Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of Ally McBeal 9780292795082

Citation preview

Beautiful TV

Beautiful TV The Art and Argument of Ally McBeal greg m. smith

Universit y of Texas Press Austin

Copyright © 2007 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2007 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Greg M. Beautiful TV : the art and argument of Ally McBeal / Greg M. Smith. — 1st ed.    p.   cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-292-71642-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-292-71642-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-292-71643-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-292-71643-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ally McBeal (Television program) 2. Television--Aesthetics. I. Title. PN1992.77.A533S65 2007 791.45'72—dc22 2006033327

For Mary,

who made my heart go “boom”

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Contents

Introduction: Why Ally?  1

Aesthetics 1. Practical Music, Personal Fantasy: Creating a Community of Song in Ally McBeal  19 2. Getting into Ally’s Head: Special Effects, Imagination, and the Voice of Doubt  47

Narration and Argument 3. Redeeming Ally: Seriality and the Character Network  73 4. “Is It Possible to Love Somebody Only Two Days?”: Guest Stars and Eccentricity  145 5. Victim of Love: Ally McBeal and the Politics of Protection  177 Afterword  193 Episode List  201 Notes  205 Bibliography  253 Index  267

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Beautiful TV

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Introduction

Why Ally?

Why read a book about a television series that is no longer being

aired? Pop culture, by its very nature, moves on to the next hot item, feeding the hunger for the new. But eventually some television series become so old that they are “new” again and can be reclaimed as “classic,” gaining a second life as retro-hip artifacts replayed on TV Land1 or as nostalgic bulletins from simpler times for a more harried society (the widespread syndication of The Andy Griffith Show, for instance). Occasionally some shows catch fire with a cult audience that recirculates and repurposes the original text (creating fan fiction romances for The X-Files’ Scully and Mulder or analyzing Twin Peaks in the magazine Wrapped in Plastic, for instance) and thus remain current in the everyday lives of their devoted fans.2 Between these two points in time, between the current and the antique, television texts either become fodder for filling twenty-four-hour cable programming grids or disappear. These texts disappear from academia as well. The study of popular television tends to follow the practice of popular culture, focusing on the latest fad or on historical artifacts. Both of these research pursuits are important. Academics need to act at the moment, to take advantage of the wealth of data available when a pop culture phenomenon occurs, and we need to do the difficult work of reclaiming the appeal of popular culture from the dust of history. But, although the temptation is strong, we need not mimic the dynamic of pop culture when we study it. In a widely circulated email guide to publishing, an editor of a leading academic media journal recently asserted that essays about contemporary media are more “attractive” when

  introduction

they treat a “hot” topic: “there was a moment when work on Ally McBeal was really hot, but now the show is canceled and that moment is over.”3 Pop culture necessarily is of the “moment,” but the study of popular culture need not be.4 When academics valorize television because of its currency, we propagate one of the basic societal positions concerning popular media: they are evanescent and therefore not worthy of prolonged, serious attention. Imagine my opening question being asked about other media: Why read a book about a play that is not currently produced? Or about poems published in a magazine? Keeping television shows around makes economic sense (they may find a new market through syndication), but in terms of their intrinsic value, only a rare few critically acclaimed series “deserve” to be treated as something other than disposable. Here I argue something more than a simple “we need to claim more television shows as classics.” We should recognize that our own emphasis on the currency of television treats the medium as being worthy of study because of its contemporary popularity (for instance, the rise of Buffy studies in the wake of that show’s cult following). Without current popularity—or without reasserting its historical value as a beloved commodity—scholars of television seem to believe there is little reason to explore a television show. Complexity of narrative or the beauty of construction can justify critical consideration of a novel or a film, but when a television show is no longer au courant, these considerations matter little. As long as my opening question rings true, we are accepting the notion that television is basically bad and can only be reclaimed academically when it is directly, socially relevant. The burgeoning field of popular television studies has certainly done much to take television off the garbage heap of culture, asserting that texts from Alias to Dragon Ball Z can produce interesting insights. And yet the way that television studies tends to approach series still contains hints of the assumption of the medium’s inferiority. The dominant mode of television analysis treats programs as an instructive nexus of more important discourses, a highly public site of struggle where social contestation occurs over what it means to be a woman or a man, a homosexual or a heterosexual. A popular television series provides a particular configuration of elements (themes, characters, buzzwords) that activates and tweaks the larger social discourse in vivid ways. Television shows are better at energizing one side or another of a broader debate than they are at subtly advancing their own specific arguments. The construction of the program itself is therefore less important than the way television (as arguably the most widely consumed

Why Ally?  

medium of our time) establishes a space where the culture can consider vital issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on.5 A television show can voice these concerns elegantly or awkwardly, but that is of less concern to most television scholars. In fact, we assume that the power of the television text to promote water cooler discussion and living room arguments may be because of its somewhat ramshackle construction. We conceptualize the television text itself as full of contradictions because popular culture raises multiple ideological possibilities in its greedy attempt to give pleasure to a large, diverse audience. The academic examining a television program should pay as much or more attention to the “absences” in the text as he or she does to what the text says, because the power of ideology relies heavily on what it leaves unsaid. Such texts encourage audiences to integrate television programs into their daily lives, and scholars justify their interest in a show in terms of this possibility for active political engagement, as opposed to grounding their arguments in analyses of the show’s elegant architecture. A television program, however, is more than a “site” or a “space” in which more important cultural discourses play. The formal properties of the program—the narration, the style—powerfully shape those discourses. In our zeal to explain the social power of television, we have neglected to give much specific consideration to the aesthetic and narrative construction of television at anything other than the broadest levels. By examining television narrative patterns in genres (as in the important work of Tania Modleski, Robert C. Allen, Jeremy Butler, and E. Ann Kaplan)6 or by discussing the overall “flow” of television itself, we unintentionally echoed the message of the larger culture: television has great social importance, but specific programs are worthy of consideration only if they tell us something about society as a whole.7 And so the accepted way to examine Ally McBeal would be to look at, for instance, what the controversy about Calista Flockhart’s thin body has to say about anorexia and issues of women’s bodies,8 or to situate the show as a postfeminist icon, or to discuss how Ally uses black characters as emblems of sexuality, or to study how Robert Downey’s very public drug problems created a dialogue about addiction and recovery.9 The book you hold in your hands is not that book, although all these issues are interesting and I touch on each one briefly.10 By examining the show’s narrative and formal construction, I am intentionally downplaying the questions that current television studies tends to emphasize, questions that the show raises in passing without focusing on them.11

  introduction

In part this academic emphasis on the social importance of television has to do with the institutional history of television studies, which emerged as an outgrowth of film studies. Film studies began as a close consideration of the aesthetics of the text, and of course when television studies tried to distinguish itself from its parent discipline, it did so by carving out a very different approach.12 Unlike film studies, which traditionally was content to deal with the text alone, TV studies did not shy away from what actual audiences did with television texts; instead, it emphasized the complexities of audience interactions around television shows. Looking to justify the study of what was broadly considered trashy, television studies proved that images of Madonna and Roseanne were important because of the ideological complexity they summoned. Important early works of television criticism made the split with older criticism explicit. John Fiske explicitly defines cultural studies as a “political” framework in polar opposition to the study of culture’s “aesthetic” products.13 Television studies and cultural studies became linked, rising at the same time with similar concerns and approaches. As John Caldwell notes, the conjoining of cultural studies and television meant that “from a methodological perspective the very television program itself—its visual and aural presence—has been written out of history.”14 Because of the different institutional histories of film and television studies, it is acceptable to do a book-length aesthetic analysis of a film, but to analyze a television series on primarily aesthetic and narrative terms is a radical notion. There are a few scattered examples of pioneering essays that focus specifically on TV aesthetics,15 but single-author book-length academic works on individual television shows are rare. Television shows receive chapters in single-author books (e.g., Janet Staiger’s Blockbuster TV ),16 and they are increasingly becoming the subject of anthologies by multiple authors using a variety of perspectives (dealing with recent “hot” series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and The X-Files).17 There are critically savvy single-author works on The Avengers, The Untouchables, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, television series from long ago.18 But most single-author works on contemporary shows are little more than glorified guides, leading the reader through the show episode by episode instead of providing a consistent focus on the overall construction of the series.19 The most important academic book on a single television series by an individual author is Julie D’Acci’s Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney & Lacey.20 While I greatly admire D’Acci’s approach, her simultaneous attention to the text, its production, and its reception sends an

Why Ally?  

unwritten message that the text itself is not complicated or worthy enough to sustain critical attention. We now can study individual television programs in intensive, sustained fashion; we should be able to do so without justifying our efforts in terms of the show’s popularity, its ideological reach, its industrial strategies, or its audience interaction. Just because TV studies came of age in a certain institutional context does not mean that the field needs to remain defined by its origin. Television studies and cultural studies are not necessarily synonymous. We have already accommodated a broad range of historical and economic work; it is time to make room for readings grounded in aesthetic and narrative considerations. Part of the reason for writing this book is to assert that television is too important to read quickly past the text to the larger social forces without examining its aesthetic construction. A series can deserve close attention on its own terms, as a well-constructed, narratively complex, stylistically rich text. Let me be clear: I am not advocating that all of television studies deal with aesthetic or narrative readings of texts. I am not championing an “Everything is aesthetic” mantra as a replacement for the slogan “Everything is political” (though obviously both statements are true). But by focusing on innovative devices and their narrative/aesthetic functions, I wish to demonstrate how to unpack the complicated, elegant, artful construction of a single television series as it both makes explicitly political arguments and creates beautiful television. To assert the importance of aesthetic/narrative television criticism is not a simple return to our origins in film studies.21 Instead, within the micro­ politics of academia, treating television as if it deserves close aesthetic/narrative consideration is a way to fight back against the broader social awareness of television as a bad object. As Henry Jenkins has said, “To map the aesthetics of an otherwise neglected form, then, constitutes a political act, helping to question the naturalness of the aesthetic norms separating high and low culture.”22 To study popular aesthetics and narration in this context, therefore, is not a return to retrograde practices; it is an attempt to assert the value of a degraded form in a way that the dominant (and undeniably rich) mode of cultural analysis simply cannot. Television studies tends to lean toward the lowbrow, with occasional forays into highbrow fare (such as John R. Cook’s book Dennis Potter).23 Low cultural forms help cultural studies make its points more clearly. Lowbrow television tends to make its assertions more aggressively, and so criticism can take advantage of the energy it provides. Because many lowbrow texts are popular, this allows the critic to read through them to get at the widely held beliefs that a particular text condenses. And so television/cultural

  introduction

studies makes a kind of challenge to the highbrow/lowbrow distinction: it argues that lowbrow works, like highbrow works, are worthy of critical attention, but it tends to do so by examining lowbrow television for what it can tell us about society. Our academic discussions frequently leave out the middlebrow, the vast number of popular culture forms between the high and the low. There is a hipness about academic study of works that deal in “trash,” and there is relatively little hipness in examining television aimed at the great middle. Beginning with Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and Dwight Macdonald’s “Masscult and Midcult,”24 criticism has denigrated the whole notion of the middlebrow as being fatally compromised: not energetic enough to be lowbrow and not complicated enough to be “art.”25 Part of the reason I have chosen Ally McBeal for this book-length study is because it is so squarely a middlebrow text, not aspiring to the rarefied heights of The Singing Detective but not exactly fighting zombies either. Just as we need to overcome our prejudice toward popular culture as emphasizing the current, we need to deal with our tendency to reduce popular culture to hipness.26 As television studies grows, we should increasingly deal with the vast expanse of texts that are “squarer” than The Simpsons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer but that are not PBS fare either. We have done much to reclaim the lowbrow as a worthy object of study. In this book I argue that we need to begin a similar reclamation of explicitly middlebrow works as a way to combat the notion of television as bad object. One traditional way to examine middlebrow to high culture works is to justify their status by pointing to their author.27 This would certainly be one way to handle Ally McBeal, situating it in terms of television auteur David E. Kelley’s work on L.A. Law, Picket Fences, Chicago Hope, The Practice, and Boston Public, among others.28 On the one hand, I want to recognize the extraordinary extent to which Ally McBeal is the highly personal product of one creative mind. The easiest job in Hollywood is being on David Kelley’s writing staff, so the joke goes. This is especially true for Ally McBeal. Although Kelley does much of the writing for his other series,29 he seemed especially protective of Ally and was much less likely to farm out scripts to other writers. In a medium that is necessarily collaborative, Ally is as close as we will probably ever get to a primetime series as personal expression.30 Out of 111 episodes, Kelley wrote an astonishing 102 of them by himself (sharing story credit on 10). He cowrote 8 others, leaving only one episode out of five seasons for which Kelley did not receive screen credit. In such a work, it is difficult to avoid dealing with authorship. Without

Why Ally?  

Kelley having acquired status as a television hitmaker, it is hard to imagine how Ally could exist. By 1997 Fox TV had established itself as a viable fourth network on the strength of ribald and outrageous comedies, such as In Living Color, Married with Children, and The Simpsons, but it was not a brand widely associated with quality hour-long television (with the exception of the cult hit The X-Files, Fox’s hour-long hits leaned toward the sudsy, such as Beverly Hills 90210). Luring an established producer of quality (more about this term later), Fox gave Kelley the freedom to create an intensely personal show that dealt frankly with sexuality, something that might be more difficult on the established networks.31 Ally’s examination of sex and the workplace could only be possible at a moment when broadcast standards about explicit language were loosening. Ally McBeal fit in Fox’s lineup as a comedy that stretched the limits of sexual expression on television,32 but it also distinguished itself as the first hour-long nonvariety comedy show on primetime (although, with its dramatic elements, it is more accurately described as a “dramedy”).33 Ally McBeal is made possible by a nexus of forces: Fox’s desire to gain status, the loosening of broadcast standards on sexually explicit talk, and Kelley’s established track record as an auteur.34 In this book I do not focus primarily on Kelley’s auteur status, the traditional method of justifying a work as art.35 This is a book about the text of Ally McBeal, not about Kelley’s entire oeuvre. Although Kelley tends to circle around certain key topics (sexuality, eccentricity), I do not spend much time tracing these themes across his work. Nor does this book situate the show among Fox’s industrial practices.36 Although both of these approaches would produce interesting insights, my focus on the text’s artistic construction is aimed at combating one of our basic understandings of television. The public discourse about television reiterates certain themes so frequently that they have become “truths” that no longer need to be established: TV causes violence, shortens attention spans, reinforces stereotypes, and appeals to the lowest common denominator. We almost never hear someone express my most common reaction to television today, that much of it is drop-dead gorgeous. American primetime television today presents an embarrassment of riches.37 When I began writing this book in 2002, I could watch within a given week The Simpsons, The Sopranos, Oz, ER, The Practice, Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, King of the Hill, Felicity, The West Wing, and Alias, all complicated and innovative texts. Certainly there is much unartfully made television, but this is true of any medium (“Ninety percent of everything is crap,” says

  introduction

the old adage). Television is simply too diverse to have the cultural cachet of theater or the novel,38 and so it becomes easy for even academics to reduce television to a 500-channel extension of The Jerry Springer Show, allowing us to condemn the medium as a whole (a faculty member in my department has a bumper sticker on her office door that urges people, “Kill Your Television,” whereas a “Burn Your Theater” sticker would be unthinkable). Because the medium has long been established as a bad object, we seem unable to see television for its beauty.39 A publisher once told me, “The only word you can’t say in academia today, the only obscene word, is beauty.”40 The television industry itself avoids the term, preferring instead to focus on “quality,” a word with different meanings in different contexts.41 In Europe, “quality” has been used in official policy documents to provide an elusive, highly debated description of a desired type of programming.42 In America the notion of “quality television” has served as a targeted marketing strategy. Jane Feuer has noted the link between “quality” television and the “quality” (i.e., desirability) of the audience it delivers (a young, more urban, wealthier consumer for the sponsors).43 Feuer says: The quality audience is permitted to enjoy a form of television which is seen as more literate, more stylistically complex, and more psychologically “deep” than ordinary TV fare. The quality audience gets to separate itself from the mass audience and can watch TV without guilt, and without realising that the double edged discourse they are getting is also ordinary TV.44 By providing expensively produced, high-profile programming called “loss leaders,” networks hoped to lure people to their television sets to see commercials for their other programming, at times accepting a potential loss in revenue in order to create interest for their less expensively produced shows. Such quality programming becomes even more crucial in a moment of crisis in which network broadcasters are trying to attract viewers who have departed to watch cable fare.45 Feuer also reminds us that the overt politics of American quality television leans toward the left: “Quality TV is liberal TV.”46 This tendency to parade more tolerant values in front of the American public often leads quality television to a certain quirkiness of characters, and so we find communities like Cicely, Alaska (Northern Exposure), and Twin Peaks.47 Another characteristic that distinguishes much quality television from the

Why Ally?  

mundane is its tendency to refer to other television shows. Feuer asserts, “Intertextuality and self-reflexivity operate both as the normative way of creating new programmes and as a way of distinguishing the ‘quality’ from the everyday product.”48 Winking references congratulate viewers on their tele-literacy, and such television often flatters its viewers for recognizing the quality of its construction. And so, as John Caldwell notes, “quality” refers to both narrative and visual principles: “the industry legitimizes itself as much by overproducing and complicating narrative as it does by overproducing and complicating high-production values.”49 If I want to argue that a “quality” television series can sustain prolonged aesthetic scrutiny, why choose Ally McBeal? Why not make the argument about well-crafted television using something like the current critical darling The Sopranos, which most people could instantly agree is “art”? Or, if you’re so in love with David Kelley’s work, my friends have asked, why not do one of his more “serious” shows like The Practice? One of the reasons I have chosen Ally McBeal to make the larger argument is because it does not instantly leap to mind as “quality television,” although it has won a number of awards.50 If I can show the complexities and elegant narrative technique of a sometimes “silly” show like Ally, it becomes easy to argue for the aesthetics of “weightier” shows.51 Another reason for exploring Ally’s aesthetics is because of the way the show has expanded the formal and narrative devices of the medium. The Sopranos and The Practice depend on solid writing, acting, and directing, but they do not push the boundaries of television style and expressivity. Ally McBeal, however, has changed the way special effects and music can be used on television, and my understanding of aesthetics can shed light on how this happens. In my discussion of “aesthetics” in the first section of the book, I rely on a rich set of theoretical assumptions articulated by the Russian Formalists of the 1920s.52 The Formalists were concerned with understanding how artworks use various “devices” to achieve particular “functions.” A “device” can be any of a set of historical strategies available to a mediamaker: choices about camera setups, character qualities, dialogue, editing, and so on. A “function” is the desired effect on the audience member, an attempt to attain certain narrative (crucial story information), emotional (how we should feel about the story), or aesthetic goals. Once mediamakers decide to try to accomplish a certain function, they consider what devices would be best to accomplish it. For instance, if a mediamaker wants to give us insight into a character’s memory, he or she can do so with a variety of devices. One

10  introduction

can have the character reminisce aloud about old times, or show us a flashback, or let us hear a voiceover, and so different devices can accomplish the same basic function. Conversely, the same device can perform different functions; for instance, voiceover can be used to convey a character’s subjective perspective, or it can be used to provide “voice of God” commentary. Available technology, economic constraints, and historical convention establish what aesthetic devices are available to mediamakers to accomplish their story­telling goals at any given moment. An innovative text can open up new options for later mediamakers, in the way that (for instance) The Shining’s use of the Steadicam paved the way for ER’s mobile camera. One important job of the aesthetic critic operating within a Formalist framework, then, is to articulate the links between functions and devices. In chapters 1 and 2 of this book, I lay out the multiple functions served by music and special effects in Ally McBeal. I assert that Ally’s innovative aesthetic strategies have changed the options that primetime television has available to convey subjective experience, to tell jokes, and to comment on action. It is not enough to enumerate the different functions that devices serve in a text, however, because devices are not independent for the Formalist. An artwork combines and coordinates devices to create a distinctive system, to build a world that operates under certain principles. Once I have discussed the basic functions served by music and special effects in Ally, I explore how the show uses these devices together to accomplish more complicated purposes. I examine these formal choices as a system that encourages certain attitudes toward the characters and values presented by the show. Because devices work in a system, they make richer meanings possible. I start the book with two chapters of close consideration of these overtly formal strategies (the “art” of Ally) but then turn to an examination of the distinctive narrative tactics of the show. Music and special effects serve multiple functions (including some narrative ones), but Ally’s most complex narrative strategies have to do with how it constructs and elaborates its network of characters. The show uses its characters to construct an elaborate political debate, and television studies needs to develop tools for elaborating how this debate progresses over time. The last part of the book deals with laying out the “argument” of Ally McBeal. Key here is an understanding of Ally as serial television, as a show that tells a continuing narrative over its entire run. Television has long understood the power of serial narrative to attract and maintain a loyal audience, but for most of its history, television used serial strategies only to gain a

Why Ally?  11

daytime audience for soap operas. Primetime audiences, it was assumed, would not devote the time required to get to know serial characters and to understand a long-running plot, and so primetime series tended to be nonserial so that audiences could start watching them at any point without having to catch up. After the popular success of Dallas and Dynasty and the popular and critical hit Hill Street Blues, primetime recognized that the serial form provided a strong impetus for viewer loyalty to its quality shows, and so serial narrative became a hallmark of quality television.53 Even sitcoms such as Roseanne and Friends began to integrate serial plotlines (will Ross and Rachel end up together?) into their episode-oriented form.54 The increasing number of serial shows on television emphasizes the question of how a serial narrative unfolds in primetime. Television studies has yet to wrangle in detail with this topic,55 and so the last several chapters of the book demonstrate how we might approach these issues. How does Ally take advantage of the serial’s possibilities for character growth without fundamentally undoing the basic setup of character relations? How does the show use an ensemble cast, a set of series regulars, and guest stars to achieve different narrative payoffs? I do not systematically lay out all possible narrative strategies for primetime serial narrative. Instead, I show how Ally McBeal finds its own balance among the various narrative pressures of long-term storytelling. Each series navigates these concerns in different ways, discovering new possibilities for telling continuing stories. My hope is to encourage more scholars to investigate these serial narrative practices. If we do so for a wide range of primetime serials, we can come to a better understanding of the strategies available for these important shows. Beautiful TV is at the same time a book specifically about Ally McBeal and also about how serial narrative can proceed in primetime. To investigate this serial construction, television studies must be willing to look at such series in their entirety. Here is another argument for television studies to examine series that are no longer current. If we only discuss a show while it is ongoing and hot, we can only discuss the work in part. A serial television show can be looked at before it completes,56 but we need to recognize that this prevents us from examining the overall arc of the show. We justify our middle-of-the-run publishing partly in terms of expedience; after all, a publication deadline is a publication deadline. But also implicit in our acceptance that it is no big deal if we do not examine the full television text is (once again) the understanding of television as being narratively simple. Certainly a snapshot approach makes considerable

12  introduction

sense for nonserial television, since story lines resolve entirely at the end of the episode and the narrative mechanisms do not vary much over the course of the run (except for changes in cast, writers, etc.). I too have done work on single seasons and individual episodes of television, and I believe that such an approach can provide insight into the show as a whole.57 But unquestioned acceptance of a snapshot approach to a serial admits that the overall course of the narrative has little to say that cannot be found in examining particular episodes.58 We need to begin a tradition of analyzing the whole of a serial television text. Admittedly, this is not easy (and I can attest to this as someone who has done close analysis of five seasons of a series). The formal and narrative tools developed to discuss a 90-minute feature film need to be adapted to look at a 111-hour narrative such as Ally McBeal, and this book is an attempt to extend those tools usefully to serial narrative. In part my justification for publishing a book on a primetime series after it is over is to argue that only then we discover certain meanings. I argue that Ally McBeal engaged in a long-running public dialogue about certain key concerns: what it means to be a woman or a man in the modern workplace; what place romance has in the therapeutic understanding of relationships; the value of eccentricity and how much oddity we as a society should tolerate; and what utility fantasy has in the pragmatic world. An individual episode of Ally can seem to endorse one rhetorical stance on these issues, and a subsequent episode may take the exact opposite position. This is not to say that Ally is incoherent or merely full of “contradictions.”59 I assert that Ally McBeal creates a coherent, nuanced argument about its central issues, an argument that veers in one direction and then in the other before arriving at an overall conclusion, an argument that is only possible through serial form, an argument that we can examine best by viewing it in its entirety. We assume that long-running television shows are going to go awry at some point. This recognizes the singular difficulties of maintaining quality and innovation while producing twenty-two episodes per year, but this is also a way that we can continue to sneer at television. We await the inevitable moment that a series “jumps the shark,”60 and much fan discourse argues over when the series diverges from what fans perceive as the show’s central pleasures. Many Ally fans cite the departure of Ally’s lifelong love interest, Billy, as the moment when the series began its decline, although some people place the decline earlier.61 Clearly a show’s fans have every right to police the central text, and I do not wish to engage in an argument over a definitive series apex or to position Ally McBeal as a flawlessly constructed text.

