the case: "Once a man hits puberty he gets a sense he will forever be part idiot." Point taken. The more serious plot has Georgia becoming reacquainted with a man she dated once and never kissed. Under the guise of fixing Ray up with Ally, Georgia gets to spend some intimate time with Ray. Still in her recent incarnation as the voice of propriety, Ally insists that the flirtation is as bad as an actual affair. While Rayj and

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Georgia come close to kissing, the dangerous act never occurs and we can all sigh with relief. The moral of the story? Perhaps that affairs are easy and fidelity is darn hard work. While Ally is not the main attraction in either of these plots, she certainly has her moments. One comes when she arrives home before a date with Ray in order to put on her "lucky underwear." Kelley seems to get a kick out of risking charges of exploitation and Ally waving her underwear around might just be an intentional red flag. But it isn't as bizarre as Ally getting stuck in one of the unisex toilets, so that a crew of firemen has to work to get her out while she sits vulnerably with her thighs exposed. Ally herself seems less than upset and even manages to flutter her eyes at the handsome fireman who finally breaks her free. Perhaps the moral here is that humiliation can be fun.

206 You Never Can Tell O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

11/23/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Adam Nimoy Lucy Liu (Ling) Shawn Michael Howard (Ben) Bob Glouberman (Wally) Murray Rubin (Seymore) Michael Reilly Burke (Mr. Wells)

This is the delayed episode which was originally intended to air on November 2. If it had appeared as planned some of the jokes about trying to get rid of Fitzy in "Happy Trails" would have made more sense. Readers of this book will spot the little in-joke that David Kelley makes about his personal life here. Annoyed that Renee has set her up on a blind date at a bowling alley, Ally whines, "Nobody ever met anyone good bowling." Oh no? Unlikely as it seems, Kelley himself met his future wife Michelle Pfeiffer on a blind bowling date. Alas, Ally is not so lucky. The short, solemn, bespectacled schnook named Wally who appears is no David Kelley. Wally turns out to be as persistent a suitor as Fitzy, serenading her through a door, sending her flowers, taking rejection as a greater spur to action. Only a staged kiss between Ally and Georgia sends him fleeing (a trick that wouldn't work on Fitzy), but first he must

offer Ally scriptural material against the sin of homosexuality. Because Fitzy was more colorful and determined — not just a nerd but a nerd with style — Wally seems a little faded in comparison. If Wally is just a variation of Fitzv, then Ally getting a bowling ball stuck on her fingers is a variation of getting stuck in the toilet. Both offer humiliation in a way that seems vaguely sexual. In this season Ally has fewer opportunities to show her strong side, and far more chances to feel helpless. Once again Ling is on the litigious rampage, this time against an employee whom she accuses of sexual harassment for thinking dirty thoughts about her and offering what she calls "groin-motivated looks." There is a pleasing sequence in which Ally demonstrates the power of several seductive looks by casting them at the judge, proving the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. (Let's face it, most men, faced with Ally's gentle upward gaze, would melt into their socks.) The case is a rare defeat for the firm, though Ling discovers that losing can be just as emotionally gratifying as winning. Meanwhile, the on again, off again courtship of John Cage by Nelle Porter continues. Usually it's Ally who takes it upon herself to interfere with John's personal life, but this time Billy decides to act like big brother. He listens to John's concerns about the consequences of falling in love with Nelle: "I worry what might be fun for her might be dangerous for me." Billy warns Nelle not to date John out of "curiosity or sport" but the audience senses that her feelings for him are genuine. The date, however, is a failure, due largely to John's simple loss of nerve. When another man tries to pick Nelle up at the bar, John crumples in defeat. There is real insight here on David Kellcy's part: many people lack the courage and self-esteem to take romantic risks, no matter how much they yearn for love. Surprisingly, it isn't Ally but Elaine who finally gives John some of that courage back, inspiring him to simply "take her" on the dance floor. Sure, the taking doesn't exactly work out as planned (Nelle and John both end up toppling over) but the two get up again and happily continue. In the last two episodes Ally has not played as central a role in the story. Perhaps Kelley is trying to make the show a little less dependent on her. Reluctantly, even fans of Calista Flockhart must concede that if the show is to continue for several more years the other characters will have to carry it sometimes. J

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210 Making Spirits Bright O R I G I N A L A I R DATE:

12/14/98

WRITTEN BY: DIRECTED BY: GUEST STARS:

David E. Kelley Peter MacNicol Richard. T. Jones (Matt Griffin) Lee Wilkoff (District Attorney Nixon) Jon de Lancie (Jackson Poile) Mark Linn-Baker (Sheldon Maxwell) Dyan Cannon (Judge Whipper Cone) Lara Flynn Boyle (Helen Gamble) Amy Castle (child Ally)

David Kelley could not let the media frenzy over Calista Flockhart's reported (and refuted) anorexia pass without at least some notice. His response in this episode is a most curious one. In a very brief cameo, Helen Gamble of The Practice (played by the equally waif-like Lara Flynn Boyle) appears in an elevator and gives Ally a hostile once-over. "Maybe you could eat a cookie," Helen says, obviously referring to how thin Ally is. "Maybe we could share it," Ally counters, knocking the verbal volleyball back over the net. David Kelley has taken the media attacks on Calista Flockhart and the show and turned them into a little cat-fight between two attractive women. By doing so does he not, in effect, admit that thinness for women is a competition for desirability and status? But this is only one passing moment in the season's Christmas episode. Last year Kelley used Christmas as an opportunity to write a tragedy ("Boy to the World"); this time he reaches for the spiritually uplifting. Sheldon Maxwell, a bond trader who is the firm's most important client, has been fired for seeing a unicorn in his office. His employers fear that the hallucination is the beginning of some mental breakdown, while Maxwell refuses to admit the unicorn wasn't real. The case allows Billy to argue that the unicorn is not only an old symbol for Christ, but also embodies hope. "When did jot; see one?" the solemn Maxwell says to Ally. And sure enough, when Ally was seven years old a unicorn appeared to her in the family living room. "The people who see them share some of the unicorn's traits," he tells her. "They're lonely, with virtuous hearts." (Does Ally really have an especially virtuous heart? You can answer that one for yourself.) As the two speak about their visions they look like born-again Christians or members of a religious cult, or maybe those people in Close Encounters of the Third Kind who get to see the aliens. And yet there is also something touching about the

idea as Kellcy finds a simple symbol for hope and faith in these faithless times. In contrast, most of the episode is flat-out fun. Elaine gets a knock-out musical number, complete with whip, during the office Christmas party. (Why is it that supporting actors often get to show off the most?) Peter MacNicol does another splendid job of directing himself as he tries to sneak up on Nelle under the office mistletoe in order that at least one kiss between them be the result of his move. The running joke ends with Nelle still firmly in control, but at least John seems happy to give in after she kisses him and they go off together into the night. And so do Billy and Georgia, and Ling and Richard. Only Renee and Ally end up alone for Christmas. Ally, however, doesn't feel sad for a change, having seen her second vision of a unicorn, this time in her office. (Observant viewers, however, will notice what while she hugs the creature she neglects to touch its horn, which Maxwell had told her brings love.) Renee is the unhappy one this year, having decided that she won't continue her affair with the married Matt, the only man she has allowed herself to be vulnerable with. Seeing Renee when she isn't so tough is refreshing, but perhaps this story line is most remarkable for Ally's attitude. In the recent past she has tried to prevent Georgia from having an affair and has otherwise been the voice of moral rectitude, but here she admits that she may not have all the answers. "Common sense is killing us," she tells Renee, encouraging her to follow her heart, even if that means breaking society's rules. Perhaps she herself will take more risks in the new year.