Why Ally?  13

However, I assert that our academic tendency to focus on contradictions, in combination with our broadly held understanding of the inevitable decline of television series, blinds us to the possibilities of articulating the continuities of a series. We can thus miss the complexity of the serial argument such as Ally’s. Not every serial engages in such a long-running debate, but Ally apparently benefits from series creator David E. Kelley’s experience as a lawyer to articulate a remarkable disputation over the show’s central issues.62 This book takes this argument seriously. And so a good part of the book is engaged with laying out this argument. In Beautiful TV I assert that Ally McBeal’s literal argument needs to be articulated because it requires full knowledge of the text to show the richness of the discussion. By presenting the argument as the series does, I demonstrate that a television series can create such a debate on its own terms in ways that are richer than much social criticism has done. “Foul!” the discerning reader may cry. “I thought social criticism was exactly what this book was not going to do!” My understanding of narration and aesthetics is that the choices involved in making media shape the kinds of meanings that the text produces. I believe that formal choices such as music and special effects are not totally independent of what they are trying to convey. A mediamaker chooses a device to achieve a particular function, and often that function is explicitly argumentative. To ignore the fact that the text is explicitly making an argument about the place of romance in the modern work environment or the utility or liability of the concept of sexual harassment just because these debates are social/political is to limit unnecessarily the value of narrative and aesthetics. When a mediamaker chooses a device to convey an argument, that formal choice affects the way we perceive the argument. Narrative practice also uses political attitudes for its own purposes; introducing a character by having him or her say something sexist, for instance, is a good way to establish that character as the heavy. The last part of the book examines how formal decisions about how and when to voice political attitudes construct an argument that is richly imbued with the long-term emotions that serial television can muster. Considering the “art” of Ally McBeal is not incommensurate with an exploration of its “argument.” Therefore, in my chapter on music, for example, I not only delineate the various narrative functions that Ally’s sound track performs but also discuss how these choices make it possible for the series to portray a particular kind of community. In the chapter on subjective devices (special effects, flashbacks, voiceover), my analysis begins with laying out the distinctive ways Ally uses these stylistic choices,

14  introduction

but I then argue that subjective access provided by these devices challenges our assumptions about the value of doubt and indecision. Beautiful TV discusses these matters not because they are innately more important but because they are an overt focus of the show’s argument. To neglect them would be to do violence to the series itself. I am not insisting on divorcing formal criticism from its social and cultural realm (and thus overcompensating for cultural studies’ lack of attention to aesthetics). Instead I am asserting that aesthetic and narrative choices in television are a valuable, overlooked basis for analyzing television. Certainly such choices may underwrite or advocate certain kinds of social meanings (Ally’s musical community, or the series’ advocacy of eccentricity). An aesthetic analysis should not be justified solely on the basis of what it can tell us about real-world issues. Nor should a focus on narrative isolate us from discussing the show’s overt commentary. Beautiful TV demonstrates the value of taking a television series seriously on its own terms, not using its setup as a springboard for discussing larger issues that the series voices in vivid but not especially articulate ways. This book treats television as capable of beautiful innovation in aesthetics and narrative and of nuanced debate on its explicitly framed central topics. I am grateful to Ally McBeal because I have learned things from its very public debate. By following its narrative, I have considered political perspectives that I would not normally engage in, and it has caused me to question the underpinnings of some of my basic political stances. Like many well-meaning, card-carrying, left-leaning academics, my politics are what I call “cocktail party politics.” I like hanging out in the hermetically sealed world of the left more than the hermetically sealed world of the right, and so I have adopted lefty politics partly through personal inclination and beliefs and partly through association. Of course I believe in tolerance and gender equality, and so does everyone in my social circle. It is very easy to do so at the abstract level of issues, and my sanctimonious politics will tend to remain unchallenged at my cocktail parties (and the same is true for the sanctimony of the right). There is plenty of discourse from the other side floating around, but I am unlikely and uninclined to listen to the wild posturings of Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh. With Ally, however, we get a seemingly liberal stance toward the world, one that values tolerance, sexual openness, professional roles for women, and sensitivity for men. These characters would not seem particularly out of place at my cocktail parties. And yet the series places these well-meaning characters in very difficult circumstances, which make them blurt out the most outlandish political assertions, exactly the kind of things that would

Why Ally?  15

be shocking to hear at a good liberal intellectual gathering. This debate asks us to do what the left rarely does—look at the trade-offs of our high moral stances and consider compromises in our positions. Such a discussion is made possible because it is cloaked in the form of overtly tolerant characters and because it is presented in an engaging narrative form. Ally’s debate about sexuality and the workplace has provoked more consideration of the issues for me than most works of social criticism I have read. Ally asks me to reconsider some of the left’s sacred beliefs, such as faith in the law’s ability to change social attitudes, and so as a card-carrying lefty I squirm at some of the apparently conservative conclusions that this narrative maneuvers me toward. At the same time, I recognize how emotionally powerful, intellectually astute, and well constructed this argument is. Attention must be paid to such an argument. Having said that Ally and company would fit in at my cocktail parties, I must also confess that I would never invite people like them (if they existed). Ally (Calista Flockhart) is a waifish, self-centered lawyer prone to hallucinations, unrealistic expectations, and internal and external expressions of doubt. In her eternal search for her romantic soulmate, she plows through a range of prospective suitors, including long-term lovers Greg Butters ( Jesse L. Martin), Brian Selig (Tim Dutton), Victor Morrison ( Jon Bon Jovi), and Larry Paul (Robert Downey Jr.). She similarly makes her way through a dizzying array of strange therapists, from snide Tracey Clark (Tracey Ullman) to smiley Harold Madison (Fred Willard). She works for Richard Fish (Greg Germann), an unrepentant capitalist who has a fetish for loosehanging wattle flesh, and John Cage (Peter MacNicol), a powerhouse lawyer who needs numerous gimmicks to bolster his ego and to win court cases. Ally’s confidantes include Elaine Vassal ( Jane Krakowski), an oversexed secretary who loves being in the limelight, and her roommate, Renee Radick (Lisa Nicole Carson), a romantically cynical public defender. Her fellow attorneys at Cage and Fish include her former lover Billy Thomas (Gil Bellows) and his wife, Georgia (Courtney Thorne-Smith), who are both so straight-laced that the other characters comment on how boring they are. Joining the firm for most of the series are two vicious lawyers, frigid careerist Nelle Porter (Portia deRossi) and pampered diva Ling Woo (Lucy Liu). Other characters have briefer stays at the firm: Mark Albert ( James LeGros), Coretta Lipp (Regina King), Jenny Shaw ( Julianne Nicholson), Glenn Foy ( James Marsden), Raymond Milbury ( Josh Hopkins), Claire Otoms (Dame Edna Everage/Barry Humphries), Liza Bump (Christina Ricci), and Wilson Jade (Bobby Canavale). I realized fairly early on that I adored the show while I abhorred each of

16  introduction

the major characters, and I recognized how rare that phenomenon is. How could a show bring me back week after week when I disliked its principal characters? This initial question led me to investigate the show, and it led me to emphasize the argument of Ally McBeal. I kept coming back (in part) because I was enjoying the give-and-take of the debate about important issues regarding gender, romance, and work. I want to highlight the complexity of this issue-oriented debate as it is waged through these frequently obnoxious characters. Which brings me to the issue of Ally-hating, a fairly widespread phenomenon.63 “How can you possibly tolerate doing a whole book on that show?” friends have asked. “I can’t stand to look at her for five minutes.” The reaction to Ally can be visceral and immediate, which for many has to do both with Calista Flockhart’s thin body and Ally’s tendency to whine about her pampered life. My romantic partner had exactly the same reaction to Ally and avoided it for several seasons. As I kept watching, she eventually came to see Ally for its complex construction, and she became a regular viewer as well. I recognize that some of you may hate the very sight of Ally McBeal, and I ask you to hold that distaste in abeyance here. You don’t have to like Ally. I don’t, particularly.64 But I will ask that you be open to the possibility that this show presents a subtle, well-constructed debate. If you come to recognize that a middlebrow and sometimes obnoxious television show can be beautiful and rich, then my work here is done. One last note: I intend this work to be read by a variety of people, not only the academics who are interested in how television studies chooses its object of study. Therefore, I have minimized the number of specialized terms I use in this book. Those that are used are defined briefly in a note. I believe that all too often we academics hide behind our jargon and that when dealing with popular culture in particular we have a duty to use plain speech whenever possible. The study of popular culture need not mimic the ups and downs of pop trends, as I have argued, but we should not overcompensate for dealing with popular subjects by making our writing too arcane. To write about pop culture is to participate in it. Just as the best popular culture can be read by a wide range of audiences, I assert that the criticism of popular culture should be approachable as well.65

ON E

Practical Music, Personal Fantasy Creating a Community of Song in Ally McBeal

More than any other contemporary American primetime television

series, Ally McBeal experiments with the way music intersects with narrative. Ally’s music toys with the boundaries between diegetic and nondiegetic,1 interior and exterior, real and imaginary; and Ally serves as a virtual catalog of musical functions. Here I articulate the various ways this music is used, demonstrating the expanding range of lyrical devices used in contemporary television. Specifically, I examine several key questions about Ally’s many distinctive musical tactics. Why does the music play with the relationship between the sound track and the characters’ thoughts? What is the purpose of foregrounding musical performance in the characters’ favorite bar or of the fantasy song-and-dance sequences? How do we explain the liminal status of bar singer Vonda Shepard? Why do Ally characters use music celebrities as fantasy icons or personal theme songs as therapeutic pick-me-ups? I weave answers about the unusual and standard functions of Ally’s music into a discussion of how these devices work to create a distinctive Ally world. The bar that the characters frequent is simultaneously a fantasy space where Ally can push its distinctive use of music to the foreground and also a historically grounded representation of several 1990s nostalgic fashions. It evokes the publicized “return of the cocktail” as well as the renaissance of swing music, trends that reassert the values of an old-fashioned romanticism in a postmodern context. These musical discourses summon the sense that older standards (in the sense of both pop music numbers and norms of behavior) can articulate an unironic, unabashed ardor. A reassertion of

20  Greg M. Smith

these structures can open up possibilities that newer, seemingly freer forms of expression cannot. As Andrew Yarrow notes, “Unlike the wildly improvisatory gyrations of the rock-and-roll era, ballroom and swing dancing have clearly defined steps, although there is room for individual creativity.”2 By giving music a high-profile position in its depiction of daily life, Ally McBeal asks us to reconsider the balance of improvisation and structure required to navigate the contemporary world. The show’s music, like these other 1990s fashions, invokes a nostalgic understanding of romance while asking us to integrate these romantic themes into a contemporary setting. Like all formal devices examined in this book, music is part of a system that serves broader narrative purposes than mere formal innovation, and so here we begin to see how the art of Ally McBeal supports the argument of the show. The foregrounding of musical performance in Ally helps to set rules for the dynamic of its community, favoring certain characters and attitudes over others. Every ensemble television show depicts a type of community, and in Ally music performs many of the functions required to keep the group vital: it makes arguments, creates competition, establishes cohesion, and defines participation. The challenge for the characters in Ally McBeal is to negotiate among various discourses aimed at the heart and the head, to counterbalance powerful old conceptions of romance with new schools of thought on relations between the sexes. Using distinctive principles, the series repurposes music into a cohesive fictional world; in so doing, it demonstrates how characters might sample from the powerful discourse of music to mediate between rationality and irrationality, between the status quo and fantasy. Music as Useful Persuasion Media studies has mostly examined how music stays in the background to make its contribution to storytelling (in television, music videos clearly foreground musical performance, but they rarely tell stories).3 Hollywood tends to use music in a supporting role to accentuate or heighten the primary narrative storytelling devices: the visuals and the dialogue. In such cases music can “modify” the narrative, but it does so primarily in fairly subtle ways, trying to be relatively “unheard.”4 The musical is the obvious narrative exception here, thus putting the music performance center stage as characters burst into song and dance. And yet the musical often reminds us how infrequently musical performance is a part of everyday life. The reason the musical is such a jarring departure from the norm is that people

Practical Music, Personal Fantasy  21

generally don’t sing in public much nowadays. For most people, music functions as accompaniment, as a background provided by professional musicians while we work and play. Ally McBeal recognizes the omnipresence of background music both in television and in everyday life while simultaneously refusing to let this music stay unproblematically behind the scenes. Ally McBeal overtly treats pop music as a mode of discourse, as a way society communicates with itself about widely held concerns.5 Although pop music is often viewed as frivolous, as temporarily engaging but lacking any real argumentative specificity, Ally depicts a world in which it can serve utilitarian purposes and in which music is just as important as speech. Most television shows about lawyers clearly lionize the spoken word alone, the basic coin of the realm in legal persuasion. But Ally envisions a world in which the spoken word and music may be more equally and interchangeably used to persuade others. Far from a frivolous background element, pop music on Ally McBeal is practical; it is an effective way to get things done. It combines word and melody to make arguments and move people. The most precise persuasive element of pop music is the lyrics, which give particularity to the message that is fueled by the beat, the tune, and the harmonics. Although it is sometimes difficult to say what a blistering lead guitar line is trying to convey, lyrics help tie down the music’s signification. Pop lyrics often present assertions about such topics as dreams and good-byes and make them applicable to a wide range of situations. Using these songs in conjunction with certain narrative moments anchors these generalities and gives the songs a more specific range of meanings. Doing so takes advantage of the evocative power that familiar pop songs have gained through the years, and it exploits those connotations to make more precise points about the story lines. Ally characters sometimes liberate lyrics from their musical settings and use them to try to get their way. Richard tries to seduce Jenny’s mother (played by Jacqueline Bisset) by using his best pickup lines, which he cribs from popular songs and pawns off as his own words. Trying to get Jenny’s mother away from her young fiancé, he tells her, “If you change your mind, I’m the first in line. Honey, I’m still free; take a chance on me.” She recognizes the lyric from an Abba song, and Richard tries again: “I could just laugh, but I cry because your love has passed me by.” She instantly pegs the line as a lyric from the Guess Who. (Richard bemoans, “Women with wattle; they know all the old songs. Bugger.”)6 Recognizing that his own insincere words could not convince a woman, Richard resorts to the poetry of

22  Greg M. Smith

song without actually serenading his intended. Although such pickup lines are not always persuasive,7 they show that in moments when Ally characters try to sway others they resort to musical idioms. By using only the lyrics in his pickup attempt, Richard reminds us that pop music sets words in rhythm. Lyrics thus are not far from the rhythms of everyday speech, and Ally McBeal emphasizes the continuities between speaking and singing. When John lies about his history as a rock-and-roll singer to impress a woman, Richard suggests a mode of performance that he might be able to get away with: “If it’s rock and roll, what’s the problem? Bob Dylan’s been singing for 35 years, and he’s yet to hit a note. A lot of rock and roll songs don’t even have melodies. Pick a song where you could just talk the words.”8 The relatively unmusical Raymond also chooses the speech song when he decides to perform in the bar, and this episode underlines the ease with which rhythmically spoken words can become music. After he is acquitted of sexual harassment charges, Raymond suddenly starts speak-singing to Jenny when they are alone in the courtroom: “Some of you ain’t been down south. Let me let you know what I’m talking about.”9 Then we cut to the bar where Raymond continues talking his way through “Polk Salad Annie.” The most remarkable Ally McBeal set piece emphasizing the musical rhythms of spoken language occurs when Ally talks to her therapist about dancing to “Turn the Beat Around” with Glenn at the bar. We hear the remembered song as she sits in the therapist’s office, and her speech begins to match the rhythm of the music when she describes the part of the song “when the guitar player starts playing with the syncopated rhythm, with the scratch scratch scratch, makes me want to move my body, yeah yeah yeah.” The therapist catches the infectious beat, and he begins alternating with Ally, speaking the lyrics in rhythm to the (unheard?) song in his office: Therapist: And when the drummer starts beating that beat, he nails that beat with the syncopated rhythm with the rat-tat. . . . Ally: Rat-tat. . . . Therapist: Rat-tat on the drums, yes, I understand.10 We cut back and forth from the therapist’s office to Ally and Glenn, now passionately kissing in her apartment. “Turn the Beat Around” comes to a crescendo on the word “Yeah!” just at the moment that Ally says “no” to Glenn’s advances. As the characters in the therapist’s office catch the remembered beat of the bar music, the flashy speech reveals the musical rhythms underneath much of the language in Ally McBeal.11

Practical Music, Personal Fantasy  23

Characters in Ally McBeal often develop a rhythmic patter of dialogue interchange that harkens back to the rapid-fire delivery of the screwball comedy. In the decade immediately after the advent of sound in motion pictures, the new genres of screwball comedy and the musical arose to provide spectacular evidence of what sound technology could do. Along the way these two forms found ways to express what could not be said within the censoring confines of the Hollywood Production Code. The marker of sexual attraction in a screwball comedy is the fast-paced, argumentative banter that occurs between a couple, while in the film musical it is the dance numbers that signify sexual connection. The rhythms of speech in the screwball and the rhythms of physical movement in the musical conveyed what could not be shown in action or spoken in dialogue.12 Although the censor’s touch is lighter on the Fox television network than in the American films of the 1930s, by using such rapid repartee in the context of the musical universe of Ally McBeal, the series calls on both heritages, revealing the deeper connections between the two forms in their expression of love, sex, and romance.13 In Ally speech and music are never far apart, and both argumentative banter and musical performance are ways to try to get what you want, sexually as well as in other arenas. Characters on Ally McBeal use bits of popular music for their own purposes to spur themselves on to tasks that otherwise they could not accomplish. The central example here is John Cage’s appropriation of Barry White and a sample from the theme from Rocky. For John to transform himself from a shy, stuttering, awkward, insecure bumbler to the biggest heavy-hitter at Cage and Fish requires remarkable magic, and John has happened upon an incantation that works for him again and again: “the bells,” as he calls them, from Rocky. Listening to the bells is a dependable ritual that John uses to give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done. The bells serve him well in professional circles, but when his attention turns to sex, John must summon the spirit of Barry White to bolster his masculinity. White’s hypersexual soul music makes a physically visible change in John’s demeanor, a change that turns women’s heads as he walks by.14 John demonstrates how Ally depicts music as practical motivation for its characters.15 Ally characters use another distinctive musical motivational method. Tracey the therapist gives her patients the unusual strategy of playing a wellchosen theme song inside their heads to fortify them against the world. As I discuss in chapter 3, the series pokes great fun at therapists by having Tracey use nonsensical methods and virulent verbal attacks on her patients, but her “theme song” therapy is consistent with Ally McBeal logic.16 Characters

24  Greg M. Smith

must find a song that helps them feel better about themselves, and they must play it when they need an emotional boost. Ally’s initial choice of a theme song is “Tell Him,” a song that acknowledges she has some emotional resources (“I know something about love”) but that also admits she needs encouragement to be forceful in communicating her feelings to the men in her life. Her second choice of theme song, “Ooh Ooh Child” (“things are gonna get easier”), reflects the limited but progressive optimism that the more mature Ally feels about her romantic possibilities (the most frequently repeated song, the show’s opening theme, says, “I believe I am ready for what love has to bring, Got myself together, now I’m ready to sing . . . Now I know I can shine my light and find my way back home”). As much as Ally and others and we the audience disparage Tracey’s ludicrous tactics, they work in this universe. Music does not have to form logical linkages to be practical in this world. Although in Ally music may be effective, it may take a while to get the hang of using musical tactics, especially in the face of real obstacles. The characters hope that life will proceed like a romantic song, but that song is frequently interrupted by everyday opposition. Ally shows this difficulty formally when the music is interrupted by a rip of a needle across a vinyl record or grinds to a halt. When the music is violently interrupted, it emphasizes that life is not like a song on Ally McBeal. The characters’ best romantic intentions and any confidence they muster can be deflated with a single cutting remark, as happens again and again on the series. The rec­ ord rip explicitly acknowledges that the characters do not have full control over the sound track that is in their heads; they frequently must struggle to make the music do what they want. Pop music on Ally McBeal is not only used for motivating oneself; it is also used to try to persuade others to action. Just as one’s self-motivational musical tactics can be interrupted, one character’s attempt to gain the upper hand through music may be foiled by another character’s musical interjection. The characters compete with each other not only with words but also with music. When they perform at the bar they frequent, they often do so as an explicit competition. A cross-dressing Ling partners with Elaine in a swing dance contest, and the bar serves as a site for both a Chubby Checker twist competition and a contest to become a backup dancer for Tina Turner.17 Elaine and Renee, the show’s two best singers, literally battle for the bar spotlight in several episodes in which the women’s duet progresses from jumping on each other’s musical parts to bumping each other offstage. When Ally and her paid escort sing the Everly Brothers’ “Dream”

Practical Music, Personal Fantasy  25

to make Ally’s former lover Greg jealous, Greg and his date respond to their shy, amateurish singing by knocking out a polished, hot duet of “Heaven Must Have Sent You from Above.”18 Ally McBeal creates a space where music can become a contest for supremacy; characters compete to gain attention, to increase their feelings of worth, to hurt other people. Music therefore is not merely a gentle means of expression; it can be a weapon with personal and legal consequences. When a black gospel choir leader is jilted by her lover (the minister), she chooses hostile songs (such as Randy Newman’s “Let’s Drop the Big One”) as a way to strike back at him. The minister approaches Cage and Fish to find legal means to stop her musical attacks, acknowledging that music, like words, can be an actionable form of aggression.19 The oddity of using music in everyday life makes this tactic more forceful, even when your aggressive intent has the other person’s best interests at heart. When the firm becomes concerned that John’s hurt and loneliness are getting the best of him, they stage an intervention in the conference room. Unlike typical therapeutic interventions, however, Richard turns on a boombox and Glenn leads the firm in a rendition of “We Gotta Get You a Woman.” John flees the clapping, singing attorneys and goes into the outer office, where all the firm’s employees join in the song.20 When characters in Ally McBeal want to make their arguments heard in a way that familiar words alone cannot convey, they know they can turn to music as a surprise to get through others’ defenses. Using surprise tactics in the courtroom has certainly helped Cage and Fish in its cases. John in particular is fond of bizarre stunts (from clickers and squeaking shoes to blowtorches) to disrupt the opposing attorney or to distract the jury. Given the musical universe of the show, it makes sense that the attorneys also use musical performance in the courtroom itself to give their arguments an edge. In one case John and Ally defend a senator accused of breaking up a marriage (starting with a flirtation on the dance floor) by bringing in a boombox and playing the song they danced to (the Supremes’ “Someday We’ll Be Together”). John asks, “Have you ever been swept up by a song? Discover yourself driving faster, discover your foot tapping, shoulder move a little, maybe even a hip, see a pretty woman also enjoying the music?”21 He moves to dance with co-counsel Ally, demonstrating exactly how easy it is to get caught up in a harmless musical moment. Sometimes the witnesses themselves use musical performance to sway the people in the courtroom. When a disappointed client sues a dating service, the firm’s owner (played by Nell Carter) takes the

26  Greg M. Smith

stand under John’s cross-examination and launches into her firm’s theme song, “Matchmaker” from Fiddler on the Roof. The successfully matched couples in the courtroom audience join in the song, and even John’s client starts singing along under the music’s sway.22 In one episode Ally takes advantage of the trial under way in the adjoining small claims courtroom, which involves a bride suing an orchestra for ruining her reception. Judge Ling orders the orchestra to play so that she can hear the evidence for herself, and their soft string music comes through the wall just as Ally is doing her summation on behalf of a woman fired for dating a much younger man. “Love is the grandest of choices,” Ally says, buoyed by the diegetic mood music. She stops when the music does, obviously thinking aloud about both the case and her own romantic life: “When love comes along, there’s no guarantee that he . . . it is going to stay forever.” Having arrived at that conclusion, Ally hears the music change from lyrical strings to the rhythm and blues standard “Shout!” and she improvises to take advantage. She gets the jury to wave their arms and sing along (“hey-y-y-y”) to the call-and-response of the song to cement their solidarity with her views.23 Similarly, John uses The Music Man’s “We Got Trouble” as a point of comparison in a case involving a senator’s politically motivated attack on a small bookstore. The senator’s diatribes about pornography duplicate Harold Hill’s scapegoating of the pool hall, and instead of simply making this comparison in spoken words, John wants to get the jury more directly involved. He alternates his verbal argument with singing the song (in spite of opposing counsel’s objections), and the jury sings out the response lines after him.24 That both of these examples involve gospel-tinged call-and-response emphasizes that music is discourse, that it can be a conversation between people. That conversation can be a competition or an affirmation of solidarity, but in any case it is an attempt to sway the listener to your side. Our primary political arenas (legislatures, courtrooms, boardrooms) are designed to promote discussion using the spoken word (the dominant mode of making an argument in Western society), and the popular music industry is relegated to the less serious function of entertainment. Ally McBeal reminds us that pop music also can persuade, using a combination of lyrics (giving specificity) and music (giving emotional power) to change minds. Most people would accept that music can motivate, but to say that music can make and win an argument is to remind us that music acts as discourse, and Ally McBeal does not let us forget this capacity of song. Music has personal and legal consequences; it can injure or console, boost or retard

Practical Music, Personal Fantasy  27

us. Especially when combined with lyrics, it can be used as a powerful tool to change minds, both in the official venue of the courtroom and in the equally recalcitrant arena of the heart. Amateur Performance, Personal Revelation Ally McBeal reminds us that music is not always a recorded accompaniment to our actions; instead, it can be the action itself. Ally positions singing and dancing as important to nonprofessionals in everyday life. Not only do the characters sing in unusual locations such as courtrooms, but the plotlines also place characters over and over in situations where amateur musical performance is expected: funerals, wedding receptions, proms, church services, caroling. Let us consider just a few everyday situations for musical performance in the series. When Richard’s uncle makes an unorthodox musical request for his funeral, Cage and Fish becomes involved in making sure that his wishes are carried out, resulting in a boisterous black gospel version of Randy Newman’s “Short People” at the funeral.25 When folk musician Loudon Wainwright guest stars as Claire’s fiancé, we hear him rehearsing “Jump Shout Boogie” for the wedding reception.26 Guest star Josh Groban’s startling voice brings his high school prom to a halt, and in another episode his solo presides both over a New Year’s Eve church service and a candlelight memorial parade obviously intended to mourn the victims of terrorism on September 11, 2001.27 When communities congregate to mourn or to celebrate, musical performance is often at the center, and Ally reminds us of the power of this music to unite a community. Not all such performances are intended to convey the power of music to provide comfort, however. In a holiday episode, Ally, nervous about the fact that she and Larry have not slept together, happens upon some festive carolers singing “Auld Lang Syne” on the street, and she shoves one of the perky singers to the ground.28 Amateur musical performance can annoy as well as soothe, but in the Ally McBeal world such performances are unavoidable. David Kelley has foregrounded musical performances in previous series (for example, Mandy Patinkin’s singing surgeon in Chicago Hope and Picket Fences’ tendency to present high school pageants),29 but in Ally McBeal such situations become omnipresent, reminding us that even in our modern society that seems to have abandoned music production (leaving it in the hands of professionals), music surrounds our lives, marking major transitions and commemorating the past in ways that words alone cannot. In some ways the Ally world is a throwback to the days when sheet music

28  Greg M. Smith

sales were strong and home pianos were staple furniture. Rick Altman, in The American Film Musical, suggests that the now-dead habit of amateur music production helped create the large audience for the film musical in its heyday,30 and Ally McBeal re-creates this dynamic in its own contemporary universe. Music is something that everyone does in this onscreen world, whether it is sitting down at the family piano with a character’s father or singing into a hairbrush microphone to pop records (as we see young Ally do).31 Ally depicts a world where singing is vital to both public and private life, a reclaiming of musical performance as a tie that binds ordinary people. If we in academia have oversold the idea of modern capitalism as a republic of images, Ally McBeal does not let us forget that we also live in an empire of songs. The world of Ally McBeal is a democratic karaoke where one does not have to be a professional to make music.32 Music performance is such a part of this world that all the major characters feel compelled to sing in the bar they frequent. Singing in the bar is a ritualized marker of acceptance for the character. Even a character who has been on the show for a long time is not completely within the circle until he or she has taken the risk of performing. In the fifth season, Ally, now a senior partner, summons Nelle, an associate in the firm since the second season, and insists that she sing: “Every single person in this firm over time has sung a song at the bar. . . . Everybody else, for lack of a better word, is game, and you’re not, and you’ve alienated yourself because of it. . . . We’re a gang, and I think it’s time for you to join the party.”33 Whether you can sing well is not the point. The point is that to perform musically is to participate in the community, to risk a bit of one’s self-esteem by the potentially humbling prospect of public failure. To withhold that performance is to be selfish, cold, distant. Music is so central to this world that public performance is an overtly required rite of passage. Several of the show’s actors ( Jane Krakowski, Lisa Nicole Carson, James Marsden) have very fine voices, and we hear their characters (Elaine, Renee, Glenn) performing in the bar regularly. In addition, we hear actors with solid voices who have joined the cast for limited periods of time (Robert Downey Jr., Taye Diggs). Even actors with average voices (Calista Flockhart, Peter MacNicol) are pressed into musical service. No one is excused from performing for the office Christmas party, where we see Ally singing a sexy version of “Santa Baby” or John and Richard in leather reindeer costumes backing up a whip-wielding Elaine as they perform “Run, Run, Rudolph.”34 Even characters with spectacularly bad voices are expected to perform. Georgia sings a spirited but horribly off-key version of “Son of a

Practical Music, Personal Fantasy  29

Preacher Man,” and the other people sing along as a way of covering up her clunkers.35 As Ally notes, the community accepts someone who is “game” enough to risk looking like a fool. It is better for characters to put themselves out there than to withdraw into their individual selves. The show rewards Georgia’s dreadful vocals with the collective embrace of the sing-along, a favorite Ally moment. Moving the audience to sing along with you is both an individual and a communal act. In these instances, the individual’s singing is not so much about his or her own glorification as it is about constituting a group of like-minded people into a temporary choir.36 An older man realizes that music is a key to Ally’s heart, and he gains her attention by leading bar crowds in Neil Diamond songs.37 In one episode Amy Pietz from Caroline in the City guest stars as a singer who specializes in encouraging audiences to sing along to well-known TV theme songs.38 Audiences in Ally seem to have the need to sing along, and they do so in courtrooms and lecture halls as well as in barrooms. Later on I explore how Ally characters use the sing-along as a means of persuasion, but in all instances the sing-along offers a moment in which the individual risk of performing is rewarded not so much by the spotlight as by inclusion in a community. In this ethic of performance, it is better for a character to sing and fail than it is to withhold one’s self or, worse, to fake one’s performance. Ally McBeal harshly judges those who, when presented with an opportunity to sing, falsify their singing abilities by lip synching to someone else’s voice. When Nelle finally agrees to sing in the bar (after her employer’s exhortation), she decides that she and Ling will lip-synch a duet (“I’m a Woman”), with Elaine and one of the bar’s backup singers providing the voices offstage. Ling is embarrassed when most of the audience members recognize the familiar sound of Elaine’s voice seeming to come out of her mouth, but the episode saves its primary humiliation for Nelle. When the backup singer cannot sing because of a throat problem, Claire steps in at the last moment to provide Nelle’s singing voice (unbeknownst to her), and much to her surprise, Nelle discovers an older transvestite’s voice seeming to come out of her mouth singing “I’m a Woman.”39 Previously Ling and Richard had lip-synched their way through “Hey Hey Paula” as a way to impress others (Ling says, “I’m tired of seeing everyone performing at the Christmas parties with no attention to us”). No one in the audience, however, is fooled by their embarrassingly blatant ploy for the spotlight.40 Even if characters lie about themselves, as John does when he tells Kimmy that he once was a rock singer, this is preferable to the inauthentic presentation of themselves

30  Greg M. Smith

on the musical stage. John manages to save face by minimally singing and swaggering through a rock number while the bar crowd cheers him on, demonstrating that even a performance built on a lie is more acceptable to the community than lip synching.41 The “singers” in these cases care more about the impression they will make than sharing an authentic part of themselves, and this is viewed as pathetic in the Ally universe. Characters who lip synch (Richard, Ling, Nelle) are depicted as shallow, implying that they have nothing within themselves to share. If characters lip synch on Ally McBeal, they will be caught and exposed for their vacuity.42 The film musical deemphasizes the fact that actors lip synch to recorded playback on the set.43 This is consistent with the musical’s work to hide the artifice involved in its production, including a concern with providing narrative justification for the potentially awkward transition from “narrative” (traditional spoken word dialogue) to “number” (singing and dancing). The moment where people burst into song in a musical jeopardizes the world the film has established through dialogue, and so as the musical form evolved, it worked to minimize the difference between everyday action and showcased performance. A primary solution for this problem was the increasing importance of what Rick Altman calls the “show musical,” a film built around the performance of a musical-within-the-musical (a stage show, a cabaret). It is easier to believe that professional singers and dancers burst into music when they are offstage (Singin’ in the Rain, Band Wagon) than it is for ordinary folks. But in Ally McBeal it is exactly those everyday, nonprofessional characters who are expected to sing, and the series creates a space (in particular, the bar, but also spots like Ally’s home piano) where that performance is believable. Unlike the musical, in Ally not everyone can sing and dance well. In the musical, certain roles are written to accommodate actors with limited musical skills (a famous example is the slight musical range of “Send in the Clowns,” written to hide the weaknesses of Elizabeth Taylor’s voice in A Little Night Music), so that almost no one in the musical, even characters who are not supposed to have musical training, belts out clunkers. The film musical provides that fantasy of a world in which everyone can sing on pitch and tap dance. By creating naturalistic space (the bar) where performing is the norm for everyone (in spite of their musical limitations), Ally McBeal avoids the awkwardness of characters bursting suddenly into song. In the Ally McBeal universe there is no need to pretend that everyone secretly has the chops to be a professional musician. Instead, it fantasizes about a community where musical performance is an expected ritual for its sustenance. Everyday performance signals a willingness to participate earnestly in the

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community, and Ally McBeal uses this attitude about performance to differentiate among the characters. How much talent a character has is not the point; the primary concern is a willingness to risk embarrassment by performing as an amateur. Using the Professional for Narrative Purposes In addition to the “amateur” characters’ music performance, there are also professional real-life musicians who slip in and out of Ally’s diegetic world. Just as theme songs may be summoned by characters on the show for their own purposes, popular musicians appear at Ally’s summons (or at least their fantasy versions do). Not only may the characters sample pop music and integrate it into their lives, but they may also appropriate celebrities and use them as icons, as totems for a set of values that the musicians embody. I have already mentioned Barry White, whose highly sensual rhythm and blues inspires John. He functions as an icon of earthy, confident sexuality not only for John but also for the show’s narration. Just as John can invoke sensuality by ritually channeling White’s music, the show can connote sexuality by the mere mention of White.44 When in the second season Ally begins to wonder if she may secretly desire to be alone, she begins to hallucinate Al Green, even seeing him as a judge in her trial, complete with dancing jurors.45 Green becomes omnipresent as her worries increase, appearing on computer screensavers and in mirrors. These appearances culminate in Green’s presiding (in electrician’s garb) over an elaborate fantasy musical sequence with the male principal cast members in white tuxedos and the females in sparkling formal gowns, telling her in song that “you make me feel so brand new. . . . whether life is good or bad, happy or sad.” Her pill-pushing therapist (Betty White) prescribes Prozac to rid her of the hallucinations, but she refuses to “kill” Green, who voices her emotional pain. Green becomes a figure embodying heartache on the show, and by refusing to destroy his fantasy figure through chemistry, Ally embraces the central place of heartache in her own life. As Elaine notes, Green is a reminder that “there’s song in all of us, too,” and that knowledge should be cultivated. This episode ends with Green and Ally dancing down the street, arm in arm, until he disappears.46 Barry Manilow makes a similarly over-the-top appearance as Barry Manilow the icon. After Larry leaves Ally, fantasy Manilow pops up everywhere, singing his signature sentimental songs. He’s in her bedroom; he takes Richard’s place in a staff meeting; he’s a ghostly figure at her piano; when she opens the bathroom stall door, he’s there crooning. Manilow

32  Greg M. Smith

embodies a maudlin, hyperromantic sensitivity that Ally could fall into after her difficult separation, so Richard advises her to confront the fantasy figure and “take his head off.” In a fun bit of Ally play, acknowledging the blurred boundaries between fantasy and reality, the real-life Manilow appears as a surprise musical guest at the bar; Ally mistakes him for fantasy Manilow and takes a swing at him in mid-performance. As with Al Green, Ally ends up dancing and singing with Manilow by episode’s end. Thus professional musicians serve as widely recognizable markers of certain easily identified cultural meanings: sexuality, romanticism, heartbreak. To dance with the musician or to take his or her head off is to embrace or repudiate the values he or she represents. These values, of course, are already largely imprinted on the musician based on his position in pop culture, and to choose one celebrity as icon is to bring his full social connotations into the mix. When John admits, “For my sexual persona, I’ve always gone to Barry White. For my solitude it’s always been Barry Manilow,”47 he situates White and Manilow as opposing icons, one evoking animal sexual power, the other embodying sentimental romanticism. (I examine race more fully in chapter 4.)48 Not all of the many professional musicians who appear on the show appear with the level of focus and attention devoted to the emblematic Al Green, Barry White, and Barry Manilow. Sometimes these established musicians appear not as icons but as performers. Elton John, Chubby Checker, Sting, Randy Newman, Gloria Gaynor, Tina Turner, KC and the Sunshine Band, Boz Skaggs, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy have appeared as themselves. Mariah Carey; Broadway singers Nell Carter, Jennifer Holliday, and Jim Bailey; and Loudon Wainwright guest starred not as themselves but as characters who perform musical numbers. Rock musician Jon Bon Jovi was featured for nine episodes as a plumber whom Ally dates (although he doesn’t sing in the bar, he sings and plays acoustic guitar in a couple of episodes). Barry White and Gloria Gaynor have appeared not only as fantasy figures but also as themselves performing in the bar, thus allowing the show to play with the difference between performer and icon.49 When established professionals step onto the bar stage as themselves, the show treats them with either the adulation (“That’s Elton John!”) or the mockery (“Unbelievable,” Richard says upon seeing Chubby Checker. “He’s really not dead!”) that are both a familiar part of American celebrity.50 Although the Ally community is distinctive for the way it foregrounds amateur performance and for the way that certain professionals weave in and out of fantasies, most other guest musicians simply perform and leave with

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little interaction with the principal characters. Certainly Ally features an unusual number of musical guest performers for a comedy series (which further affirms the importance of music to this world), but the vast majority seem to be fairly standard artist-promoting one-shot performances. The exception is Vonda Shepard, the only professional musician who is a member of the cast. Shepard portrays the regularly featured vocalist at the bar the characters frequent. Although it is not unusual for a primetime series to use copious amounts of pop music (especially in the current climate of media synergy and promotion), Ally McBeal is distinctive in that it tends to filter this music through a single voice, Shepard’s. Just as the dramatic universe of the show seems to be constructed on Ally-centric principles (fantasy, romanticism), the musical universe of Ally McBeal is fashioned around a single primary musical voice. This allows Ally to experiment with the multiple ways music can slip back and forth from background to foreground. The bar singer’s music serves three basic character-based narrative functions on Ally: as commentary on character actions, as the voice of the character, and as advice. Rather than the conventional use of “modifying music,” Ally McBeal shows how music can sometimes undercut what the characters say, sometimes tell them what to do, and sometimes speak for them. An example of music making explicit commentary on characters and scenes in Ally McBeal is when Mark becomes romantically interested in Cindy (Lisa Edelstein), who unbeknownst to him is a transvestite. This sets up several opportunities for the music to make wry and sometimes sad statements about their relationship. In the early stages of their romance, they dance at the bar as Shepard sings, “If I were your woman and you were my man,” emphasizing the difference that is the cause of their romantic problem.51 Later they dance as Shepard sings, “This boy won’t be happy until he sees you cry,” leaving open the question of who the “boy” is here. Cindy finally reveals her secret to Mark on the dance floor, holding him very close until he feels her penis, as Renee sings “Mr. Big Stuff ” in the bar.52 Here the musicians seem to have knowledge that the couple does not share, and they use their position outside the primary action as a forum to remark on the dramatic situation. Frequently music—either the diegetic music in the bar or the nondiegetic music on the sound track—seems to have knowledge superior to the characters’. After Larry declares that he is interested in Ally and they agree to jettison their current romantic interests, the new couple walks down the street, accompanied by Shepard singing, “Ain’t it funny how you’re walking through life and it turns on a dime.”53 Ally’s client asks why

34  Greg M. Smith

her (the client’s) lover left her, which leads Ally to replay mentally her own breakup scene with Billy. As she remembers, we hear Shepard singing, “I’ve been thinking I’ve been thinking too much,” and this mental work causes her to realize that they broke up because Billy wanted to get away from her. Later in the same episode the same nondiegetic song plays as a pensive Ally sits looking at a shot of alcohol. While she is “thinking too much,” she also realizes that Billy left her because he had met Georgia.54 The lyrics in the pop sound track can cause us to reframe the action in particular ways, to see connections where we might otherwise have missed them, to emphasize some meanings over others, to encourage certain moral judgments. Sometimes the commentary can be brief, as when Ally cites familiar pop music in ways that are quick, specific, and often humorous. The show makes joking musical citations of Psycho, Leave It to Beaver, Raging Bull, Jeopardy, Hawaii Five-O, and The Sound of Music, and it repeatedly uses the wicked witch theme from The Wizard of Oz as a leitmotiv to characterize Ling.55 When we laugh at Ling striding through the office with her wicked witch accompaniment, we respond not to the emotional contours of the music line itself but to the commentary and ridicule provided by the Wizard of Oz sample. In a hypermediated age, music is everywhere, unavoidable: you hear it in supermarkets, on hold on the phone, in the car, in elevators, while pumping gas, in cell phone ring tones, while jogging, in birthday cards with tiny speakers, from streaming radio on your computer, from the mouths of animatronic fish sold as novelty items. Such a realm makes it possible for a phrase snatched from one musical context to be precise enough in its connotations to act as a punchline in another narrative context. At other times, the music, instead of commenting on the action from outside, can voice a character’s inmost thoughts, even when the character cannot speak them aloud. For most of the second season, Ally and Billy wrestle with whether they want to rekindle their old relationship and betray Georgia. This flirtation comes to an end after a traumatic therapy session with Billy, Ally, and Tracey, and later Ally asks Georgia’s forgiveness. Billy thanks Ally for trying to mend fences with his wife, and as he leaves, Shepard says on the musical sound track what Ally cannot say: “And I Love Him So.”56 Classic film music practice could associate musical leitmotivs with characters to evoke a broad sense of character emotions, but in Ally familiar pop lyrics allow the music to give very specific voice to its characters’ thoughts.57 In some cases music overtly contradicts what Ally says, voicing a deeper instinct that she conceals with words. Ally is clearly attracted to George

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( John Ritter), a kooky man who hears music in his head and patents silly walks. Unfortunately, George is dating Elaine, who pleads with Ally not to go after her boyfriend. As Ally tells George there is no hope for them as a couple, we hear Shepard sing, “Take me home, you silly boy,” undercutting Ally’s words.58 Not only can music reframe a scene to emphasize certain meanings over others, it can also provide access to the character’s interior that can contradict other sources of evidence, such as dialogue. The show lets the music speak for Ally when her own voice falters. Music can even seem to give advice to the characters. When Ally is trying to decide whether she should act on her attraction to Billy, she discusses it with her roommate, Renee, admitting her indecisiveness. As Renee advises her to act on her feelings, Shepard seems to concur on the nondiegetic sound track: “Go ahead and listen, just give in to the voices.”59 At times the music can appear to command the characters’ actions. When John tries to summon the courage to have sex with Nelle for the first time, he enters her office, energized by the sensual power of a Barry White song in his head. “Babe, take it all off,” White croons, and she begins to take off her blouse. “Take off that brassiere, my dear,” White commands, and she does.60 Music is such a force in the Ally universe that it can interject itself into the onscreen action, even if it is not heard aloud. Although it is possible to distinguish certain moments of musical commentary from musical advice, more complicated examples in Ally McBeal take fuller advantage of the broad applicability of pop songs, shifting from one narrative function to the other, changing its focus from one character situation to another. Here the music begins to take on more formal functions instead of purely character-driven purposes. Music helps to unify the show’s narrative: it structures individual episodes, provides a lyric closing summary device, and links together episodes in the serial. Other recent television programs have made similar formal uses of music. One factor that sets Ally McBeal apart is how elegantly Shepard’s music serves these now more standard purposes. Individual pop songs frequently recur in a given episode of Ally McBeal, and this repetition serves as a structuring, synthesizing device that ties together various plots within the episode. Judge Jennifer “Whipper” Cone, after a painful breakup with Richard, presides over one of Richard’s cases involving a bride suing for emotional damages after being left at the altar. After sniping at Richard through the legal proceedings, Whipper says that the law is expanding into “broken hearts,” and therefore she should recuse herself from the case. In the background we hear, “You made me cry when