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T ¥ I IT T^TTTTTTTl IT ^\ IT D J\ "1 7" T TT> TH T7" If T ¥ TH ~1L 7" Lately, it seems that whatever David Kelley touches turns to gold. On January 24, 1999, Kelley was undeniably the star of the night at the ^6th Annual Golden Globe Awards. Not only did he pick up the award for Best Comedy/Musical Series for Ally McBeal, but took the stage a few moments later to accept the Best Drama Series award for The Practice. This time the latter show received the attention — Dylan McDermott took j home the Best Actor in a Drama award, and Camryn Manheim continued her winning streak with a Best Supporting Actress award. No matter how dedicated David Kelley is to Ally McBeal, at some point he will turn it over to others, just as he did for Picket Fences and Chicago Hope. But it won't be easy. "This show is so idiosyncratic it's going to be tough to hand over to any other writers," he has said. Just the prospect of it sends fear into the hearts of the cast, who know that the words they speak come from David's pen. No matter who takes over, or how closely David remains involved, its life is likely to be a limited one. As David himself has said, it will be a challenge to keep the series "fresh and original in the long run." In fact, he has predicted that it will last no more than five years rather than the eight, nine, or more years that hit shows usually run. The Practice too will end up being written by others, but the transition will no doubt be easier. Ironically, the less successful show may turn out to run longer. This doesn't mean that David will take an extended vacation. He already has a new show slated to go on the air in the next year for ABC, a detective drama with the working title of Snoops. And he owes Twentieth Century Fox one more series to conclude a contract worth $30 million. But now that he is J

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in his mid-forties, it seems likely that in the not-too-distant future he will tire of writing two series at a time. Even the novelty of such remarkable success and productivity will wear off. In its place may rise a desire to write less but take more care. And if the movies that David Kelley has scripted turn out to be more successful than his earlier attempts, he may well find himself attracted to more feature film writing. But it is doubtful that he will ever turn away from television, a medium which suits his natural voice so well. The next few years should bring more David Kelley shows, both new takes on old genres and surprises like Ally McBeal. And of course we have a few years yet of Ally McBeal itself to enjoy and it seems unlikely, even when David does hand it over, that he will cease to be intimately involved. Will Ally find true love? Will John Cage find someone who, like Ally, can see that he is not just odd but special? And what will happen to Richard, Georgia, Elaine, Renee, Nelle, and Ling? Not even David knows all the answers, at least not yet. But he is discovering them, sitting at his desk, Papermate in hand, writing across that yellow legal pad. Smiling.

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"Created by David E. Kelley" Bill Carter, " 'L.A. Law' to Halt Slide, Reaches Back to Bochco"; Robert J. Thompson; David Marc and Robert]. Thompson, Prime Time, Prime Movers: From 1 Love Lucy to L.A. Law — America's Greatest TV Shows and the People Who Created Them (Little, Brown 1992); Steve Pond, " 'Picket Fences' and the Man Behind Them"; Jill Gerston, "This Season They've Rebuilt 'Picket Fences.' " New York Times Nov. 2 1 , 1998, 36; Bill Carter, "The Unintended Career of TV'S Prolific Writer"; Howard Rosenberg, "Kiss of the Teenage Girls Impales CBS On Its Picket Fences." Toronto Star April 29, 1993, 57 (from Los Angeles Times); The Practice official Fox Web site; "A Producer's Return." New York Times July 23, 1997; Thomas H. Stahcl, "Christmas in the Courtroom." America Dec. 18, 1993, i£—16; Melina Gerosa, "Michelle Up Close and Personal." Ladies Home Journal March 1996, 140—42, 204—oj; Claire Bickky, "Producer's Wife." Toronto Sun July 28, 1997, 42; Lynn Elber, "What? Men Are from Venus Too?" Ottawa Citizen Dec. 27, rg97 (from Associated Press); "Cat Woman, Is That You?" People Weekly Jan. 23, 199^, 33; Alan Rich, "Chicago Hope." Variety Sept. 12—i 8, 1994; Ken Tucker, "Chicago Scrubs." Entertainment Weekly Sept. 23, 1994, i 2 ; A..J. Jacobs and Heather Keets, "Channel Crossings." Entertainment Weekly Nov. 11, 1994,^7; Jessica Shaw, "Peter Principle." Entertainment Weekly Nov. 17, 199^, n; Richard Natalc, "Fences X'd Out." Entertainment WeeklyDcc. 9, 1994, i 2 ; Paul Mitchell, The Duchovny Files (Toronto: ECW Press 1996); "To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday." Variety Oct. 14—20, 1996; "Chicago Hope." 'People Weekly Sept. 19, 1994, 20; John Powers, "People Are Talking About Movies." Vogue Nov. 1996, 1^8, 160; Nancy Collins.