36  Greg M. Smith

you said goodbye, ain’t that a shame.” In the same episode, John is in court with a former best friend with whom he was secretly in love. He tries to tell her about his feelings, but he realizes that she only wants a platonic friendship, and he backs down, with “Ain’t That a Shame” playing.61 Repeated songs ask us to reinterpret the lyrics as they apply first to one situation and then another. “Since I Fell for You,” “Fools Fall in Love,” “It’s in His Kiss,” “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”—all these songs have served as the structural anchor for individual episodes.62 The set piece that foregrounds this musical pliability is Ally McBeal’s music montages. More primetime series are using music montages today (several shows announce the artists and albums used during an episode, encouraging a tie-in purchase), but Ally uses montage consistently to provide a lyrical summary statement for the episode, requiring us to examine the action in light of the lyrics. For instance, one episode concerns itself with a famous elderly artist who paints pictures of his late wife, his one true love, over and over again. This, of course, causes Ally to revisit her feelings for Billy at precisely the moment that John is trying to woo her. John and Ally’s date ends with a horribly failed kiss, and the montage soon begins as Shepard sings “It’s the End of the World.” We see glimpses of the artist in his studio surrounded by paintings of his wife, of Ally walking down the street, of Billy and Georgia kissing, of John alone.63 Each of them must decide “why does my heart go on beating,” and each of us in the audience must make the formal connection among their situations. Repetition is a device that is at once vague and evocative, broad and particular, theme and variation. Not only does Ally McBeal create a dialogue between individual songs and the rhetoric of a certain episode, but it also engages in a long-running dialogue between favorite songs and the rhetoric of the series as a whole. Certain pop songs appear again and again in multiple episodes, gaining more and more associations. “Hooked on a Feeling” (the “ooga-chucka” music for the recurring dancing baby hallucination in Ally), “In the Neighborhood” (“Here’s a picture I’ve been looking for, it’s a picture of the boy next door”), “Gimme Dat Ding,” “You Belong to Me” (“See the pyramids along the Nile”), “Goodnight, My Someone,” “Tell Him,” “Try to Remember,” “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything,” “For Once in My Life,” and “Ooh Ooh Child” recur so frequently in so many contexts that they become a sort of “Ally’s Greatest Hits” collection. The possibilities for cross-marketing sound track albums are obvious,64 but this device also recalls the way certain songs stick in your head.65 Like

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the repeated songs on Ally McBeal, these songs are often ephemeral pop that has been embalmed in time with layers of repeated associations.66 By duplicating this dynamic, Ally McBeal remains true to the experience of poaching67 a sound track for one’s own life out of pieces of found popular culture. As we become familiar with Shepard’s repeated voice, as we hear songs reused in different narrative situations across different episodes, it becomes less important whether at any moment that voice is diegetic or nondiegetic. Because Shepard’s music is omnipresent, Ally can play between the external commentary and music from the story world,68 and this play represents some of the show’s most creative moments. For example, in the “Theme of Life” episode we see Ally on an especially frustrating day walking down the street with her theme song “Tell Him” playing as nondiegetic music. In anger she waves her arm, and the music rips to a halt, only to restart when she begins walking again. As she stands in a crowd at a traffic light, her shoulder begins to bob. Then a woman begins to bob with her, then a man, and then the whole crowd of pedestrians begins to move to the music as they cross the street.69 Ally McBeal violates the division between diegetic and nondiegetic music by toying with the fantasy that through their own actions characters can control the nondiegetic music we the audience hear. The magic of the music in Ally McBeal lies in its refusal to separate the sound track of the series from the sound track of the characters’ lives. Music can be utilitarian in part because it can move from external stimulus to internal sound track and back. It has the ability to comment on action or to voice our inmost thoughts, but it does so with the evocative force of one of modern culture’s most omnipresent forms of expression. The linkage of personal purpose and cultural connotation makes the sampling of popular music both powerful and widespread. Thus Vonda Shepard is important because her omnipresence makes this distinctive slippage between diegetic and nondiegetic possible. Clearly the show could do much of its formal play with the medium’s boundaries by simply pasting together a sound track of previously recorded pop music. But by re-presenting that pop repertoire through a specific singer, it makes a larger point. Shepard’s covers of familiar pop music assert that music must be reinterpreted. The show argues that characters should not simply sample professionally produced pop; they should bring it into their own lives and remake it with their own voices. Shepard as chief interpreter demonstrates the many ways individuals can repurpose our pop music heritage. Because of the variety of music Shepard covers and the variety of narrative functions

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her music serves, she is less a particular singing character or even the musical voice of the protagonist, though she is all that. She is the ever-present voice of the series itself, serving as a kind of musical narrator, frequently shifting to express commentary, dispense advice, and voice thoughts that cannot be said.70 Because Shepard is everywhere, because she serves so many functions usually reserved for a narrator, she is somewhat tangential to the dramatic action at any given moment. Characters almost never speak to Shepard. They sing with her, and they refer to her, but her actions have no impact on the plot itself. Usually it is as if she is at a reserved distance from the characters, even when she occupies the same space. Shepard is ready to provide a musical interpretation of the moment, but unless she is performing with the characters, her music is at a remove. Shepard herself, therefore, is liminal in this universe, sometimes acting as a spectral musical commentator, sometimes portraying a bar singer, but because she can shift back and forth so readily, she is the only diegetic character whose actions never affect the world.71 Interestingly, the less central certain characters become in the plot, the more likely they are to occupy temporarily Shepard’s segregated position as primary musical interpreter. Although Renee is an important figure early in the show’s run (trying cases, having romances), she eventually becomes little more than Ally’s listening ear, serving the simple narrative function of giving the protagonist an audience for her verbalized thoughts. As Renee becomes tangential to the series’ plot, she starts to sing more frequently at the bar. Similarly, when the series has little for Elaine to do, it puts her in the bar, singing. Certainly this has to do with the series giving Jane Krakowski and Lisa Nicole Carson (both talented singers) something to do when episodes have other plot business in mind, but there also is an important statement being made here about the Ally world: the more “professional” a singer becomes, the less important their actions become in this world. Again we see the importance of the amateur aesthetic: professional musicians may give spectacular performances, and they may even model how we should recycle pop tunes, but Ally McBeal values the integration of music into one’s ordinary life. If music comes to dominate one’s life, as it does a professional’s, the crucial balance is lost. If the characters choose the spotlight, they must step out of the everyday world. Professionals may visit the Ally world. They may even serve as useful fantasy icons to help characters motivate themselves. But they occupy a liminal position: in the story world but not participating fully in plotlines; outside the story world but able to

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tinker with the main characters’ thoughts. Vonda Shepard’s liminality helps her music serve a large number of narrative functions (character-based and formal), but this flexibility and professional status also limits her participation in a community built around amateur everyday performance. Performance as Revelation and Consolation Ally uses music for private purposes to spur characters on to achieve their goals, and it uses music to effect change in the social world. But if Ally uses these different musical functions as part of an overall system, as I maintain, it needs to arrange these separate public and private functions into a hierarchy to make its community’s values clear. Which uses of music are most central to the construction of the Ally world, the public or the private ones? If Ally’s innovative use of music makes everything from musical fantasies to commentary to diegetic/nondiegetic crossovers possible, which narrative functions are the most highly valued in the Ally universe? We came close to the answer when we looked at the most devalued use of music in Ally, lip-synching. When certain characters (Ling, Richard, Nelle) fear performing enough to lip-synch their way through a song, they show exactly what they want to hide: their fear of failure, their dishonest vanity. Ally relies on our common understanding of music as being able to communicate emotion in a truer fashion than can untrustworthy language and uses music to establish the “truth” about characters. But the universe is set up with the musical’s faith that performance serves as a kind of lie detector, revealing interior truths; that music provides interior access in a way that cannot be faked, and thus it is valuable to the community and to the narrative. In Ally music functions as revelation. If characters use their moment in the spotlight solely to bolster their feelings of self-worth, what comes through in their singing is their desperation. When the jilted choir leader begins to use the public forum of the church service to express her pain, the public spectacle of this woman (portrayed by the superb Jennifer Holliday) reenacting her grief through music is dismaying to the other characters and disrupting to the church services.72 The gospel singer returns to “sing her pain” in a later episode when her grief reemerges as she begins dating a woman in her choir. Nelle admonishes her, “I realize it hurts, but the humiliation is in what you’re doing. How can you put your misery on stage like that in front of the whole congregation? . . . You’re the one making it a spectacle.”73 The truth will out as the characters take the musical stage. Music is also a way to reveal to the world that characters are in love or

40  Greg M. Smith

sexually involved. When the characters learn that Jackson and Renee are scheduled to sing a duet in the bar, Elaine says, “You know what they say, once two people are singing together, they’re doing it.”74 After their sultry cover of “That’s What I’m Gonna Do,” it becomes clear to everyone that the two are sexually involved. Although Glenn and Jenny are not sleeping together, the former lovers remain emotionally involved, and this becomes clear when Glenn sings “Always on My Mind” to her as a birthday present. After Ally, who has been dating Glenn, realizes the depth of feeling behind the song, she confronts Glenn and gets him to admit his love, thus musically resolving a central romantic stalemate in that season.75 The principal character using the musical stage to satisfy an emotional need is Elaine. She grabs any opportunity to sing at the bar and bounces competing amateur singers out of the way. Anyone invited to sing a “duet” with Elaine soon discovers that he or she is expected to sing backup (at best). Elaine has so much self-esteem riding on her performance that other characters must conspire to boost her bruised ego when she fails. When Elaine’s swing dance partner drops out, Ally persuades Ling to step in as a replacement by emphasizing to Ling how pathetic Elaine’s life is outside of performance.76 In a later episode, Elaine loses a contest that would have given her the opportunity to dance with Tina Turner, and Ling gets Tur­ ner’s manager to lie to Elaine, to convince her that she was not chosen because she was too good and would have upstaged Turner herself.77 Elaine, like Ally, has a void inside, but unlike Ally she looks to fill that void with public accolades, even when they are not truthful. Because of Elaine’s overeagerness to perform, the other characters denigrate her singing whenever possible and try to keep her from stepping into the musical spotlight. At first this universal disdain for Elaine’s singing seems inexplicable because the actress playing her, Jane Krakowski, has a fabulous voice.78 What the other characters respond to is not her vocal skills or her love for music but something else that is communicated: her desperation. Because her vanity is so fragile, Elaine cannot be content with the joy of musical expression: “It’s more about applause for me. Without a stage and an audience I have no use for music.”79 What matters in the Ally McBeal universe is not the music itself so much as how you approach the performance. If a character needs an audience’s favor too much, then performing shows the emptiness inside, and no amount of vocal skills can blot out that obvious, unattractive hunger. Participating in amateur musical performance can endear characters to the community, even if they cannot hit a note, but to want too much from that community reveals a lack that no group can fill.

Practical Music, Personal Fantasy  41

The spectacle of emotional need: Elaine (Jane Krakowski) performs to fill her personal emptiness. (Ally McBeal © 1998 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All rights reserved)

In one key instance the most central emotional revelation about an Ally character’s lack comes in musical form. Ally recognizes early on in her relationship with Larry that he is sad to be away from his son, who lives in Detroit, but she does not understand the depth of his pain until she overhears his mournful rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “River” at an unguarded moment in the empty bar. “It was a hugely sad song,” Ally says. “One of the things I like about him is his capacity to lift me out of my gloom, and now I’m thinking his despair runs deeper than mine.”80 Larry’s desire to be with his son becomes the main problem causing Ally and Larry’s separation.81 To entrust such a plot-crucial piece of information to music puts considerable pressure on the actor’s rendition of the song, but such moments also provide bravura showpieces for the actor’s (in this case, Robert Downey Jr.’s)

42  Greg M. Smith

talents. Ally McBeal chooses to reveal this conflict in a way that transcends spoken language. Ally McBeal does not invent this “performance as revelation” function; it inherits it from musical theater and the film musical, in which a musical number can reveal private thoughts that a person has not admitted to himself or herself (e.g., “If I Loved You” from Show Boat) or openly display the acknowledged core of character in a public setting (e.g., Carmen singing “Dat’s Love” to admit her fickleness with men in Carmen Jones). But Ally McBeal creates a world in which musical performance can reveal character without those characters suddenly bursting into song in the middle of a naturalistic dialogue scene. This same faith in the truthfulness of musical expression is built into the basic structure of melodrama (so named because its earliest forms combined music—melos—with spoken drama). Because spoken language is bound by social conventions of what can and cannot be said, because high emotion itself is considered too overwhelming to be expressed within the constraints of mere words, melodrama often uses music to carry the dramatic function.82 During several key episodes in the overall serial narrative of Ally McBeal, emotions run so high that the characters have almost nothing to say to each other. These episodes are driven by musical performance, letting the songs say what cannot be said by mere dialogue. The fourth season ends with an episode in which Ally is distraught when it becomes clear that her lover, Larry, is gone for good. Renee tries to console Ally with vague assurances that she will go on, but Ally instead asks Renee to sing an Ally chestnut, “Goodnight, My Someone,” causing Ally to break down. Her father drops by when he hears about the breakup, but his inadequate words of comfort give way to “Dulcinea,” the song he sang to her when she was a girl. The episode ends with Josh Groban singing “You’re Still You” as an affirmation that seems to console Ally more than words could.83 The final episode of the series places remarkable weight on the songs to carry the dramatic force of the series’ close. The episode is filled with Ally musical favorites: “Tell Him,” “In the Neighborhood,” “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything,” along with the familiar competition for the spotlight between Elaine and Renee singing “Lady Marmalade,” but the spoken good-byes between the characters are brief. Ally and John’s private farewell is full of awkward silences, until John openly admits, “There’s nothing really to say. . . . I know you know how I feel about your leaving, so I guess there’s no need for words.”84 Instead of giving his characters dialogue to convey a sense of loss in these episodes, David Kelley entrusts the music to say what words cannot.

Practical Music, Personal Fantasy  43

In such moments music not only reveals the characters but also models how music can function as consolation. The solution for grief and loss on Ally McBeal is music. Music soothes the emotional pain of a breakup or mourns the end of the series itself. Larry explicitly phrases this mode of musical expression as an alternative to the notion of music as self-aggrandizement. In a conversation with Elaine in which she confesses that for her music is about gaining attention, Larry says, “When I end up feeling empty, which I always do in December, I sit at my piano at night and sing a little. You’d be surprised what an incredible companion music can be.”85 Here Ally McBeal asserts the value of private amateur musical performance even over the importance of performing in public. On Ally McBeal public performance signals participation in the life of the community, and performing publicly gives the community (and the television audience) insight into one’s inner feelings. But there are pitfalls and dangers in this performance. If certain characters depend too much on an audience to fulfill their emotional needs, they will evacuate their own selfhood. Characters on Ally can air their fears and griefs through music in public, but they should do so briefly, as Ally does when she makes a spectacle of herself while dancing in the “Playing with Matches” episode. Her relationship with Glenn now at an end, Ally fears she will never find love, and she dances wildly to Vonda Shepard’s rendition of Donna Summer’s “Last Dance.” Only when the song ends does she realize that everyone else in the bar has stopped dancing to watch her increasingly frantic movements.86 When Ally realizes that the entire bar crowd is seeing her honest expression of her inner feelings, when she realizes she is onstage, she stops. Unlike the gospel singer, Ally does not repeatedly use the musical public forum to “sing her pain,” although she certainly repeats her whines and complaints in spoken words throughout the series. Public whining happens frequently in the Ally McBeal universe, but music has such powerful charms to soothe the savage breast that it should not be squandered by multiple public performances. Although Ally McBeal valorizes the notion of public performance by amateurs, the most important solace music provides in the series is private. In a key flashback we see that young Ally would escape the sound of her parents arguing by going into her bedroom and turning up the volume on her radio.87 For Ally, early on music became a private sanctuary where she could escape from emotional trouble, and the series as a whole adopts this emphasis. For a series that emphasizes the acceptance of eccentricity (discussed in chapter 4), it is important that characters unabashedly present who they are and equally important that their community accept their honest

44  Greg M. Smith

performance. But Ally McBeal also recognizes the limitations of public performances and asserts that the primary power of music may be outside the spotlight. Let Those Who Have Ears Hear, or Why Ally Is Not a Musical The last episode of the third season deserves comment here, both because a single guest singer-songwriter, Randy Newman, provides the music that structures the entire episode and because this is the only time that Ally McBeal switches into full-blown musical form.88 It would seem that having the characters burst into song and dance would make perfect sense for a universe as musical as Ally’s. But the episode is disappointing for a couple of reasons. Some of Randy Newman’s three-minute story songs repeat information that we have learned in more complex ways over the previous three seasons. For instance, when John Cage makes Newman’s tale of childhood bullying (“Davy the Fat Boy”) into his own life story (“Johnny the Fat Boy”), he is singing a portrait of his sad childhood that we have heard before in more detail than is possible in a single musical number. But the primary difficulty with this episode helps us see exactly how Ally McBeal’s regular use of music differs from that of the film and stage musical. Overall Ally McBeal argues that music is powerful, that it can change lives, but it does so either as naturalistic performance or as internal sound track. Not surprisingly, the strongest revelation in “Ally McBeal: The Musical, Almost” comes in the moment that plays by Ally’s regular rules. Ally learns that her boyfriend, Brian, also loves “Lida Rose” (from her favorite musical, The Music Man).89 The new couple starts to sing the duet together (after a few false starts) at the piano just as Ally’s father walks in. Her father flashes back to memories of himself singing the song with young Ally, and he realizes that his place in Ally’s life is being taken by someone else. The most dramatically significant moment in the musical episode is a familiar pop song performed naturalistically by amateurs in a private space. The rest of the musical numbers in this special episode are done according to standard film musical practice. There is an audio/video dissolve (in Rick Altman’s terms)90 when the characters move from naturalistic acting and dialogue into singing and dancing. Sometimes this transition is commented on by other characters (e.g., when Richard begins singing “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down,” John comments on his tone deafness), but otherwise this is fairly standard musical technique. Other characters can hear the character singing, and they can join in. This is very different from Ally’s usual way of handling offstage music. In

Practical Music, Personal Fantasy  45

the Ally universe it is important to differentiate those who can hear private music from those who cannot. In Ally music is powerful but only if characters let themselves hear it. The important thing is for a character to stay open to the possibility of hearing music that is not audible in the diegetic world. When one character can hear another character’s internal music, it is a sign that they connect, and this moment of connection may take some effort. John may try to help Richard out of a romantic slump by teaching him to hear the bells, but often Richard only manages a pathetic cowbell clunk or two. When Nelle does not hear John’s beloved Barry White, it shows that this couple is having difficulties. In the Ally McBeal world if characters do not allow themselves to hear the unvoiced music, they are isolated, cut off from the way this world works. This is why it is important that Ally McBeal does not work in the traditional form of the musical. If the series surrendered this idea of differential hearing, if everyone could hear the non-naturalistic music (as is true in standard musicals or in “The Musical, Almost”), Ally would not be able to use music to privilege the romantically open characters over those who are closed down. Over and over Ally McBeal valorizes the ability to believe in things unseen and hear things unheard over the more rational, level-headed acceptance of the world as it is. Or, more precisely, it treats the ability to hear imaginary melodies as unproblematic, though it may question visual imaginations. Visual hallucinations (e.g., dancing babies, Al Green, Barry Manilow) are what cause the supporting characters to worry about Ally’s stability. A character’s tendency to hear things that are not there (Barry White songs, for instance) does not seem as troubling. In this narrative system, the ability to hear the music is a sign of sanity, a sign that the person is still vitally alive. The point is to be receptive to the power of music without being subject to it, to use the discourse of pop music for one’s own purposes, to choose the right voices to listen to. As we shall see, this is the way that over the course of the series Ally McBeal treats all its key issues: sex, gender, romance, feminism, love, victimhood, and music. All these are powerful discourses in our society, with voices from opposing sides telling us how to be a man, a woman, a lover, a feminist. Ally McBeal became most prominent in the discourse about feminism when Time magazine placed Calista Flockhart’s face alongside real-life feminist icons Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem on its June 29, 1998, cover, which asked, “Is Feminism Dead?” Most of such popular writing presents postfeminism as an antifeminism stance that asserts feminism is no longer needed, and the Time cover thrust Ally/Calista into the limelight as the standard-bearer for postfeminism, thus creating one of the

46  Greg M. Smith

series’ earliest and fiercest controversies.91 Ally is Time magazine’s poster woman for postfeminism because the series asks the character to negotiate constantly among discourses about feminism and love. Characters should remain open to the undeniable social call of old-school womanhood while also being receptive to the progressive advances of feminism. The point is to choose which song applies best at the moment.92 Of course, one can see this strategy as yet another case of popular culture wanting to have its cake and eat it too: by not firmly endorsing one position over another, Ally McBeal proffers an impossible choice. And certainly that is a reading available here, but I think there is a more nuanced possibility, one that is consistently pursued throughout the series. Ally chooses an appropriate position vis-à-vis love, romance, and feminism, but it does so after much consideration of various alternatives. Musical technique models the way the show chooses from the social repertoire. The discourses about love, sex, gender, and romance in pop music are inescapable and powerful. “Every time I hear a love song on the radio or go to the movies, I tap into this guy who I’ve never met that I know is out there,”93 Ally says. The trick in Ally McBeal is not to turn off the ideological call from the radio, nor is it to swoon at the music’s romantic fantasy. The trick is to dance with the social forces. When confronted with a desire for a child (in the form of a computer-generated baby), acknowledge the ideology speaking through you, confront it, and dance with it. To dance is to control and not to control at the same moment. When Ling rehearses swing dancing with Elaine, she asks in consternation, “Are we supposed to wing this, or be doing this in unison?” and Elaine replies, “A little of both.” In law, in love, in music, Ally McBeal argues that the dance is the way to be in the moment, to react, to bow to the power of discourse, but ultimately to swing it to your own choices.

two

Getting into Ally’s Head Special Effects, Imagination, and the Voice of Doubt

A lly McBeal uses a remarkable range of subjective techniques, some

that are familiar, such as voiceover and flashback, and some that innovatively repurpose devices developed in other genres, such as special effects. The combined use of all these techniques gives Ally McBeal a distinctive construction. Unlike most shows with ensemble casts, Ally is remarkably centered on its protagonist (as the title would indicate). There is little attempt to portray a “real” world that is equally shared by all the characters. The deployment of formal devices makes it possible to create this distinctive world, populated by a community but shaped around an individual. That Ally gets more significant screen time is not the crucial factor in this world construction. Instead, the combination of different formal devices makes this world Ally-centric. Although I consider each of these devices— flashbacks, special effects, voiceover, and fantasy sequences—one at a time, I assert that they work together as a formal system while each makes a distinct contribution. Careful consideration of these or subjective techniques to a certain extent allows me to explain Ally hatred. They air Ally’s doubts and complaints, which make her seem whiny, a quality that our decisive society abhors. By separating subjective access from Ally’s overt actions in the courtroom and in relationships, I reclaim the series’ strategy to balance her character’s effectivity with her waffling: each trend is located in a different mode of expression. I make the case that such distinctions can be found only by looking at the formal construction of the show.