"The Practice" The Practice official Fox Web site; Todd Everett, "The Practice." Variety March 10, 1997, 43; Caryn James, "Lawyers You Can Trust? Almost." New York Times March 4., 1997, C r 8 ;

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"The Practice's Dylan McDermott Is Guilty of Being Sexy." Cosmopolitan April 1998, 194; Bill Carter, "TV Notes." New York Times Jan. 8, 1997, C2o; "A Producer's Return"; Bill Carter, "The Unintended Career of TV'S Prolific Writer"; Boston Tribune; AJ. Jacobs and Heather Keels, "Channel Crossings"; "Dylan McDermott." FeopleWeekly May n, 1998, 144—4J; Jennifer Kasle, "Dylan McDermott: TV 's Coolest New Guy." Redbook March 199 8, 37; Ben Svetkey, "Dylan McDermott." Cosmopolitan April 1994, 102; Jennifer Dunning, "A Searing Debut in'Hamburger Hill.' " New York Times Sept. 4, i987,C8;BronwenHruska, "The New Dylan." Entertainment Weekly August 6, 1993, 20; Lisa Schwarzbaum, "Miracle on 34th Street." EntertainmentWeekly May 12, I99J, 44; Janet Maslin, "Destiny Turns on the Radio." New York Times April 28, 199^, C8; Lisa Schwarzbaum, "Destiny Turns on the Radio." Entertainment Weekly May 12, 1995", 44; "The Cowboy Way." People Weekly June 6, 1994, i£; Bob Makela, "Dylan McDermott." In Style. June 1997, 6r; Ken Tucker, "The Practice." Entertainment Weekly March 7, 1997, £2; "The Practice." People Weekly June 12, 1998; Bob Tourtelotte, "Newcomer Ally McBeal Hailed at Emmys." The Globe and Mail July 24, 1998, C2; Benjamin Svetkey, "Kelley's Heroes." EntertainmentWeekly, Sept. 2r, 1998, 33—40; Josh Young, "Sweet Justice." Us Dec. 1998, 99—100.