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Special Effects: The Horror of Revealing Feelings Computer-generated special effects are increasingly a part of the aesthetic of television.1 The appeal of miniseries such as Gulliver’s Travels or Merlin depends on the convincing use of special effects to create magical, fabled, supernatural worlds. Digital processing methods have decreased the time and, to some extent, the cost of producing spectacular effects so that weekly television series (for example, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) can now regularly use them. But how has the smaller screen learned to use the language of special effects? Television, like most media, borrows from practices developed elsewhere; in this case, from horror, disaster, fantasy, and science-fiction films. In its appropriation of effects technologies, television has also tended to borrow the traditional functions of special effects in films: as spectacle and as depictions of mythic creatures such as vampires and giants. Ally McBeal, however, has stretched the signification of special effects to fit its own quirky world. Instead of taking place in a fabled land far, far away or showing monsters from the grave, Ally McBeal uses special effects in a contemporary, naturalistic setting. It thereby demonstrates an alternate conception of how to use special effects to create meaning on television. Ally McBeal domesticates special effects to depict subjectivity, thereby reinvigorating the possibilities for the meanings of effects on television. Traditionally, special effects in film have served one of two primary functions—to produce spectacles that can be marketed to audiences and to create backgrounds that make difficult shooting situations easier. In the first case, the special effects must be highly foregrounded. The appeal of Jurassic Park or Them! depends on the audience’s desire to glimpse fantastic vistas of living dinosaurs or giant ants.2 In the second case, special effects are presented so as not to call attention to themselves. In film’s classic era, rear projection was used to give the illusion of characters driving down a street; actors did not have to leave the studio. Today computer-generated night skies overcome the difficulty and unpredictability of shooting in the dark. In Ally McBeal the effects are highly foregrounded, but they are not the climactic moments around which the story is organized. Steve Neale has noted that science-fiction films are narratively organized in a crescendo of effects, with the biggest, most spectacular effects saved for last.3 In Ally McBeal, however, digital effects do not reorganize the narrative. They are not used to depict final cataclysms and violent battles; for the most part, they are asides. These effects are not meant as background (unlike rear projection), but they also do not dominate the narrative as in horror or science

Getting into Ally’s Head  49

fiction. If Ally does not use its effects for traditional filmic purposes—either for show-stopping spectacle or for cost-saving backgrounds—what distinctive functions do they accomplish? The aside is a theatrical moment of direct address in which the character reveals his or her thoughts to the audience verbally. One of the functions of effects on Ally McBeal is similarly verbal—to show playful literalizations of spoken puns or metaphors.4 When a character on the show dumps his or her lover, the series literally depicts what that feels like. A tiny version of Ally or Richard or John is hydraulically lifted out of a dumpster and tossed into a garbage truck, intercut with the real-time breakup scene. In the series pilot, after Ally is sexually harassed and then fired, she looks in the mirror and says, “This is not a tragedy. It’s just a funny bounce of the ball.”5 At that moment a huge ball falls out of the sky and squashes Ally to the pavement. Sometimes these visualized puns are based on unspoken metaphors. For example, Ally has a discussion with Billy (her first love) about the case of a famous artist who continues to obsess about his wife even after she is dead. Speaking of the case, Ally says, “There are some loves that just don’t go away.” Instantly an elephant appears standing on its front legs between Ally and Billy.6 The visuals acknowledge the “elephant in the room” during Ally’s and Billy’s conversation (their continuing interest in each other). They reveal the metaphor after the fact, thus making the joke. Once the series has established a familiar metaphor using special effects, it is free to provide elaborations. After the audience is familiar with the “dumping” procedure, comedy can come from variations on this established pattern. When John initially makes his romantic intentions toward Ally known, she thinks she should squelch his interest early to avoid hurting him too deeply. The episode never shows John actually being dumped, but it provides snippets of the garbage truck approaching the dumpster and lifting it in preparation.7 The humor is boosted by our anticipatory knowledge of how dumping works on the show. Once expectations for these set pieces is established, the pleasure comes in the text toying with those expectations as we look to see exactly how the dumping pun will be literalized this time. The status of these visual puns is not quite clear. Are they joking commentaries from the series producers, outside the diegetic world? Are we seeing what the character is actually picturing in his or her mind? Are they instead externalized depictions of what the emotional experiences feel like? The lack of a clear answer makes sense, given the consistent way the series

50  Greg M. Smith

plays with the boundaries separating the diegetic and the nondiegetic. The use of special effects echoes the diegetic playfulness in Ally’s treatment of music, in which Vonda Shepard frequently shifts from diegetic bar singer to Greek chorus to the musical voice of Ally herself. Like the use of music on the show, these visualized metaphors are used systematically to slip into the crevice between the clearly diegetic and the clearly nondiegetic. Ally McBeal takes a simple strategy of embodied puns (think of Airplane!’s “The shit’s really gonna hit the fan”)8 and provides a digitized elaboration that links the puns into an overall blend of nondiegetic commentary and diegetic subjective access. The primary function of digital effects in Ally McBeal is to reveal inner states: feelings, thoughts, fantasies. Typically the cinema uses other narrative devices to convey subjective experience: dreams, fantasy sequences, voiceovers, music, facial close-ups, and so on. It is the feminized genre of film melodrama (and its televisual offspring, the soap opera) that has developed these devices furthest, not the relatively masculinized genre of science fiction. The woman’s film offers the promise of unlocking a female character’s mind and heart, using these cinematic devices as keys.9 Certainly Ally McBeal uses all these inherited means to show the insecurities and the hopes of its characters, but in its drive to penetrate deeper into interiority, it also mobilizes digital effects to reveal emotion.10 This is an extension of certain previous television practices, such as Dream On’s use of old movie footage as edited inserts or The Life and Times of Molly Dodd’s use of fantasy sequences, or the literal embodiment of aspects of the protagonist’s psyche in Herman’s Head.11 By appearing at a moment when extensive use of digital effects in film made their efficient use possible in series television, Ally McBeal takes a relatively new tool and uses it for its own purposes. In Ally McBeal digital effects reveal specific kinds of emotions—those that the characters are trying to hide, either because of propriety or because of codes of civilized behavior. There are functional advantages to having another subjective device in these circumstances. If the actor is playing a character who is trying to conceal emotion from other characters, then his or her outward displays can provide only a limited reaction. Special effects offer a quick way to show these hidden states, and they can do so hyperbolically. Embarrassment, for instance, is a frequent reaction that the characters try to conceal. When Ally and friends are at a wake, awkwardly trying to make conversation in spite of the circumstances, Ally blathers, “It’s a wonderful night,” and then we see an enormous foot inserted into her mouth.12 When a former teacher of Ally’s tells a priest that Ally and Billy knew they

Getting into Ally’s Head  51

were in love by sniffing each other’s butts like dogs, Ally’s cheeks turn a bright digitally enhanced red and start smoking.13 We see variations on the red cheek trick in other episodes, such as when Ally discovers that the priest who just heard her confession is going to start a “World’s Naughtiest Confessions” TV show, causing Ally’s face to turn gray (as in black-and-white television).14 Another frequently used way to convey embarrassment is for the character to shrink (literally). When one of Ally’s dates reprimands her for judging him based on his looks, a tiny Ally jumps up on his shoe and says, “I’m sorry.”15 Similarly, a witness being humiliated on the stand during cross-examination shrinks until he is a tiny speck with a high voice.16 The effects convey what it feels like to be embarrassed by making common metaphors concrete—“putting your foot in your mouth,” “feeling small”— or by exteriorizing and exaggerating a common bodily reaction—getting redder. One of the most common bodily reactions on Ally McBeal is that of raw lust. When characters approach in public, it is not appropriate to accost each other sexually, so special effects show us their desire. When Ally meets Bobby Donnell from The Practice on a crossover episode, her head morphs into that of a panting dog.17 When Ally hires an actor to play her lover in order to make her boyfriend Greg jealous, the handsome actor asks if she can pretend realistically that she wants to make love to him. Ally replies, “I might be able to fake it,” and sucks his whole head into her mouth.18 The most frequent special effects signifier of lust is a giant tongue extending from characters’ mouths. This begins in the episode in which Billy’s and Richard’s tongues literally hit the floor as they ogle an attractive woman who delivers the mail,19 but this device continues through several increasingly byzantine variations. When Bobby Donnell returns briefly, Ally’s tongue reaches out, wraps around his neck, and spins him around.20 In one episode Ally’s tongue snakes out slowly across the room heading for Greg’s ear, but when he turns around unexpectedly her tongue snaps back, knocking her against a wall.21 When Billy, suffering from a brain tumor, begins to hallucinate, he sees Nelle’s breasts swell, and then she lashes out with her tongue, wraps it around his neck, and pulls him across the table.22 Special effects stretch the tongue’s utility from its relatively private uses to a “public” display of unmentionable desire, shown for the audience’s benefit alone. Ally McBeal also uses effects to convey how deeply characters hurt each other. This reveals to the audience the damage done by a cutting remark while allowing the characters to conceal their feelings from each other. When Georgia, Billy’s wife, announces that she is pregnant, Ally is hit with

52  Greg M. Smith

a missile that leaves a hole in her belly.23 In the pilot episode, when Billy tells his former love Ally, “I appreciate you not as an ex-boyfriend but as a lawyer who appreciates a talented addition to the firm,” several arrows hit her in the chest.24 Words can have violent force, and a concrete device such as special effects allows us to see that. Not only does the series want us to see the hurt that characters feel, it also wants us to envision the violence that characters would like to inflict on each other. Special effects show us the intensity of an initial angry reaction, where the desire to cause harm is immediate and savage. When Ally bumps into her boyfriend Glenn, who obviously has lied to her about being out of town, she takes a sword and hacks him up, cutting off his head.25 After a telemarketer aggravates Ally, she reaches into the phone and pulls the startled telemarketer’s head out of the receiver so she can yell at her more directly.26 When Ally compares a case to her third grade election to class president, the opposing attorney snidely says, “What a delightful little analogy,” and Ally stretches her arm across the courtroom and punches him.27 In another episode, the executive vice president of Women for Progress gets into an altercation with Ally about what it means to be a role model for women, and Ally promptly bites her nose off and spits it so that it sticks to a pane of glass.28 These violent fantasies provide brief moments of wish fulfillment by acting out what characters might like to do to the annoying people they encounter in the work world and in their private lives. Embarrassment, lust, and hurt are the kinds of feelings that the melodrama traditionally promises when it penetrates to a woman’s heart, but fantasies of a woman’s violent physical reaction are not a standard part of the melodramatic mode. Revenge for harm done better characterizes the action film and the horror film, neither of which is known for providing deeper emotional interior access.29 Ally McBeal takes the language of violence that special effects have developed in the horror film and crosspollinates it with the melodrama’s emphasis on hidden feeling. The result extends the kinds of emotions that Ally McBeal reveals, not simply using effects as a narrative replacement for melodramatic devices but providing more equal access to violent fantasies. But does it make a difference that special effects are the method chosen to convey subjective states? If effects serve functions roughly equivalent to other subjective devices, does it matter that the series chooses to use digital effects in these situations, as opposed to, say, traditional dream sequences? Is there something about the nature of effects that influences the particularity of the meaning here?

Getting into Ally’s Head  53

Another question about the particularity of effects has to do with their widespread use on the show. I am not talking about the number of times we see digital effects; instead I am referring to the fact that effects show us the subjective states of a wide range of characters. The series uses effects to show us the interior life of almost any character, from Ally to Billy, Richard, and other members of the continuing supporting cast to clients of the firm. This egalitarian access is in sharp contrast to that provided by Ally McBeal’s other primary subjective device, music. Characters gain access to interiorized music only to the extent that they are close to Ally’s frame of mind. Not every character gets to hear imaginary music. It is closely guarded and ally-cated only to those who are open to their own fantasy lives. John can hear Barry White, and so can Elaine; but Nelle cannot, though she tries. Even a character as pivotal as Billy hears the music only when he is suffering from a brain tumor. There is a clear musical hierarchy that favors certain characters and denies musical subjectivity to others. Obviously the series could do the same with special effects to focus more emphasis on Ally and her world. Why choose to limit one device and to open up access to the other? Does this have to do with the nature of special effects? The answer to these questions has to do in part with the fact that special effects are industrial practices that carry their own histories. Special effects cannot do anything that the mind can imagine, or rather, they cannot do all things equally easily. Industrial factors shape the kinds of imagery that effects can present, so these preferential factors influence the possibilities for expressivity in the series. Although digital effects can be more cost-effective than traditional, laborintensive effects processing, lengthy special effects sequences are frequently both expensive and time-consuming to produce. Both factors, expense and time, work against including longer special effects sequences in the tightly scheduled and budgeted world of series television. Therefore, shorter sequences make more sense in this context, and Ally McBeal’s special effects tend to be brief. Special effects on the show are one-liners, quick jokes with a short setup. Like the verbal one-liner, they provide maximum payoff and only a brief interruption of the narrative.30 Because these effects shots are necessarily short, it is difficult to develop them into a coherent and consistent means of providing interior access. Their brevity tends to make them isolated. Given this limitation, it is easier to spread the effects among the characters in a more egalitarian fashion, showing us brief, vivid moments of subjective experience that do not derail the overall patterns of character sympathy.

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Certain kinds of digital effects have been perfected during the R&D of mainstream filmmaking, which then makes those effects more likely to be envisioned and produced by effects artists. This helps to explain the prevalence of shrinking in Ally McBeal. Over the years effects technicians have learned how to manipulate apparent size, so shrinking is an option that comes readily to the technician’s mind. Shrinking makes sense given the series’ narrative focus on embarrassment and insecurity, but these thematic concerns tend to be expressed through special effects because of their history.31 Once one has created a digital effect, it is relatively easy to reuse and modify it. This provides an industrial reason for why key special effects in Ally McBeal tend to recur with slight variations. Once a long, slithery, lusty tongue has been created, it is not difficult to make the tongue tickle an ear.32 Once the mechanics of “dumping” characters has been worked out, the sequence can be interrupted and drawn out in later episodes. Like many elements in the Ally McBeal universe, special effects shots are used repeatedly, and by placing each iteration in new narrative circumstances, the devices accrue meaning. But industrial factors are not enough to explain fully the patterns of digital imagery in Ally McBeal. Again the contrast with music is instructive. The series could use music more equitably among the characters. After all, music is not appreciably more difficult or expensive to provide once you have assembled the musicians. Ally certainly uses musical one-liners (for example, the association of Ling with the wicked witch theme from The Wizard of Oz), but it also integrates music into a consistent subjective orientation that allies us more closely with Ally. Although the brevity of special effects limits their use somewhat, still we must ask, why not use digital effects to focus our sympathies more on the protagonist? The other significant trend to note here is the prevalence of animal imagery in the show’s effects. The long tongues inevitably evoke associations with lizards. Like a dragon, Ally in one episode breathes fire at Ling, and Ling returns fire.33 During an argument in another episode, Georgia’s head turns into a cat’s, and then Ally’s head does too.34 Much of the imagery represented here falls squarely within Noël Carroll’s definition of the monster in the horror film: as a category violation, a combination of opposites that should not be merged (human/animal, normal-sized/shrunken).35 Much of the rest of the effects depicts monstrously violent urges. Again we see the importance of the horror imagery that helped to give rise to the modern special effects artist. Even when placed within the relatively sanitized standards of network television, images of the monster emerge in Ally McBeal’s

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effects. If one believes Robin Wood, who argues that the monster in horror condenses repressed content, then it makes sense for this imagery to borrow from the monstrous.36 The emotions that the characters seek to hide are the very ones that the effects embody. When these powerful emotions emerge as hyperbolic digital effects, they show the animal inside. Depicting someone by using animalistic imagery, however, interferes with creating sympathy for that character. There are sympathetic monsters, of course, but they are made sympathetic in spite of their monstrousness, not because of it. Because these digital effects skew toward the horrific (though they are played for laughs), they tend to distance. The effects in Ally McBeal are subjective devices that, unlike many of the devices inherited from the melodrama, frequently do not encourage our sympathies. This is a significant extension of the televisual language to create possibilities for alignment without allegiance, in Murray Smith’s terms.37 Because Ally McBeal limits its musical subjectivity to those most like Ally and because it uses effects to give subjective glimpses into a broader group of characters, the balance of sympathy and interior access is preserved across the cast of characters.38 This leaves one last key special effect in Ally McBeal, the digital baby that Ally hallucinates when her biological clock starts ticking. The baby appears (dancing to the “ooga-chucka” rhythm track from “Hooked on a Feeling”) as a representation of Ally’s deep fear that she will go through life childless. The hallucinated baby first appears during the first season when Ally wants noncommitted sex with a well-endowed sculpture model. The baby stalks Ally, who then chases it (Ally: “I’m not the first person to confront a demon.” Renee: “But you are the first person to make an open field tackle.”)39 The baby reappears with multiple variations in the first season: it dances while Ally makes love, chucks a spear at her, and skates by on the street brandishing a hockey stick, but then it virtually disappears from the show for several seasons.40 This hallucinated baby seemed to be a misstep by Kelley, then, given the framework articulated here. If effects tend to represent deeply repressed emotions in Ally McBeal, then the most foregrounded, most famous digital effect on the show should embody Ally’s deepest fear.41 Given the first few seasons, it would seem that Ally’s primary concern is her desire to find a soulmate, a romantic partner. But in the last season, Ally satisfied her desire by finding that soulmate in a surprising place: not in a man, but in a tenyear-old girl (her daughter). Her desire for a man has been reframed not as her heart’s main desire but as a logical step toward her ultimate goal of motherhood, a step she has now recognized as unnecessary. The seemingly

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Special effects as foreshadowing: Ally (Calista Flockhart) dances with a digital baby, prefiguring the end of the series. (Ally McBeal © 1998 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All rights reserved)

misguided importance of the special effects dancing baby now provides an elegant foreshadowing of Ally McBeal’s endgame. Ally makes peace with the hallucinatory dancing baby by confronting it and dancing with the mirage. Living with these repressed anxieties made it possible for her to find her heart’s desire, though the object of that desire was not what she envisioned. Special effects provide the key that brings closure to the series. Although some of Ally McBeal’s formal innovations may be too idiosyncratic for widespread adoption (such as its use of music), already there are shows (Scrubs, Andy Richter Controls the Universe) that have adopted its use of effects.42 Ally’s primary formal legacy may be its broadening of effects into new modes of televisual expression. Imagining the World Special effects sequences (along with other musical fantasies—Al Green singing in a courtroom, the entire law office singing and dancing to the song “Bill”) are only some of the means Ally McBeal uses to depict characters’ imaginings.43 Imagination/fantasy segments that do not use special

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effects or musical performance serve some of the same functions discussed earlier: they can reveal lust (Ally’s true feelings for a quirky client played by John Ritter are revealed when she imagines jumping up on his shoulders and putting his head in her crotch);44 they can depict violent wishes (when Maddie makes a snide comment about Ally’s lengthy preparations for a date, we see Ally in a Lara Croft outfit draw two pistols and blaze away with both barrels).45 Just as Ally tends to use special effects as one-liners, the show usually presents brief live-action fantasies as well. In these instances, live action serves the same basic narrative functions that special effects or musical performance would (with differences in connotative meaning). There is nothing new about fantasy/dream sequences in media,46 and Ally McBeal certainly has full-blown dream sequences that follow traditional conventions. In fact, the longer the dream segment, the more conventionally these sequences play. Ally dreams that her broken heart is being surgically removed; she dreams of making love to Victor; she dreams she is in an all-female unit of the armed services with a drill sergeant who makes them shout “Men suck, sir!” Although these dreams are whimsical in subject, they are presented in standard fashion, with Ally waking up.47 Ally’s fantasy sequences are more innovative when they are shorter. Rather than depict complete scenarios, Ally tends to rely on fantasies that correspond to single notions. As quick as thought, they interrupt the scene to provide glimmers of ideas that the characters entertain only for a few seconds. Fantasy sequences allow the characters to imagine possible futures, to consider various courses of action.48 The characters can literally picture what it would be like to follow through on their instincts. Ally is attracted to a man who then reveals that he is bisexual, causing her to rethink whether she will pursue her interest. She goes to him to tell him that her personal prejudices will not let her date him, and we see Ally’s visualization of her possible future: Ally kisses the man passionately, bathed in light; the man kisses another man, aglow in the same light; the man lies in bed with another man.49 Early in John and Nelle’s courtship, John pictures Nelle as a pregnant homemaker in a vividly colored kitchen serving food to two perfect children and kissing him, her husband.50 Often these fantasies are exaggerated visions of the future, as in John’s stereotypical picture of his possible home life with Nelle, or when Ally imagines herself in a birthing room, firing babies from between her legs at the father until one baby’s head clangs into the operating room light.51 Whether depicting the worst possible outcome or not, these fantasy sequences allow the characters (and us) to envision the results of their choices.