"The Birth of Ally McBeal" Kinney Littlefield, "Buzz Is High on Basket-Case McBeal"; "It's the Law: Ally McBeal Plays It Straight." Seinfeld 8t Classic TV Moments 1998; Bill Carter, "The Unintended Career of TV'S Prolific Writer"; Torri McEntire, "Ally McBeal — Everywoman (Sort Of)." Ultimate TV (from internet); Kate Moss, "Stuff." The Globe and Mail April 30, 1998, Cg; Mark Kingwell, "Buffy Slays Ally." Saturday Night May 1998, 77—78; David Handelman, "Ally's Biggest Ally." Cosmopolitan May 1998, 230; Bonnie Malleck, "The Law from a Woman's Perspective." Hamilton Spectator Sept. 8, 1997, Cio (from Kitchener-Waterloo Record); Rick Marin and Veronica Chambers, "High Heels, Low Esteem." Newsweek Oct.. 13, 1997, 71; Lynn Elber, "What? Men Are from Venus Too?"; Ron Miller, "Meet the Brain Behind TV'S Finest Hours." Edmonton Journal Feb. 7, 1998, Ci (from Knight Ridder Newspapers); Benjamin Svetkey, "Everything You Love or Hate About Ally McBeal." EntertainmentWeekly Jan. 30, 1998, 10—26; Jennifer Steinhauer, "How To Succeed in Business without Really Trying On a Suit." New York Times Sept. 28, 1997; David Kronke, "Courting Courtney." TV Guide July 18, 1998, 14-17; Love, Ally McBeal (Web site); Ally McBeal, My Life (Web site); BrianD. Sweeney, "GregGermann." Texas Monthly April 1998, 32; A.J.Jacobs and Heather Keets, "Channel Crossings"; Politically Incorrect ABC, June 12, 1998; "Hungry to Act." Madean'sDec. 16, 1996, £o; Bruce Williamson, "Miami Rhapsody." Playboy Feb. 1995, 2o; Internet Movie Database (Web site); Sheri Linden, "Snow White: A Tale of Terror." Variety Aug. 2j, 1997, 37; Brendan Kelly, "The Assistant." KzrietpNov. 3, 1997, 103; "A Tangled Web." Toronto Sun (television magazine), Nov. 30, 1997; Kristen Baldwin, "Write Up Her Ally." EntertainmentWeekly Sept. 19, 1997, 64; Courtney thornesmith.com (Web site); Tom Gliatto, "Dream Girl." People Weekly April 13, 1998, 8r-86; David Ansen, "Denzel Washington as a Self-Made Private Eye." Newsweek, Oct. 2, 199^, 8j; David Handelman, "Ally's Biggest Ally"; Michael A. Lipton and Cynthia Wang, "Taking a Bough." People Weekly July 2o, 1998, 87; Benjamin Svetkey, "Kelley's Heroes"; Hilary Stern, "Silver Belle." Us Dec.

"Nothing To Lose" Margy Rochlin, "The Us Interview: Calista Flockhart." Us May 1998, r^— r8; Meredith Adams, "Calista Flockhart Finds Fame as Ally McBeal." Biography May 1998, 82—8j; Michael A. Lipton and Cynthia Wang, "Taking a Bough"; "Right Up Calista's Ally." Toronto Sun August 2 8, 1997, j6; " Parents Say Ally Really Suits Calista." Toronto Sun Jan. 23, 1998, 68 (from Associated Press); "Calista Flockhart." TeopleWeekly May n, 1998, 171;; "Calista Flockhart." Cosmopolitan Jan. 1998, i 28; Frank Rich, "A Woman from Four Viewpoints at

the Circle Rep." New York Times Oct. 18, 1989, C i j ; Mimi Kramer, "Appearances." The New Yorker Nov. 6, 1989, 130; John Simon, "Games Better Left Unplayed." New York Oct. 30, 1989, 101; Mel Gussow, "Reeve Resurrects Death as Charming Stranger." New York Times August 13, 1990, C n ; Steven Holden, "All for One." New York Times Dec. j, 1991, C i j ; Frank Rich, "After Ceausescu, Another Kind of Terror." New York Times Dec. j, 1991; John Simon, "Sophomoric Seniors." New York Oct. 25, 1993, 99—100; John Lahr, "The Haunted Menagerie." The New Yorker Nov. 2 i, 1994, i 24—27; Jeremy Gerard, "The Glass Menagerie." KjrietF Nov. 21, 1994, 43; James Collins, "Woman of the Year." Time Nov. 10, L 997; "Flockhart, Crudup Win Derwent Awards." Backstage May 26, 199^, 3; William Tynan, "One Small, Unhappy Family." Time Dec. r,, 1994; John Simon, "Promises, Promises." New York Nov. 28, 1994, 7.f—76; Lewis Lazarre, "The Three Sisters." Variety April 10, 199^; Celia Wren, "Three Sisters." Commonweal March 14, 1997, i^; Daniel Kimmel, "Drunks," Variety Sept. 11, 199^, 106; Brendan Kelly, "Milk and Money." Variety Nov. 2^, 1996, 74; "Telling Lies in America." PeopleWeekly Oct. 27, 1997, 19; David Anscn, "Telling Lies in America." Newsweek Oct. 20, 1997, 68; Benjamin Svetkey, "Everything You Love or Hate About Ally McBeal"; "Calista Flockhart." FeopleWeekly; Alex Kuczynski, "Calista Comes Clean." Harpers Bazaar Sept. 1998, 1,07—oj, f j o — £ i .