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These imaginary moments function to show us who the character is really thinking about at the moment, regardless of whom they are conversing with. Ally McBeal often makes one character substitute briefly for another, visually or verbally or both. After Larry leaves for Detroit, Ally attends a staff meeting at which Richard is discussing an annulment case. Suddenly Richard speaks with Larry’s voice: “It would be different if they had a child.” Ally now sees Larry standing in Richard’s place, and she hugs her lover, only to have him change back into her boss.52 Over and over the show presents the uncanny spectacle of one character speaking with another’s voice. After invoking Barry White to boost his sexual performance with Nelle, John climbs into bed, only to find the soul singer there instead of his girlfriend. Startled, John says, “You looked a little different for a second.” Barry White asks him (using Nelle’s voice), “Different how?”53 In these moments we discover what the character is really thinking about by seeing whose image they project onto someone else. These brief moments of imagination appear so frequently that they become a structuring principle for the entire show. At any moment a fantasy sequence might appear, and this changes the way we view narrative events. Because fantasies are shown so systematically, Ally McBeal begins to play jokes with the audience’s expectations about imagination sequences. As Ally and Greg drive down the road their conversation is interrupted by a subjective closeup of a stop sign, and they lurch forward. Ally dismisses this incident, explaining to Greg that she frequently has fantasies, including the one she just had about running into someone. Greg then explains that this was no fantasy, that they indeed ran into another car.54 When Maddie knocks at Ally’s door and explains that she is Ally’s ten-year-old daughter, Ally stares at her, explaining that she is waiting for the “fantasy beat” to be over; when she realizes that Maddie is not a fantasy but a live girl, she faints.55 We are trained to expect that bizarre events on Ally McBeal will be revealed to be fantasies, and once this expectation is established, the series plays with our anticipation. Just as Ally looks for imaginary moments, so do we. And just as Ally begins to have difficulty telling imagination from reality, so do we the viewers see images whose status is not clear. When Glenn, the sculpture model, breaks up with Ally in the bar after only a few dates, Ally begins to hear the “Na-na-na-nah, hey, goodbye” chant familiar to most sports fans. We see her head turn, looking for the source of the music, although no one else seems to hear it. Then Vonda Shepard begins to sing the song in the bar as the breakup scene continues, and the bar crowd begins to

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sing along, waving their hands, pointing their fingers at Ally. It is unclear at what point this scene slides from Ally imagining music to having the diegetic crowd singing along to embarrass her.56 After spending much of the second season trying to decide if she wants to get back together with Billy, Ally tells Renee that she is finished with Billy and that she feels all right about it. An old woman passes her and shouts, “Liar!” A passing man calls her “trash”; we see the people at a bus stop pointing at her; the pope passes her, muttering, although Renee denies seeing anything when Ally asks. Then when a dog pees on Ally’s shoes, Ally asks Renee if that actually happened, and Renee replies, “I’m afraid that’s real.”57 Over and over Ally McBeal plays the same guessing game with its viewers that the dramatic world plays with Ally: what is “real,” and what is fantasy? Slowly we begin to view the diegetic world in a way that resembles Ally’s perspective. We see Ally’s projection onto the world, an interchangeable blend of fantasy and reality.58 When Ally’s world is emotionally cold, the diegetic world becomes cold too. When Ally has to reduce the firm’s expenses and fire one of the associates, the lawyers retreat from her in fear. Ally, feeling the isolation, walks through a blinding snowstorm in the outer office, finally shutting the storm out as she closes her office door. When Elaine opens the door to announce that Nelle is ready for her appointment, Elaine enters wearing a parka, snow blowing behind her, but when Nelle enters, there is no snowstorm behind her.59 When Ally is feeling down, the world feels down with her. After her breakup with Larry, Ally attends a staff meeting where the lawyers try to comfort her. We see Jackson sing a brief line from “You’ve Got a Friend,” although he denies this when Ally confronts him. Elaine enters in black mourning garments, but when Ally asks about her unconventional garb, Elaine instantly reverts to her professional clothes.60 Ally’s internal states become projected onto her environment, and we see them as clearly as she does. In this way Ally’s fantasy projection onto the world becomes a fundamental structure for how this fictional world is constructed. One of the most distinctive things about Ally McBeal is the extent to which the narrative world is warped to reflect a single character’s sensibility. Most ensemble shows differentiate between major and minor characters primarily through the amount of time spent before the ostensibly objective gaze of the camera. Although Ally gets the most screen time, the series becomes Ally’s in more ways than this. Ally McBeal presents a highly sophisticated organization of subjective devices that in some cases privileges our access to certain characters and in other cases distributes Ally’s subjective experiences more

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democratically across characters. What this organization does is to privilege music, which is shown to be the best way for the audience (or another character) to reach Ally’s core. It also distorts the fictional world in a way that no other television show has done without having a character step outside the fiction and address the audience.61 While staying within the confines of its diegetic world, Ally McBeal creates a personalized world through its style of presentation. Ally’s values become the cornerstone not only for the series’s ideology but also for the overall mode of formal presentation. The tendency for the series to go into fantasy mode is justified solely by Ally’s tendency to see things that are not there. No one else in the regular cast of characters has this proclivity. Because Ally clings to her fantasies and refuses to give them up, the entire series multiplies this principle of imagination until it governs both the characters’ actions and the viewers’ expectations. Ally’s fantasies infect the world, remaking it in her own image. The characters themselves comment on the fact that the universe in which they move is Ally-centric.62 “With Ally, everything’s about her,” John admits, and Richard concurs, telling Ally, “All the world’s your stage.”63 Georgia asks Ally, “What makes your problems bigger than everybody else’s?” “They’re mine,” Ally unabashedly replies.64 In a conversation with Renee about a wrongful death case, Ally extrapolates from the tragedy to her own circumstances, and Renee says in amazement, “A plane crashes, hundreds of people die, and you find a way to make it about you.”65 After the newcomer Wilson spends a bit of time at Cage and Fish, he notes the firm’s orientation around Ally. “Is it normal for this waif to stop trains?” he asks. Nelle replies, “You have no idea.”66 Elaine says, “[Ally’s] dream is to have the whole world revolve around her,”67 and the series emphasizes that such a world is clearly different from our own. As Elaine comments, “Anything can happen around here. You keep forgetting we don’t live in the real world.”68 There is little pretense that this narrative world exists as an objective reality. The series comments on real-world occurrences (such as sexual harassment), but any attempt to make strict comparisons between Ally’s world and the actual practice of law will be frustrated. The subjective focus of the Ally McBeal universe flaunts the fact that this is unlike the impartial world in which we live. Far from denying the criticisms that Ally’s character is too self-involved, the series fully admits her self-centeredness and constructs the show’s narrative and style around that center. This partly explains the level of frustration some viewers have with Ally herself. It is not merely that Ally herself

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is self-involved; the show itself duplicates that nearsightedness. Any viewer frustrations with Ally get magnified because of the way her consciousness dominates our access to the fictional world.69 By constructing this series in such a daringly personal way, Kelley risks alienating a great many television viewers. We cannot concentrate solely on the characters we like best, as we can in many ensemble shows, because Ally’s values are so integral to the world.70 If you do not like Ally’s way of looking at the world, there is little possibility to escape it without changing the channel. Kelley uses the potentially claustrophobic construction of the show to comment on a single set of issues: the relationship among love, sexuality, and the workplace. As I discuss in chapter 5, Ally McBeal stages a long-running debate on sexual harassment. It is no coincidence that the cases on Ally McBeal focus so strongly on a single type of law, unlike the general practice firms seen on other law shows such as The Practice or L.A. Law. Rather than envision the hour-long ensemble show as a broad canvas to deal with a wide range of issues, Ally McBeal defines itself as a miniature, a highly concentrated examination of the things most dear to a single character. Kelley’s public discussion of the issues is clearer because the show speaks with a unified voice, and this unity comes from its coordination of subjective devices.71 The Past Lives on in a Culture against Doubt Not all the subjective devices on Ally McBeal are used to convey imagination. The show uses flashbacks and voiceover fairly straightforwardly to let us hear the characters’ thoughts and see their memories.72 Although these devices are somewhat less innovatively employed than Ally’s special effects and musical performances, they are employed so frequently that they are clearly crucial to the series’ narrative voice. Many different characters have flashbacks on the show, and the vast majority of these are done in standard fashion, by editing material from the past into the present scene. At times these flashbacks are presented through rapid editing to intersperse brief memories into the current scene. When Ally learns that a favorite law professor of hers has died, we discover through flashback that she had an affair with him. Speaking with his widow, Ally says, “He was a wonderful . . . ,” and the camera reveals Ally and the professor giggling in bed before she finishes the sentence, “professor.” These rapid flashes of memory continue through the episode. After the widow finds out about the affair, Ally tells her that it was only a midlife crisis, that the professor did not love her, while flashback snippets clearly reveal

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that she is lying, that the affair was much more.73 Sometimes the show relies on elegant camera movements to link past and present. We see Ally brushing her teeth, listening to Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” on the alarm radio and also hearing faraway giggling. The camera pans and in one continuous shot takes us into a flashback in washed-out colors of girls (including young Ally) singing “Addicted to Love” into their hairbrushes as they watch Palmer’s music video.74 Such elegant transitions underline how beautifully made Ally is, even when it is not groundbreaking. Guest stars frequently have flashbacks when they take the witness stand, allowing us to see the events they are discussing. Occasionally Ally gets so caught up in the flashback that she puts herself into the events being recalled. When a woman testifies about making love to a sixteen-year-old boy, we see the couple, courtesy of a black-and-white flashback. As her story progresses, eventually Ally herself appears in the flashback in the woman’s place, touching and kissing the boy, until she makes a noise in the courtroom that calls attention to herself and interrupts the testimony.75 Ally puts herself into a less inviting scenario when a witness describes how her husband was murdered while she was in the shower. Ally takes the woman’s place in the shower (in an obvious Psycho homage/ripoff ), and when the assailant pulls back the curtain, Ally screams both in the shower and in the courtroom, again interrupting the legal proceedings and the flashback.76 Just as Ally has difficulty differentiating between fantasy and reality, she mixes together past and present. The frequency of flashbacks emphasizes the importance of the past for the present in the Ally world. As I point out in chapter 3, the grand narrative of the series is a straightforwardly psychoanalytic one, in which we discover that the fantasy construction is rooted in Ally’s childhood trauma. The series wants to emphasize that early experiences shape who the characters are in the present. Flashbacks, therefore, remind us that the characters carry their histories inside them. Ally McBeal literalizes this from time to time, having figures from the past, in particular childhood versions of the main characters, appear in the present-day scenes. These scenes are somewhere between flashback and imagination, creating a hybrid of past and present. Ally is visited by her younger self, who tells the adult Ally that she must help Billy when he separates from Georgia. Young Ally sits and listens in court, she dances with young Billy, and after Georgia refuses to take Billy back, this episode ends with the adult Billy walking down the street with his childhood self, who slowly disappears.77 When Ally begins to fear that Billy is losing his

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mind, he reminds her that they used to sing “Over the Rainbow” as children, and suddenly the child Ally is sitting beside the adult Billy. “Grow up, Billy,” says the child, and instantly Billy is replaced by his childhood self, who replies, “We are grown up.” The scene returns to its adult participants, until finally the child Billy reappears, asking, “Do you really think I’m cracking up?” The child Ally reappears to answer, “Yes.”78 This complex example points out the way that past selves live within our current selves, and they can appear at any moment in either behavior or words. Ally McBeal consistently reveals these selves through flashback, reminding us that the past has lessons to teach. Unlike other subjective devices such as special effects, voiceover belongs almost exclusively to Ally.79 Here I want to explore what this tells us about Ally and what kinds of thoughts the show tends to reveal using voiceover. Answering this question will help us see a bit further into why Ally annoys so many people. Not surprisingly, Ally McBeal uses voiceover to reveal thoughts that the characters cannot speak aloud. When Ally (on a bet) gets up to tell a dirty joke to the entire bar, she prefaces her performance by saying that the dirty joke is one of the last vestiges of gender bias. Men can handle it, Ally says, but women cannot: “We’re too . . .” “Decent,” Ally says to herself in voiceover, but aloud she revises her thought to say, “fragile.”80 Over and over in Ally McBeal we the audience get access to two parallel dialogues—one internal, one external—making us aware of the differences between them. Voiceover shows us the extent to which Ally questions herself and her own actions and words. When her former lover Billy asks her if she wants the new man in her life, Ally replies, “Yes,” but in voiceover we hear her ponder, “Why do I feel unfaithful in saying that?”81 Voiceover can let us know that Ally is questioning her own thoughts. When she has lustful imaginings about a much younger client, she asks herself, “He’s nineteen. What’s wrong with me?”82 Even when Ally’s overt actions and words are clear, confident, and professional, we hear the questions that lay underneath. Because Ally interrogates her own motives and interactions, she must counter her doubts with internal pep talks to try to bolster herself into acting forcefully. Walking down the street after an especially embarrassing incident, Ally tries to convince herself, “I’m luckier than most. I wake up each morning, glad to start a new day, grateful that the last one is over.”83 Of course, not all these motivational speeches are successful. Ally sometimes undercuts her peppy voiceover aphorisms with a self-deprecating

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remark. For example, “It brings me comfort knowing that everything happens for a reason. It would just be nice to be let in on it.”84 This self-talk is the oral equivalent of the theme songs that Ally replays in her head to find encouragement. We hear Ally’s voiceover command her to do things that are socially appropriate, even if they are counter to her inclinations. When a judge makes a disparaging reference to a fight Ally had over a can of potato chips in a previous episode, Ally tells herself, “Just smile and pretend that was cute.”85 Ally does not always take her own internal advice, however. When a former professor’s widow discovers that Ally slept with her husband, the widow confronts Ally, and Ally desperately tells herself, “Lie, just lie,” but she immediately confesses the affair.86 Ally even mentally commands other people to do things. When Ronald is obviously about to kiss her for the first time, her voiceover orders him to hurry up, but instead he pecks her on the cheek.87 Just as often as we hear Ally’s commands and pep talks through voiceover, we see them fail. Voiceover often provides a final, concise summary of an Ally episode. The series pilot finishes with such a bon mot, delivered in voiceover as Ally walks down the street: “The real truth is I probably don’t want to be too happy or content, cause then what? I actually like the quest. The more lost you are, the more you have to look forward to. I’m having a great time and I don’t even know it.”88 The series as a whole ends similarly, with Ally’s voiceover having the last word. As she walks away from her friends, Boston, the law firm, and the series itself, Ally says, “Looking backward, many of the saddest times of my life turn out to be the happiest, so I must be happy now. This is going to be good; why else would I be crying?”89 Sometimes sappy, sometimes insightful, such comments wrap up the episode’s plotlines into a neat package. Aphoristic voiceovers throughout the series provide some of the most self-deprecating commentary on Ally. Sitting in a bathroom stall, Ally thinks, “I don’t know why I like to think in here. Maybe it’s the right depository for most of my thoughts.”90 After a terrible day during which her mental fitness is questioned by the legal establishment, Ally says to herself, “Sometimes I’m tempted to become a street person cut off from society, but then I wouldn’t get to wear my outfits.”91 The strongest evidence that Ally is fickle and concerned with surface matters often comes not from her overt actions but from her own words in voiceover. Repeatedly in these examples Ally’s voiceover contradicts her spoken words or public deeds. Voiceover in Ally McBeal does not simply serve the standard function of letting the audience hear thoughts that the character

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cannot share aloud. In this series voiceover goes further, emphasizing the direct contrast between Ally’s private speech and her public actions. In the series pilot Ally argues for a sleazy magazine’s right to publish satiric material about a religious figure (recalling the legal battle between Hustler magazine and Jerry Falwell). As she faces the judges, she makes a passionate argument: “This magazine represents democracy!” Her voiceover demurs: “They sell sex.” She continues aloud: “It may contain material that might seem vulgar, but so does Vanity Fair, Esquire, Vogue.” To herself: “More sex.” “And if this court is suddenly prepared to be the guardian of content absent libel, absent obscenity, then you should at least have the integrity and honesty to admit that your ruling abolishes, certainly in part, the notion of free press in America!” Her voiceover finishes: “Sometimes I’m more persuasive when I lack conviction.”92 When Ronald confesses he is too intimidated to enter into a relationship with Ally, he says, “[Ally is] a great lady, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life overmatched.” In voiceover, Ally thinks, “That’s the most flattering thing anybody’s ever said to me.” Aloud, she says, “You coward!” In her personal life as well as in her private life, Ally’s voiceover sends a different message from the one her lips present. What voiceover does in Ally McBeal is show Ally’s self-doubt in great detail.93 Increasing the discrepancy between what Ally does and what she thinks has important ramifications on how we read Ally the character. One of the most common complaints about Ally is her whining; she should just “get over it.”94 This criticism obscures the extent to which Ally does get over it. Judging by her actions and public words alone, Ally McBeal is a forceful character, one of the most powerful women portrayed on contemporary television. She is a fiery, effective litigator who rises to become full partner in her law firm;95 she becomes the sage emotional adviser to all the characters on the show; she backs down a series of potential suitors (Ronald Cheanie, Greg Butters, Brian Selig) who are not man enough to give her the intensity she expects in a love relationship.96 More important, she does all this without compromising her core values, in spite of consistent opposition. Instead she makes the dramatic world bend to accommodate her way of being. If the voiceover were turned off and if scenes that show her steeling herself for battle were excised, Ally McBeal would be a secondwave feminist dream of success. By letting us hear the doubts behind the actions, Ally McBeal creates a character who is bold in action despite her misgivings. The trouble is it is difficult for us to see Ally in this way because of our broadly held prejudice

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against doubt.97 We like our leaders forceful and our heroes decisive. We are able to tolerate a certain amount of self-doubt when we know that clear action is imminent. Similarly, a certain amount of doubt revealed gives humanity to an action character, but we tolerate it best when action is forthcoming. If a narrative draws out the self-questioning for too long, the character is seen as weak, whiny. Other feminized forms of narrative such as the film melodrama, in which we gain significant interior access to the characters’ paralyzing doubts and misgivings, end in clear, decisive action in ninety minutes. In Ally McBeal we have access to Ally’s doubts for a longer period before we get the payoff of her actions. By borrowing some of the subjective devices from melodrama (voiceover, flashback), by significantly stretching other of melodrama’s interior devices (music, fantasy), and by repurposing other devices to reveal thoughts and desires (special effects), Ally McBeal gives enormous attention to Ally’s interior life, and because the show is in serial form, this attention is spread over a considerable time. Cases are generally resolved in one episode, but larger issues such as love relationships may take weeks, months, or years to come to closure. The obvious point of comparison here is daytime soap opera, the primary serial form of television. Soap opera also draws out the time between the introduction of a new dramatic situation and its conclusion, allowing the characters to ponder their next steps in lengthy detail.98 In adapting the serial form, Ally McBeal brings a daytime television strategy into the bright light of primetime, thus causing Ally’s character to become more of a lightning rod for criticism. Of course, there have been other American primetime television serials that draw their plotlines out across several episodes, but none of them to date have explored their characters’ interiors with such an array of subjective devices as Ally McBeal has. David Kelley and his colleagues want us to see Ally’s doubts.99 To do otherwise would be to make her a cardboard character that satisfies second-wave feminism’s desire for bold, aggressive women. Second-wave feminism tends to argue for clear positive role models by reinforcing our society’s distaste for selfdoubt. A role model should work through doubt and adversity, not linger in them. As a third-wave feminist text, Ally McBeal asserts that doubt is a major part of working one’s way through the world.100 Having an overtly successful woman character express her vacillations, especially over the protracted time of the primetime television serial, brings Ally up against our lack of tolerance for doubt. Instead of concentrating on the fact that Ally overcomes her misgivings, we emphasize the fact that she

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expresses doubt in the first place. Because we the audience see and hear her misgivings, we are tempted to judge her negatively, but to do so is to miss an important key reading of Ally as a woman who fiercely fights for what she believes in, in spite of the fact that she has considerable fears. This reading would position Ally as modeling a certain kind of admirable behavior—engaging in self-questioning and in the confidence of friends but suppressing those doubts when you enter the public arena for decisive action.101 We are led to emphasize Ally’s doubts over her actions in part because of our assumptions about male and female characters. Having a woman expressing doubt is read differently than having a man do so. I often encourage students in my classes to engage in “mental cast switching” as a way to discover the ideological underpinnings of a text. To determine how gender (or race or class) assumptions are working in a text, I ask my students to mentally substitute someone of a different gender (or race or class) in a character’s role. As a point of comparison to help us see the gender assumptions behind our judgment of Ally’s whinyness, let us consider J. D., the protagonist of Scrubs. Without Ally McBeal as a predecessor, it is hard to imagine Scrubs, a show that follows a young professional in an ensemble cast, complete with ample voiceovers, brief fantasy sequences (some involving special effects), and occasional musical outbursts. A key difference, however, is that Scrubs places a male character at the center of its universe. J. D. is deeply insecure, prone to fantasy wish fulfillment, and racked with self-doubt, and subjective devices show us his waffling in great detail. With J. D., such internal conflicts are usually read as “charming,” as opposed to the tendency to read Ally’s self-doubt as “annoying.” Certainly one cannot compare all possible aspects that keep J. D. within the range of “cute” behavior; obviously it is difficult to factor in the elusive nature of actor performance, for instance. But given the high degree of interior access to both Ally and J. D. and given the consistency with which both express doubt, several distinguishing factors emerge. One is the difference between the timing of the two shows. Although both are serial, Ally McBeal is more strongly so, with plotlines extending over longer periods, while Scrubs focuses more on providing closure within episodes. Also, Ally McBeal is the first important hour-long American television comedy (which is not also a variety show), unlike the traditional half-hour format of Scrubs. For both reasons, Ally’s doubts tend to be more drawn out than J. D.’s, giving them more opportunity to raise our ire. In addition, the difference in gender causes us to read their doubt differently. In the aftermath of second-wave feminism, having a professional female character express doubts about everything from her love life to her

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legal arguments can feel like a throwback. Given the softening of acceptable masculine imagery as a result of decades of discussions about gender, a professional male character filled with doubt is au courant.102 The criticism of Ally as “whiny” calls on sexist assumptions about how we read indecision. But to do a purely cultural analysis of our gendered reading strategies in Ally, to examine our understanding of her doubts without paying attention to the formal devices that reveal those doubts, is to miss an important alternative reading: Ally fully, humanly, acknowledges her misgivings to herself and to her friends, but when it comes time to act, she delivers. Ally McBeal not only validates fantasy as a valuable way of keeping one’s self alive but also validates doubt as a natural response to the world. The show models a character’s struggles with indecision, interior struggles that are never totally resolved but that do not keep her from decisive exterior action. In a society that tolerates doubt only to a limited extent, Ally McBeal exposes a protagonist’s protracted inner struggles and asks us to judge her. A character filled with doubt will not proceed in a linear fashion, so such a character sets up the style of argument that David Kelley pursues across the show’s run. Kelley focuses on the nexus of gender, sexuality, and the workplace, but he engages in a long-running back-and-forth debate with himself over these issues. As I discuss later, characters in individual episodes take opposite sides of the debate. After discussions with each other, they frequently revise their opinions during an episode, making the episode seem to endorse one side of the debate. A subsequent episode might come down on the opposing side. If one wants to stage such an argument that proceeds in fits and starts, then it makes sense to place an indecisive character in the middle of it.103 To see the narrative architecture under this argument, I started with an unlikely approach—a focus on the formal functions of subjective devices in Ally McBeal. Examining voiceover revealed how the show voices internal doubt while keeping external action strong. Looking at flashbacks emphasized the importance of the past on the character’s present, which is made possible because serials can accumulate such dense histories. Attention to fantasy sequences makes clear how Ally McBeal gives value to imagination, rejecting the notion that fantasy can be pathological. Articulating the functions served by special effects in the show lets us see how devices carry their prior uses (in science fiction and horror) with them when media makers reshape them for other purposes. Choices about such matters as how to convey subjective states are not merely formal, nor do these devices work in

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isolation. They shape what kinds of arguments a text can make; they build a nuanced network of audience sympathy among a cast of characters; and they broaden the expressive capacity of television itself. Voiceover, fantasy sequences, special effects, flashbacks, music: the series integrates these techniques into a system that creates a distinctive world. The values and rules governing this world (the privileging of fantasy, community expression, expressions of doubt, etc.) appear to be primarily cultural concerns, but a cultural analysis misses the particularity of how these formal devices construct this world. I have demonstrated that attention to narrative and formal choices opens up new answers, explaining phenomena that do not appear at first glance to be formal in nature. I do not wish to justify my analysis in the previous two chapters in terms of the cultural insights provided. To do so would be to argue once again that television criticism is insightful when it opens up answers about the larger world. But the assumption that formal devices operate as a system means that they can collaborate to accomplish increasingly complex functions.

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t h r ee

Redeeming Ally Seriality and the Character Network

A long-running serial television narrative must maintain a precarious

balance. It is difficult enough for the producers of a new television series to create a set of compelling new character relations that can capture a sizable viewing audience in its opening season.1 Once these relations are established, the serial must somehow undo them, because by definition the series must move forward. Stuff happens, and in a serial narrative, events matter because a serial has a memory.2 Narrative incidents alter old relations, and characters become complicated as they accrue experiences. How can we examine the complex balance of characters across a serial, given the number of plotlines covered by the narrative? In time-bounded feature film narration, characters proceed toward goals, overcome obstacles, and so on. Certainly classic film narration and television serials share a similar “what will happen next” drive, and perhaps this forward-driven conception of narration can partly explain how serial television crafts its appeal.3 Here, however, I focus on a different understanding of narration, one that is less concerned with how plot events tell us what happened next. Rather my emphasis is on what plot events tell us about the interconnected world of the serial, how actions inflect our understanding of the dramatic community, and how the closed system of the serial sets up comparisons among characters. Others have noted that serial narrative sets up a network of intricately related characters who comment on one another’s actions. Daytime soap opera, in particular, tends to extend the ramifications of single actions (a one-night stand, for instance), spending a great deal of time on how characters in the tightly knit network anticipate, discover, analyze, and react to that action.4 But we still lack a way to analyze such narrative.