"Making Ally McBeal" Olivia Gold Smith, "Calista and Jenna." New York Times Dec. 7, 1997; Ken Tucker, "Ally McBeal." Entertainment Weekly Oct. 19, 1997, 72; Bonnie Malleck, "The Law from a Woman's Perspective"; Rick Marin and Veronica Chambers, "High Fleels, Low Esteem"; "Ally McBeal." PeopleWeekly Sept. T i>> 1997, 20; Margy Rochlin, "The Us Interview: Calista Flockhart"; Love, Ally McBeal; Parry Gettleman, "Thanks To 'Ally McBeal,' Singer Vonda Shepard Is Hot." Orlando Sentinal; Ally McBeal: My Life; The Practice official Fox Web site; Michael Glynu and Jesse Oppe.nheimer, "Real Life Love Triangle for Ally McBeal." National Enquirer June 9, 1998,4; Meredith Adams, "Calista Flockhart Finds Fame as Ally McBeal"; "Calista Fiockhart." PeopleWeekly; Benjamin Svetkey, "Everything You Love and Hate About Ally McBeal"; Claire Bickky, "Producer's Wife"; Steve Pond, " 'Picket Fences' and die Man Behind Them"; Bill Carter, "The Unintended Career of TV'S Prolific Writer"; Kinney Littlcficld, "Buzz Is High on Basket-Case McBeal"; Ron Miller, "Meet the Brain Behind TV'S Finest Hours"; Lynn Elber, "What? Men Are from Venus Too?"; "It's the Law: Ally McBeal Plays It Straight"; Tom Gliatto, "Dream Girl"; Michael A. Lipton and Cynthia Wang, "Taking a Bough"; David Kronke, "Courting Courtney"; "An Interview with Greg Germann." Viewers Voice (Web site); Carla Hall, "A Creation Unto Herself." The Gazette April 13, 1998 (from Los Angeles Times); Michael Orey, "Sex! Money! Glitz!"'; "Calista Flockhart." Cosmopolitan; EnterlainmentWeeklyJune 26, 1998, 8j; HenryMietkiewicz, "Ally the Belle of the Ball." Toronto Star Nov. 2$, 1997, C7; "A Tangled Web"; Alex Strachan, "The Strange Appeal of Ally McBeal." Vancouver Sun Feb. 2, 1998. 87; Robert Strauss, "Practising Law with Angst and Whimsy"; James Collins, "Woman of the Year"; Henry Goldblatt, "Fox Nails the Gen X Vibe." Fortune Sept. 8, 1997; Alyssa Katz, "Ally McBeal." The Nation Dec. 15, 1997, 38; Steven D. Stark, "Ally McBeal." The New Republic Dec. 29, •997) : S ; "Ally McBeal Voted Best New Series" VieweisVoice (Web site); Bob Tourtelotte, "Newcomer Ally McBeal Hailed at Emmys"; Ken Parish Perkins, "Fox Network None Too Sly." Edmonton Journal April 27, 1998, C2 (from Fort Worth Star-Telegram); Joe Flint, "Outfoxing the Competition." EntertainmentWeekly April 3, 1998, 74; Joe Dziemianowicz, "Crossover Screams." EntertainmentWeekly April 17, 1998, 12; Alex Kuczynski, "Calista Comes Clean."

"Searchin' Vonda's Soul" Chuck Taylor, "A Regular Club Gig on TV'S 'Ally McBeal' Helps Vonda Shepard's Career Take Off." Billboard Feb. 21, 1998, 72; Scott Moore, "Singer Wins With Ally McBeal."