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I want to take one approach to looking at serial narrative, an approach that should also be more broadly useful for exploring the way in which primetime serials deploy characters. At the same time, I want to argue for what is distinctive about Ally McBeal. As I noted in the previous chapter, Ally uses an ensemble cast, which is characteristic of much “quality television,”5 but it makes little attempt to give a balanced portrait of a workplace. Rather than create a set of more or less well-rounded characters, each on his or her individual trajectory through the narrative, Ally McBeal depicts a network of central characters each of whom reflects, refracts, or extends Ally’s key values. The characters are defined as thematic variations on Ally herself, rather than placed into a clear relationship of narrative antagonism and allegiance. It matters less that Renee works for the district attorney’s office and therefore is more likely to face members of Cage and Fish in court. The issues raised by these cases matter more than who opposes whom in court or who wins or loses. The characters shift their alliances based on the issue at stake at the moment, and these shifts are made possible by the complicated character architecture of the series. The primary characters on Ally McBeal exist to voice exaggerated versions of one or more of Ally’s core beliefs. Following these characters allows us to discover the consequences of the roads Ally might have taken, and thus the system of characterization on the show depicts a complicated balance of possible outcomes rather than stake everything on the simple serial question, what will happen to Ally? As the other characters become increasingly dissatisfied with the lives they have chosen, we are left with only one viable alternative: Ally’s unrepentant eccentricity, which becomes the moral touchstone that all characters use to evaluate their own failings. The series gradually reveals that Ally’s refusal to give up on her dreams of romance is actually a more morally courageous stance than the other characters’ pragmatism. By sticking to her romantic ideals, Ally has become the most grounded character while the others seem dangerously stuck in their own patterns of behavior. What Ally McBeal demonstrates is that a serial can progress by changing its basic attitude toward the characters, by asking the audience to reevaluate its judgments of character behaviors, not by changing the characters themselves.6 Ally McBeal shows us that the other main characters are stuck in the past, so it spends considerable time exploring the past as a way to discredit their present and future. To increase its ability to provide audiences with a steady stream of new character information, the serial usually progresses along two fronts: forward into the future and backward into the past. Although the

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dramatic interest of the serial often depends on tuning in next time to find out what will happen, the show frequently delves into the characters’ pasts to discover the motivations that drive their actions. Ally McBeal is remarkable in that almost every key character is revealed to have gone through a specific childhood trauma that governs their adult behavior. The turning point for the entire series is when Ally, unlike all the other characters, confronts her primal scene and comes to terms with it. Although the series pokes fun at therapists throughout, the narrative engine is driven by an overt faith in the psychoanalytic process. Ally emerges as the most viable alternative because she is the only one in the course of the serial shown to have accepted the legacy of her childhood hurt. Ally McBeal, like the more highly praised serial The Sopranos, depends on psychoanalysis to explore the past.7 The series is also distinctive in its handling of a central problem in serial narrative: how to present the arc of a romantic relationship. Achieving one’s goal (finding true love in a romance or finding the real culprit in a mystery) is a hallmark of classic Hollywood characters, but long-term goals also serve important functions in serial narrative. Viewers returned to Cheers and Moonlighting to discover if Sam and Diane and Maddie and David would finally become couples. The problem with using such a romantic goal to propel interest is that it is difficult to sustain the serial narrative after the goal is achieved. Ally McBeal does an interesting narrative judo move using the goal that seems to drive Ally through most of the series—finding a man. Much to her surprise, Ally discovers the fulfillment she seeks in another source entirely, her daughter. The series performs an elegant substitution, arguing that the goals that people pursue are not necessarily the ones they really want. Although the series appears to be centered on Ally’s romantic pursuits, the substitution of child for man in the last season reorients the information presented in the previous seasons. Instead of being about finding a man and then having a child, the series reveals itself as being centrally concerned with motherhood as a primary value. This chapter demonstrates one way that serial narratives can weave characters to form a coherent, complicated rhetorical argument.8 A serial juggles many different balls, catching and redirecting some, monitoring those that are in the air, and expects that the dedicated viewer will be able to track its progress, remembering previous events and anticipating future ones. The data the serial viewer handles in real time necessarily take more time to analyze in print, but the argument in this book is that the totality of the narrative allows us to see important patterns in the show’s construction.

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Brief Methodological Matters The basic impulse for my approach in this chapter begins with Rick Altman’s notion of the dual focus narrative, which he examines in a wide range of narrative media from epic poetry to cathedral doors but in greatest depth in the film musical.9 Rather than emphasize the progression of events that eventually shows us the solution to the plot’s dilemma, Altman notes, the resolution of a musical is not of great concern for its audience. We know how the musical will end: with the embrace of the romantic couple, each one finding in the other the qualities that complete them. The progression of the musical does not follow the path of a single protagonist but follows the paths of two characters as they resolve their opposing characteristics. A dual focus narrative sets up binaries: playful/uptight, experienced/naive, assertive/shy. The male and female leads embody these characteristics in different configurations, and the narrative shows each person in the couple learning that he or she needs the opposing qualities. The narrative details how each of the protagonists compromises to create the couple in the end. Dual focus narratives ask us to weigh the relative merits of opposing thematic qualities. Altman has also asserted that this dual-focus concept of narrative has broader relevance, arguing that we have overemphasized the influence of the classic realist novel’s linear construction on narrative film and paid relatively little attention to the importance of the interrelated structures of melodrama for the origin of film. Stage melodrama was structured around such moral comparisons embodied by characters, and Altman has now been joined by other scholars in emphasizing how our fundamental concepts of motion picture narratives were shaped by these structures.10 Altman is elaborating on one of the older tools of contemporary media analysis: the concept of binary opposition. This is another term to describe pop culture’s tendency to position characters in extreme contrast to each other to create more opportunities for conflict. Thus Ginger is portrayed as glamorous in contrast to Mary Ann’s down-home plainness, and the professor’s braininess is accentuated by Gilligan’s stupidity. Binary opposition is a simple, fairly static concept inherited from semiotics, indicating that any meaning is defined in relation to other meanings, that we only know what something is by knowing what it is not. We can see more clearly that the Western’s schoolmarm is the embodiment of civilization and repression because of the opposing presence of the dance hall girl.11 And yet I want to do something more intricate than simply trace thematic oppositions voiced by the characters in Ally McBeal as if they were

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characters in a film or a traditional television series. The mode of analysis that Altman suggests for dual focus narratives can be extended to serial narratives that have a system of interrelated characters. Instead of putting forward a notion of dual focus narrative as an alternative to the singular focus of the classic narrative, I argue for the value of examining the serial’s primary character network as a set of multiple, intersecting binary comparisons. We need not limit ourselves to two principal characters, as the musical does. The primetime serial asks us to stage a series of comparisons among its characters, evaluating their relative differences and thus creating a long-running moral balancing act. In this analysis, I do not examine all possible binary permutations of the characters; instead, I emphasize the comparisons that the serial itself emphasizes, the variations provided by both like-minded and opposing characters, connections that inevitably point us back to Ally herself.12 In Roland Barthes’s terms, this analytic approach emphasizes the semic codes (the qualities assigned to the characters) and the symbolic codes (the elaboration of thematic oppositions such as human vs. machine) over the hermeneutic codes (which encourage us to concentrate on what will happen next). Such an analysis conceptualizes narrative as being more “tabular,” as pairing like items as one might do in creating a filing system. The reader/viewer does this as he or she proceeds through the narrative, finding points of connection that link character to character, event to event.13 My argument here is not that all narratives focus on building this tabular system (though, as Barthes notes, not even the most classic narratives can concentrate completely on what will happen next), so this mode of analysis may not work well for some narrative genres. However, I assert that this approach helps one handle the enormity of plot in a serial. What might seem like a daunting task actually serves as a way to make the plot more manageable. One of the reasons that many books on television series simply re-present the plot season by season is that the narrative sweep of the serial makes it easier to think of the narrative in terms of what happened next. My approach is meant to show how one might analyze a long-running serial narrative, teasing out the configuration of serial elements that make it distinctive. The Difficulties of the Television Serial Form Traditional series television has the luxury of narrative amnesia; the characters can reenact variations on the key conflicts that established the series’

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popularity. Audiences tuning in to Everybody Loves Raymond can predictably expect Robert to be jealous of Raymond, Frank to be boorish, and Marie to be controlling. Part of the pleasure of the series is watching the various familiar permutations of the characters’ interactions as they deal with a new situation. The domestic crisis may change in the Barone household from episode to episode or the cases may change on Law and Order, but the basic character proclivities do not. Although an individual episode often centers on a character learning a valuable moral lesson, it is hard to spot the effects of that lesson in the next episode.14 It is as if a reset button were pushed at the beginning of each episode, wiping out the memory of history, reestablishing character relations by returning to their comfortable, familiar, initial positions.15 Such long-running series can be segmented into periods based on the addition or deletion of key characters, which often opens up new narrative and thematic possibilities. Replacing permissive Col. Henry Blake with a career army man (Col. Sherman Potter) on M*A*S*H enabled the series to realign and rearticulate the series’ initial conflict between the official military structure and the renegade doctors. Substituting a talented, pompous, upper-crust surgeon (Charles Emerson Winchester III) for the inept buffoon Frank Burns not only gave Hawkeye Pierce a potentially more challenging foil but also created the possibility of introducing a class dimension to the series.16 There is pressure to introduce new central characters in long-running series. This strategy gives an aging series something to publicize (and thus maintains the series’ visibility in the hullabaloo of the new fall lineup), and the new characters can enliven writers who may be running out of ideas for the old ones. But once a new character is established, the traditional series returns to reset mode, albeit with character relations now slightly altered. Comedies that sustain serial elements often do so by keeping the central character dynamics stable and bringing change in from outside the family circle. Roseanne and Grace under Fire maintain their memories, but their internal household relations change less than their external circumstances (Roseanne gets a new job, Grace finds a new lover). Daytime soap opera usually depicts dramatic occurrences that do not realign the fairly stable character relations, which avoids the challenges posed by serial narrative.17 Cha­racters may scheme and manipulate, setting up interesting narrative questions for the audience to ponder over the course of the show—Will the intrigue be discovered? Will the underhanded plotting succeed?—but the overall character positions tend to remain the same. The two central

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families in a soap community remain at war; if the matriarchal bitch is foiled in one gambit, she will return to scheme again. When characters do make fundamental shifts, the daytime soap can activate plot devices that bring ridicule from nonsoap fans. Soaps are stereotypically thought of as presenting more than their share of long-lost evil twins or bouts of amnesia, but these devices recognize both the difficulty of having a character act differently than she used to and the narrative necessity of character change. Soaps, then, remind us that not all changes in a serial are equal. All such events can add to the complicated pleasure of the longtime soap watcher, who knows the complicated history of character entanglements, but some occurrences provide narrative payoffs without altering long-term character traits.18 The high-wire act of creating a successful serial often involves balancing characters who change with characters who do not. If everyone changed throughout the series, it would cause narrative chaos. Having stable characters allows us to see other characters’ progress more easily.19 Tracing Margaret Houlihan’s evolution from uptight shrew to a well-rounded, sensitive woman on M*A*S*H in part depends on the presence of a contrasting character who does not evolve, in this case, the doltish Frank Burns. One of the challenges of presenting a serial is maintaining the overall balance of character growth and stability across the continuing narrative.20 What may be right for the character’s individual arc may not be best for the series as a whole. M*A*S*H, for instance, fell prey to a tendency for its beloved characters to become nicer in later years. As Hawkeye turned his back on blatant womanizing, as Charles began to show his generosity, as Margaret became softer, the series lost much of its potential for conflict among characters.21 Playing an unapologetically caricatured role (such as M*A*S*H’s Frank Burns or Ally McBeal’s Richard Fish) may be great fun for a while for an actor who enjoys the spotlight usually accorded brash characters.22 Over time, however, individual (and now powerful) actors in a series may lobby for changes to make their characters more challenging professionally, changes that may make sense for the characters but do not serve the needs of the series as a whole. The issue of the actor poses yet another difficulty in creating the televisual serial, as opposed to a literary one. Charles Dickens can create an unrepentantly nasty character who never reforms without getting complaints from the character. In television, however, protagonists are both characters and people who have real-life concerns. The character John Cage is played by Peter MacNicol, who may decide, as he did in season 5, that he wants to spend more time with his family; therefore, the John Cage role must be

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made to fit that request. Dickens’s Pip did not have drug possession arrests or contract disputes that had to be dealt with before his character could continue in the story; Miss Havisham was not lured by a promising feature film career or was not bored with her current role in Great Expectations, causing her to leave for a meatier role in another narrative.23 Actors’ external conflicts may alter the course of the televisual serial narrative.24 Thus the television serial is an ongoing negotiation between the real-world business constraints of producing a series and the continuing narrative that is being told about the diegetic characters. Real-world concerns can make it difficult to make long-term plans for characters in a serial, but several serials choose to organize around an overt goal. The X-Files, for instance, sets out to discover the “truth” that’s “out there” about alien life and about the government’s conspiracy to conceal. Because The X-Files operates in such a byzantine universe of lies and halftruths, it becomes easier for this series to replace certain long-term subgoals (discovering what happened to Mulder’s sister Samantha) with a set of new puzzles (explaining the mysterious black oil that possesses people). Goals can provide a powerful organizing structure for a serial, but they usually become exhausted and require adjustment. The similarly convoluted serial Alias appeared to have as its organizing goal the eradication of the covert spy organization SD-6, but in the second season viewers were surprised to see SD-6 destroyed and Sydney refocus her efforts on tracking down its chief, Arvin Sloane (only to have the series return roughly to its original configuration in season 4). Buffy the Vampire Slayer organized each season around preventing a new apocalypse, thus giving the series the awkward challenge of coming up with a new, even nastier apocalypse each season. The X-Files dealt with the challenge presented by its goals by creating a television show that was part series, part serial. Some episodes advanced the long-running quest for knowledge about alien life and the government’s involvement; others took advantage of the case-by-case potential of the series, having Mulder and Scully investigate a mystery that could be solved in a single episode with no ramifications on the question of alien life. As I close this brief survey of some of serial television’s key narrative challenges, I want to note the importance of static elements in creating serial narratives.25 Rarely do we see a television show oriented solely toward a character’s unbroken pursuit of a goal. A serial narrative establishes a thematic landscape for staging its events. Although a serial seems to unroll like one long narrative road, most serials double back, charting new events over similar thematic terrain.26 Different characters come into the spotlight at

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different times, bringing certain themes to the foreground.27 Characters may exhaust their own potential to articulate a theme, and this concern may be picked up by another character. Rather than view these contrasting character qualities as static, I pay attention to the individual arcs of the key characters as each of their own stories develop. Following the lead of the Formalists, below I examine Ally McBeal as an interrelated system of character functions. Richard: Honest Blurting, Childish Gratification, and the Shifting Character Network For Ally McBeal to construct a viable debate on a certain issue, it needs to have characters to voice all sides of the argument.28 A show with left political leanings has no difficulty coming up with well-intentioned characters to mouth generally progressive sentiments, but some form of counterbalancing rhetoric must be provided. Guest stars are the easiest, safest way to introduce this counterbalancing rhetoric, but this necessarily puts the guest’s opinion at a disadvantage, as our sympathies are much more likely to lie with the continuing cast of characters (see chapter 4 for the functions of guest stars). Ally McBeal must find a consistent way to express such arguments, and yet it cannot saddle one continuing character with the sole burden of voicing politically retrograde opinions. To keep a range of opinions in play, Ally relies on the blurt as a central narrative mechanism. Every main character in Ally McBeal, when pushed to the limit, blurts out an outlandish exaggeration of his or her position. They often retract their words after the heat of the moment has passed, but still the blurt airs the rhetoric in its strongest terms.29 Ally’s most outrageous statements are usually blurts that she uses to parry another person’s attack. To end the exchange, she escalates to the logical conclusion of her current position, no matter how nonsensical the results. When Billy attacks Ally for especially irrational behavior, their argument escalates as Billy says she needs psychiatric help, culminating in Ally blurting out, “Even if I get past all my problems I’m just gonna go out and get new ones! I like being a mess! It’s who I am!”30 The particular advantage of the blurt strategy is that it distances the characters from what they say while still revealing a deeply held stance. The blurt can be partly excused by the conversational circumstances, so the blurting characters are not held entirely responsible for what they say. The strategy keeps us from disliking continuing characters while also using them to introduce potentially outlandish positions.

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The most frequent blurter on Ally McBeal is senior partner Richard Fish. The blurt is important to the show’s overall gender debate, and it enables Richard to express sexist views without making him a hissable villain. Richard delivers the show’s most blatantly sexist material. For example: Where does it say women aren’t sexual objects? And here’s a flash: they like it. That’s why they’re out there getting their breasts done, their tummies tucked, their faces lifted, so we’ll keep looking at them sexually. And of course men are supposed to be the providers. Women get pregnant. They can’t work all fat and distended. They stay home with the kids while men bring home money. It’s not just God’s way; it’s the way women want it.31 The easiest way to handle such rhetoric in a recurring character is to position him as an unredeemable, vitriolic lout such as Archie Bunker. By consistently showing the character’s ridiculousness, the show can undermine his political positions. Certainly Richard is the character whose politics are most overtly condemned by the other characters ( John asks him, “Do you ever have a problem being profoundly ridiculous?”),32 but the show works hard to make Richard likable in spite of his insensitive blurts through a strategy that can be summarized by one of Richard’s favorite words, “Bygones.” Richard’s blurts are usually rapidly paced, often stunning his hearers, and before anyone has the chance to respond to what he has said, he pardons himself with a flippant “Bygones.” “Bygones” circumvents any further discussion; he issues a halfhearted apology while forgiving himself for his words and actions. Richard can announce his social errors while simulta­ neously excusing them (“Couldn’t help overhearing, probably because I was eavesdropping. Bygones!”).33 He appears to say what he thinks without considering the social consequences. Ally asks him, “How do these things just spew out of your head like this? Can’t you at least use your brain as a filter?”34 After Richard appears on television calling Massachusetts an “ugly state” where the “girls get huge in winter,” John yells, “Richard, can you not talk?” He retorts, “I can try . . . Whoops, seems I can’t! Kidding, bygones.”35 While most of the other characters’ self-censorship breaks down only occasionally, Richard appears to lack this basic mechanism, knowing that his words can be quickly excused.36 This freedom allows Richard to say horribly insulting things to people and get away with it. After Mark and Elaine begin seeing each other, he asks

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Mark, “How’s Elaine in bed? I’ve been meaning to find out, but I’ve been afraid of catching something.”37 At times Richard tries to reframe his personal barbs in more socially acceptable discourse, which can be even more insulting. When Georgia leaves the firm, he locks her out of her office, telling her, “It’s nothing personal. It’s just I can’t trust you. One of the reasons I hired you was that I was sure you’d steal files from your old employer. It’s a compliment to you, business ethics-wise.”38 Richard frequently uses the forms of acceptable polite conversation and undercuts them through sheer obvious insincerity. It is not that he is incapable of “nice-speak” but that he recognizes it and uses it baldly as a ploy. As he says in one of his aphoristic “Fishisms,” “Helping people is never more rewarding than when it’s in your own self-interest.”39 He understands the modern spirit of “sharing one’s feelings,” but the show uses his dialogue to mock how facile this emotional openness can be. The punchlines of Richard’s dialogue frequently come from providing unfeeling endings to emotional clichés. When Mark is troubled after he discovers that the woman he is romantically interested in is a transvestite, Richard (accompanied by soft, sensitive background music) advises: It’s not easy finding a person to love in this world. Whoever you end up with won’t be perfect. She’s beautiful. When people see you together, they’re more impressed with you. What I’m trying to say is, don’t dump her. Use her as bait [the sappy music grinds to a halt] to find attractive women without meat whistles.40 Richard says the nice supportive things that people want to hear, but they are so obviously used for self-serving purposes that the phrases are evacuated. When Ally hires Jenny without authorization, the firm is outraged until they hear that Jenny brings with her a case with 72,000 clients. On hearing that fiscally advantageous bit of information, Richard instantly changes his mind: “I think I speak for everyone (and if I don’t, who cares) in saying, thanks for joining us.”41 Because of the lack of consequences, Richard is able to say outrageously sour things about how the world works. His pronouncements on the dynamics of relationships are among the show’s most fatalistic: Women are beasts of insecurity. It’s all about want, want, want, and if you give them everything you have to give, then they learn to want what you can’t give. That’s why you withhold; it keeps them wanting

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what you have to offer. You want to keep a woman wanting forever. Treat her lousy, withhold, keep her miserable. Love is finite, only misery lasts forever.42 His predictions for what will happen to the characters are no less dire. When Georgia thinks she might be pregnant, she and Billy wonder why they are not more excited, Richard puts childbearing (normally a cause for celebration) into his own perspective: Having a baby is a selfish thing. You don’t say you want to GIVE life; you WANT a child. Don’t punish yourself for wanting to celebrate your greed, Georgia; you’re allowed to be melancholy. Your body is about to swell, distort, and (treadmills aside) it will never be the same. Billy, the baby’s going to see way more of her breasts than you will, and when you do get a visit, the big droop. Sleep deprivation: add 10 years to Georgia’s face the first year. The cost: can’t learn in public school, and what if you miss the deadline for private? Don’t beat yourself up for not getting excited here.43 Richard’s rants44 are full of hyperbole, which helps defang his character’s rhetoric simply because the positions he espouses are so outrageous. The careful back-and-forth debate of Ally McBeal gravitates toward a synthesis of various political opinions, which necessarily isolates a character like Richard who advocates outlying arguments that show no attempt at moderation. While bracketing Richard’s arguments as nonsensical, the show does air them and occasionally notes that “deep deep deep in the absurdity of the words that come from his mouth there is some truth.”45 Richard marshals a twisted form of “logic” to promote his positions. Just as his blurts poke fun at “nicespeak,” his rants satirize the way “logic” can be used to support even the most outlandish arguments. Richard is at his most outrageous when he attempts to cloak his sexist arguments in “scientific evidence.” He returns frequently to the notion of “anthropology” as supporting his understanding of gender relations. When Elaine asks him how to tell her boyfriend Mark that she cheated on him, Richard comes up with the following strategy: With men we go right to anthropology, nature. He’s conditioned to spread his seed around. When we sleep around we’re doing God’s work (Fishism). I’m not sure that’s true for women, though. Studies show that jealousy can result in an increased sexual passion and