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Calgary Herald April 19, 1998, Cj (from Washington Tost); Jerry Crowe, "Singer'sTV Success TookaLotof Searchin'." Calgary HeraldDec. f , 1997, PS (from Los Angeles Times); Benjamin Svetkey, "Everything You Love or Hate About Ally McBeal"; Chris Willman, "It's Good, Eve." Entertainment Weekly March i;, 1996, 64; Lyndon Stambler, "Spotlight On . . . Vonda Shepard." PeopleWeekly Feb. 9, 1998, 27; Mario Tarradell, "Vocalist Vonda Shepard Has a Key Role in the TV Series 'Ally McBeal.' " Dallas Morning News; Chuck Taylor, " 'Ally McBeal's Vonda Shepard Is a Pop Success and She Plays One on TV." Billboard June 6, 1998, 88; Parry Gettleman, "Thanks to 'Ally McBeal,' Singer Vonda Shepard Is Hot."

' 'But Is She Good for Women?'' Ginia Bellafante, "Feminism: It's All About Me!" Time June 29, 1998, 48—^4; Margy Rochlin, "The Us Interview: Calista Flockhart"; Benjamin Svetkey, "Everything You Love or Hate About Ally McBeal"; Mark Kingwell, "Buffy Slays Ally"; Elizabeth Rcnzetti, "Postfeminist? Puh-leaze." The Globe and Mail April 13,199 8; Shirley Knott, "Role Models? Puh-leaze!" Broadcast Week May 2, 1998, 9, 17; Donna Lypchuk, "The Horror of Ally McBeal." Eye April 23, 1998, 35-; "It's the Law: Ally McBeal Plays It Straight"; Carla Hall, "A Creation Unto Herself"; Rick Marin and Veronica Chambers, "High Heels, Low Esteem"; Kinney Littlefield, "Buzz Is High on Basket-Case McBeal"; Bill Carter, "The Unintended Career of TV'S Prolific Writer"; Daphne Merkin, "The Marriage Mystique." The New Yorker Aug. 3, 1998, 70—76; Maureen Dowel, "She-TV, Me-TV." New York Times July 2 2 , 1998; Alex Kuczynski, "Calista Comes Clean."

' 'Emmy Surprises'' Alex Kuczynski, "Calista Comes Clean"; Bernard Weinraub, "At the Movies." New York Times Aug. 2 i , 1998, Bio; "Phil Leeds, 82, Comic on Stage and Screen." New York Times Aug. 21, 1998, A22; The $oth AnnualPrimetime EmnyAwards NBC, Sept. 13, 1998; Benjamin Svetkey, "Everything You Love or Hate About Ally McBeal"; The Boston Tribune; Benjamin Svektkey, "Kelley's Heroes"; Karen S. Schneider, "Arguing Her Case." People Nov. 9,1998, 92—101; Elena Cherney and Luiza Chwialkowska, "The Skinny on Ally." National Post Nov. 3, 1998, A3; Karen Durbin, "Razor Thin but Larger than Life." New York Times Dec. 20, 1998, 39,4-6-

"The Future of David E. Kelley" Benjamin Svetkey, "Kelley's Heroes."

Other Sources National Review Dec. 9, 1996, 66; Bruce Fretts, "Remote Patrol." EntertainmentWeeklySept. 12, 1997; "The Practice." People March 3, 1997, i j; Alyssa Katz, "Smoking Guns." The Nation March 31, 1997, 33—34; Bret Watson, "Peter MacNicol." Entertainment Weekly June 30, 199 f , 49; Chris Nashawaty, "Love and a .4^." Entertainment Weekly March 24, 199^, 74; "Everyone Wants a Piece of Ally." Toronto Sun Feb. 20,1998,67 (from Reuters); Lisa Kogan, "The 'L' Files." Elle April 1997, no; Newsstand:Entertainment Weekly CNN, Sept. 10, 1998; Dana's Ally McBeal Page (Web site).