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a stronger bond between partners. You slept with this other man to cement your bond with Mark. It’s very simple. You slept with him as a sign of commitment to Mark. Let’s turn to evolution. Are you with me? Studies show that a man whose partner has been inseminated by another man is at risk for propagation. Jealousy leads to passion, passion leads to orgasm, orgasm causes women to retain more sperm; you slept with this other man because you want to have Mark’s child. Off you go.46 When Richard strings together a ludicrous argument based on “anthropology” and “evolution,” the dialogue pokes fun at the tendency of popular discourse to cite science to prove the distinctions between genders (“Studies show . . .”). Whenever Richard uses dominant ideological rhetoric (whether it is the “nicespeak” of sharing feelings or the faith in science that upholds expert opinion), he makes it seem stupid because of the context, his hyperbole, or his insincerity. The series often punctuates Richard’s remarks sonically, letting us know that he has struck out again. If there is any doubt that his political opinions are going nowhere, the series puts that doubt to rest with a series of cowbell clunks after an especially outrageous remark. A variation on the drummer’s classic rim shot to make sure we recognize a standup comedian’s punch line, the cowbell clunk tells us literally that Richard has issued another verbal clunker. It underscores the idea that Richard’s remarks simply die after they are heard, that no one even needs to respond to them. Richard seems utterly honest about his dishonest, self-serving dealings. In a show that spends a great deal of time discussing the pros and cons of honesty, this lack of dissembling is a virtue. If Richard lies, at least he does so openly and unashamedly. After his girlfriend Whipper catches him illicitly fingering Attorney General Janet Reno’s neck wattle, he probes Elaine and Georgia for suggestions on how to handle his irate lover: “What kind of lie works here?”47 To get Mark to do what he wants, he gives the following career advice: “Do you ever want to make partner? To have what it takes to run your own firm, you need to learn to lie.”48 For Richard, lying is a tactic like any other to be used for his own purposes. Similarly, he is honest about his bigotry, even labeling it as such. Richard is unapologetically homophobic, so much so that when a transvestite client wants revenge for his insults, she can think of nothing worse than rigging a charity auction so that a gay man purchases a date with him.49 Yet this sheer honesty about his prejudices becomes a virtue. When Cindy the transvestite seeks a lawyer to represent her in her petition to marry a man,

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she chooses Richard, saying that if she can convince him, she can convince anyone.50 Honesty is prized so highly on the show that Richard’s openness appears to forgive his ineptness, bigotry, and bile. Richard’s brazenness works in combination with his inconsequential diatribes to isolate his character from having narrative force. Although he is senior partner, within the narrative he is feckless. Because his prevarications are so open and obvious, he cannot be an effective schemer, and because his self-forgiving venomous statements have no consequences, Richard has difficulty moving the plot forward. His fecklessness places him in his own orbit, separate from the primary motive forces of Ally McBeal. Because his honest revelations can be excused with a simple “Bygones,” his words can have little force on the show. Richard is the first example of a strategy I want to examine in relation to several other characters: the character depicts a variation on some of Ally’s key virtues (honesty, for instance), and then over time the serial shows how Ally’s way is superior, eventually gaining favor for its difficult protagonist. Thus Ally’s example is a more effective alternative to Richard’s constant blurts: she honestly voices her doubts but does so more privately, thus preserving her effectiveness in the public world, such as in the courtroom. Richard, on the other hand, is spectacularly useless as a lawyer. He practices law without seeming to have read the Constitution until perhaps season 4,51 and he freely admits to not knowing the law. His version of legal argument leans toward tossing legal words into a judicial salad, hoping the judge will bite on something (“That’s unconstitutional, pursuit of happiness, give her liberty or give her death, e pluribus unum, I don’t need to tell you . . . separation of powers, e pluribus costs”).52 In a Cyrano-esque episode Richard uses a radio earpiece in the courtroom so that John can tell him what to say, with Richard mouthing John’s legal responses like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Again, in this instance Richard’s honest inability plays to his advantage when he is able to use his own unfamiliarity with the law as an arguing point to win his case for his client.53 Richard’s ineptness in the courtroom throws into relief his primary goal: the acquisition of money, which is undercut because Richard does not have the legal skills to be a big earner. This laughable lawyer unabashedly acknowledges his fixation on cold hard cash. He has a framed graphic of dollar signs on his wall, and Ling confesses that she wears hundred dollar bills taped to her private parts so that she will smell like money and drive Richard wild.54 When listing the reasons he started the law firm, Richard gives “money” three of the top four positions.55 More than anyone else in

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the firm, he embodies the stereotype of the greedy lawyer, and so he serves as the principal mouthpiece for the rhetoric of acquisition and materialism. He functions as a historically specific portrait of the flashy-but-empty greed that characterized the rise-and-fall of dot.com businesses in the 1990s. Buoyed by the decade’s economic boom, several high-profile entrepreneurs launched their online businesses based largely on their professed expertise in the mystifying new world of the Internet. The demise of these firms uncovered the hollowness of their founders’ ambitions.56 Richard argues that money is either an end in itself or that it can buy sexual allure, making money the equalizer that allows less attractive people to improve their personal status.57 His understanding of his own attractiveness is rooted solely in his conspicuous consumption: “I know I’m sexy; I have money. I drink $100 bottles of wine, I drive a Mercedes. Men don’t come any sexier than me.”58 Richard articulates a hard-edged version of the same acquisitive desires that motivate Ally.59 The overblown nature of Richard’s greed helps to situate Ally’s occasional flashes of materialism as more balanced and nuanced. Ally, unlike Richard, can wait to gain her pleasures. Richard wants immediate fiscal or sexual gratification, as is clearly demonstrated in his most unusual sexual peccadillo, his fetish for touching a woman’s wattle. When a matchmaker asks him what he wants in a woman, he says, “I look for many qualities in a woman: honest, kind, funny, but mainly I’m looking for someone who’s thin who used to be fat, who lost 75 to 100 pounds, where the stretched skin just hangs from her neck, a kind gentle woman with drip wattle.”60 Whatever Richard is doing, he can be distracted by his unorthodox sexual fixations. He interrupts discussions with an overweight arbiter to perform a “study” on the vibrations on her tricep wattle.61 Guest star Christine Lahti can gain control of him by simply offering him her foot in a sensual manner.62 He finds himself unable to concentrate when he is in the presence of Liza’s sweat.63 Rather than engage in mature sexual interactions, Richard remains fixated on physical substitutes, and even those threaten to unman him. Frequently he is left flabbergasted, totally overcome by his own desires. Sexual gestures (such as Ling rubbing his body with her hair, or a kiss) can paralyze him, or make him fall to his knees, crawl along the floor, and collapse.64 His all-consuming devotion to pursuing his private gratifications limits his ability to have a mature romantic relationship. Richard’s desires for immediate gratification position him as more childish than aberrant. Liza palliates him by licking his thumb and sticking it into his mouth as she engages in baby talk.65 He is concerned only with his

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Childish fixation: Richard’s (Greg Germano) sexual obsession with women’s necks distracts him from his profession. (Ally McBeal © 1998 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All rights reserved)

own satisfaction, not his partner’s. When asked if he thought he was good in bed, Richard replies, “I know I’m good. I’m always satisfied. Good for me.”66 His immature inability to censor his outlandish thoughts poses both personal and professional difficulties. His nonsensical legal misfires often result from his use of childlike logic in the courtroom, and he ineffectively uses a child’s strategies in managing the firm. For example, he explains his decision to hire Mark immediately after Billy dies as being inspired by his father buying him a new puppy immediately after his dog had been hit by a car.67 The idea of such a childish person running the business side of the law firm seems ill advised, but Ally McBeal asserts the importance of such immature behavior to the well-being of the firm.

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Childishness is at the foundation of Richard’s idea for the law firm, as revealed in a conversation with John during the “Over the Rainbow” episode, in which the firm seems to be breaking apart with internal conflicts. While seated, Richard says, “When I was little I just hated the grownups. I would vow that when I grew old I didn’t want to become an adult.” John replies, “I think you succeeded there.” Richard says, “I harbored this fantasy that we’d get to be kids at this place. We work together, we play together; it’d be fun. Look how it’s turning out. War.” The camera cuts to a shot of Richard the child sitting in the adult Richard’s chair, and the child says, “What happened?” John looks at him, and we see the adult version of Richard once again.68 The childishness in Richard may cause him to make inept legal arguments and to pursue immature sexual fixations, but it also is crucial to the reconceptualization of the workplace in Ally McBeal. One of the overt aims of the firm (in addition to money) is “fun,” the chance to retreat from the seriousness of the law into a place where personal matters become central. Richard’s childishness is not merely a comic pretense to make him the butt of jokes. This overtly expressed allegiance to fun is necessary to motivate the basic design of a firm such as Cage and Fish. Fun removes the adult notions of privacy that dictate men and women have separate bathrooms. The fantasy of Cage and Fish is the idea of a workplace where play is integrated into adult drudgery and responsibility, just as the bar that the characters frequent is in the same building as the law offices. The series frequently presents companies that have reorganized in innovative ways to operate better within the blurred boundaries of the modern workplace. Some firms have a single-sex workforce; others are organized like a beehive; still others have “beach day” at the office. When these firms end up in court, we see the strength and failings of the insight that created such alternate structures. The series itself also offers Cage and Fish as a fantasy model for the workplace, one structured around the very childishness that makes Richard Fish a bad lawyer and a crippled lover. For most of its central characters, Ally McBeal reveals the impact of childhood on adult selves. Childhood is never far away in Ally; it can re­ appear quickly, as when Richard discussed his initial vision of the firm. The series reveals the early genesis of the character’s behavior, showing that the adult Richard is still stuck in the coping strategies he learned as a child. When Richard’s father (played by Murphy Brown veteran Charles Kimbrough) is sued for sexual harassment because he is entirely ruled by his desire for immediate sexual gratification, we discover the model for Richard’s pleasure-centered personality.69 Richard says that the origin of his inability

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to commit to a relationship lies in his early understanding of marriage as witnessed in his parents: “I’m afraid of my parents. All they did was fight. I grew up wearing headphones blaring music. My heart would actually quicken at the end of songs because I knew in that little gap I’d be able to hear.” Whipper says, “So you equate marriage with that.” Richard replies, “I equate depending on anyone with that.”70 This origin myth for Richard’s fears remarkably resembles Ally’s own childhood method of blocking out terrifying parental arguments (see chapter 1).71 While the psychoanalytic narrative of the series details how Ally is able to transcend her childhood trauma, Richard demonstrates one possible future for her if she remains under the sway of early experiences. Ally’s tendencies toward paralyzing romantic fears are given full expression in Richard. The challenge for Ally is to retain a bit of the childlike playfulness and silliness that Richard demonstrates without being ruled by childish anxieties and impulses. Throughout most of the series, Richard remains unrepentantly the same, making his character enjoyably outlandish but necessarily limiting his possibilities for character growth. The series ends, however, not with Ally’s marriage but with Richard’s redemption through love and his growing acceptance of a marital commitment. As part of his “sudden dash for the end zone of maturity,” in the fifth season Richard actually manages to win a case based on his own legal arguments.72 His father’s sexual harassment case precipitates his decision to profess his honest affection for Liza, and this progress culminates in the final episode of the series in which he marries her, attributing this newfound boldness to Ally’s inspiration. This final episode reiterates the show’s unusual blend of an ensemble cast structure with a strong focus on a central protagonist: characters cannot even get married without the ceremony being primarily concerned with Ally. So why does the show end with the growth of one of its most stubbornly immature characters? Certainly the abrupt cancellation of the series in its fifth season helps explain this turn of events, but Richard’s evolution began about halfway through the fifth season before the cancellation was announced.73 The change can be attributed to a shift in the network of characters. When John’s character leaves the main cast to make only occasional guest appearances, the series is left with few choices of principal characters who will grow. Ally McBeal turns its attention to the unlikely task of helping Richard mature. The primary reason for the shift is to maintain the overall balance of characters in the ensemble, not particular character’s makeup. Throughout most of the series, Richard’s function in the ensemble is fairly stable: he shows us

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what might happen if Ally gave in to her childhood fears of commitment, if she listened solely to her materialist desires, if she let herself blurt out whatever she thought. When the overall configuration of characters changes, this opens up an opportunity for individual characters to change. Depending on the construction of the character network at different moments in the series, Richard acts either as one of the characters most resistant to becoming “nice” or the one who learns lessons from Ally’s tutelage. Characters in a serial network adjust to preserve the balance of the serial network as a whole, and Richard offers a good example of how characters grow or stabilize according to the overall needs of the network. Ling: Competence, Confidence, and the Compulsion toward Niceness When Ally McBeal uses a central character to voice one of its central concerns, it often seeks to find another character of the other gender to share this concern. To do otherwise would be to open up Ally to charges of simple gender stereotyping; for example, making Richard the only brash, insulting loudmouth would rely on an overly familiar image of masculinity. So the show proceeds by making gendered pairs of characters, demonstrating how a certain strategy plays when used by a man or when used by a woman. And of course a strategy does read differently depending on the character’s character.74 An insulting woman resonates differently in the culture than an insulting man. By making such pairings, Ally McBeal can discuss what difference gender makes, given similar behavior.75 Ally builds its network by refusing to make any two characters simply mirror each other. Richard and Ling share many qualities, but Ling does not share Richard’s all-consuming orientation toward sex; instead, she shares with Nelle a much cooler, distanced view of sexuality. Pairing by pairing, connection by connection, the character network is built that sustains Ally’s conflicts for five seasons and that allows the show to examine the significance of gender in multiple ways. In this way, the serial narrative advances, and so does the overall argument of the series. An obvious connection between Ling Woo and Richard Fish is that both speak their minds heedless of other people. Thus Ling is a female version of Richard’s tendency toward uncensored communication. Ling can say whatever she wants, and she does not seem to care who it hurts. But whereas Richard’s insults are tossed out without any seeming awareness that words can have consequences, Ling’s attacks are more pointed

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and consciously vicious. She attacks because her words have consequences, clearing a path for her own selfish interests. She lambastes people regardless of the norms of propriety, even harassing people with physical handicaps. When visiting the hospital, Ling accidentally collides with a man in a wheelchair, and she shouts, “Watch where you’re going! It’s bad enough that you people get all the parking spots!”76 A passing blind man accidentally taps her with his cane, and Ling cries, “Ow! They’re not weapons! . . . I so prefer the deaf to the blind.”77 Nor is Ling above impersonating the blind to get her way in something as simple as crossing a street. In one episode she puts on sunglasses, and with the push of a button she extends a telescoping white cane and walks across a busy street, tires squealing as she hits a couple of cars with her cane. Like Richard, Ling is unapologetic for these affronts. When Richard sees her unorthodox method of crossing a street, he points out that “there are real blind people in the world.” Ling retorts, “It’s not like any of them saw me.”78 To Melanie, who suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, she says, “I think Tou­ rette’s is so cool. It would be great to be able to annoy people like that. You woop and twitch. Any other good ones?”79 Ling aspires to (and frequently attains) a freedom of speech that can annoy any passerby or coworker. Her barbs are a one-person assault on the notion that anyone should be protected from the excesses of speech, and the series positions these attacks as an acknowledgment of a fundamental equality of persons. In “Angels and Blimps,” a terminally ill boy is drawn to Ling particularly because she is hostile to him. Other people’s compassion reminds him of his illness; Ling treats him as she would anyone—not necessarily in a nice way (“The way you talk to me I never feel like I have cancer”).80 The series uses such objectionable speech not as a model for real-life behavior but as a way to encourage us to interrogate the unintended consequences of protecting others from harmful speech. Ling’s verbal assaults position others as “tough enough to take it,” reminding us that a too careful politeness can be condescending and insulting. Just as Richard lampoons “nicespeak,” Ling sends up the conventions of conversational tact concerning identity politics. Like Richard, Ling is impatient about getting what she wants, frequently announcing that she is uninterested in proceedings that do not directly involve her. When John questions a witness in court, co-counsel Ling objects to the judge: “I’m bored. As an officer of the court, I have a duty to be open and forthright. I think the witness tedious and I’m concerned for the jury’s attention span.”81 Even when she becomes a judge, she pays attention to cases not based on their merit but based on whether they interest

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her. Unlike Richard’s drive for immediate sexual and monetary gratification, Ling seems to be more concerned with petty annoyances that disrupt her pleasures. Over and over she registers complaints about small inconveniences, such as not being given a glass of water.82 When John gets stuck in an elevator (his legs dangling out of the doors), Ling is concerned only about how this embarrassing state of affairs affects her life: “Does this mean I’m going to have to take the stairs?”83 Ling can take offense at the slightest of slights, such as pronouncing her name with a hard g. She pretends to be wounded by such minor matters, as if her sensibilities were extremely delicate, which seems incongruous given the severity of her treatment of others. The pretense of delicate feelings reinvokes the rhetoric of victimhood; Ling uses the rhetoric of woundedness as a deliberate ploy and therefore emphasizes tender feelings as a strategy. The insincerity of her offended posture shows one of Ally McBeal’s central assertions about victimhood: to assume the role of victim is a choice. As I discuss more closely in chapter 5, the show asserts that difficult circumstances place a person in the position of becoming a victim, but the person has a choice of how to react to that position. Ling emphasizes the individual’s choice in disadvantaged positions by lurching wildly between strategies—sometimes lashing out, sometimes displaying heightened sensitivity. For Ling, the best protection against words is your own words. Ling’s defense against others is to attack first, so she is positioned on the show as a kind of antivictim. Nelle says, “I admire the way you don’t let yourself be pushed around. Too many people when they think they’ve been wronged just walk away.”84 It is hard to imagine anyone following Ling’s example in order to avoid seeming like a victim, yet her verbal assaults present a fantasy of aggressive counterattacks that lends her authority. Ally says, “She’s my hero. She’s vicious, I disagree with almost everything she says, she treats me like dirt, and somehow she’s my hero.”85 Ling’s indiscriminate viciousness reveals a confidence that Ally never attains because of her self-censorship and indecision; she portrays an overblown version of what Ally might look like if she were supremely in control of her own life: a bold, take-no-prisoners, unapologetically assertive woman who does not worry about others’ opinions. While Ling’s inappropriate verbal attacks violate the spirit of feminism, her aggressive mode of self-protection depicts a woman in command of her own course. Obviously, Ling’s effrontery depicts a cartoonish version of aggression, which prevents the audience from seeing her as a literal role model

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for assertiveness. But she undeniably exhibits a fantasy of the unadulterated power to speak one’s mind confidently. Ling is not only supremely confident; she is also competent in a wide variety of endeavors. We first encounter her as a successful entrepreneur coordinating several businesses—including warehouses, factories, a mudwrestling club, and two escort services, one for women and one for boys— but we also learn that her financial skills are only the beginning of her accomplishments. In her spare time she designs clothes, cuts hair, plays checkers deftly, assembles a Rubik’s cube in seconds, and is a champion at dancing the twist.86 Ling’s numerous skills serve several comic functions. She performs a bit of meta-humor about the tendency of television characters to announce suddenly that they have heretofore unknown skills that are needed for a certain episode’s plot (“I didn’t know you could fly a plane!”). Instead of spreading such competencies around among the main characters, Ally McBeal parodies the narrative convenience of this device by making Ling supercompetent (when Ling announces that she is an accomplished swing dancer, she says, “Don’t you people know by now I can do anything?”).87 Also, the series pokes fun at the figure of the superwoman, the unrealistic ideal of the woman who has it all, who can effortlessly juggle an enormous range of personal and professional tasks. The dizzying array of Ling’s interests lampoons the notion that a single woman unencumbered by a serious emotional relationship would therefore have time to pursue fulfillment on multiple fronts. Ling succeeds in her endeavors without any overt effort, thus lambasting a whole range of assumptions about the American Dream. She is intensely competitive but uninterested in doing the labor required to win. “I have no interest in doing anything unless I can win at it,” she says.88 Nor is she penalized for her aversion to hard work. She is rewarded not for her preparation or for her people skills but for the exact reason that should theoretically interfere with her progress: because she is not nice. Ling is appointed to be a judge and becomes instantly popular because of her hostile treatment of the people appearing before her. Quickly she is offered a television series, prompting Nelle to note, “[If ] you treat people rotten enough, eventually somebody will put you on television.”89 Ling has achieved many of the overt goals of feminism: confidence, success, competence, and power. The series caricatures the way such goal-oriented characters are portrayed in the media, undercutting her success by making it too easy, her competence by making it too implausible, and her confidence by making it too acerbic.

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The series further undercuts this power by tying Ling’s gratifications to blatant materialism. While Richard’s gratifications are more like fetishes, Ling’s impatient desires can be satisfied with immediate acquisition, reiterating an omnipresent stereotype of women on commercial television. She says, “Despite all the glitter the world appears to offer, true happiness can be found only in one thing: shopping.”90 Just as she can be distracted by simple annoyances, she can be soothed by creature comforts. Her attention to petty details keeps her world bounded, and here she clearly depicts an alternative to Ally. Although Ally is certainly not above getting fixated on the details of style and comfort, she also pursues the larger payoff of emotional attachment. The pleasures available to Ling are economic and not emotional and therefore are more subject to her control. If Ally could delimit her desires to Ling’s boundaries, she could gain the hope of more dependable satisfaction, but she refuses to do so. The narrative logic of the show reveals Ling’s materialism as empty, leaving her with only token moments of pleasure instead of the deeper but less dependable happiness that Ally seeks. One source of pleasure that Ling generally eschews is sex, one of Richard’s primary immediate gratifications. She confesses that she thinks sex is “messy and overrated”91 and keeps her boyfriend Richard at bay when he pursues intercourse with her. She offers her infantilized and fetish-driven partner a series of physical substitutes for the more emotionally complicated act of sex, including stroking him with her hair and sucking his finger. Her hypercompetence extends into the bedroom, a discovery we make when we learn that she has been postponing intercourse with Richard because she has been protecting him from her sexual expertise: If I made love to you, you’d go blind. . . . I’m amazing in bed. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I have ruined lives, and I cannot take another man saying there’s nobody else after me. I’ve tried everything. I’ve gone half speed; I’ve gone slow; it always turns out to be the best sex the man has ever had.92 Finally she accedes to his desires but only after he signs a hefty waiver and confidentiality agreement to protect her sexual secrets.93 Ling is so sexually proficient that she cannot mention the word “sex” without provoking a lusty response from both men and women.94 Because Ling’s attitude toward sex is cold and disinterested, the sexual arena becomes yet another sphere where she can exert her own form of control. She has no problem using her allure to gain power and influence

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over men, who are weaker because they must serve the compelling interest of their “dumb stick.” She defends her mud wrestling club by arguing that the women there exploit their customers’ weakness “by teasing men with something they’ll never get their hands on. That goes to the very essence of a woman. Sex is a weapon. We tease, we tantalize, we withhold; it’s something we do in almost every walk of life, be it marriage or business. God gave us that advantage by giving men the dumb stick.”95 If sex is a “weapon” and not an expression of intimacy, then there is no reason for Ling not to use it for her own ends, to gain further control over her life and to press her advantage against others. The image presented here is a familiar stereotype of Asian women: the “Dragon Lady,” whose fearsome, devouring, vicious, cool, exotic sexuality is the flip side of the demure, passive “lotus flower” stereotype.96 Ling’s character gains power by evoking this stereotype, and she does so quite consciously. Ling is not above using her ethnicity as a means of gaining advantage, as she demonstrates in one of her closing arguments. She says to the jury, “There’s a very old expression in China,” and then she begins to speak Chinese. In subtitles we see her saying, “It really doesn’t matter what I say here, because none of you speak Chinese. But you can see from my sad face I’m sympathetic. You hear from my tone it’s appropriate to feel sorry for me. As I drop to a faint whisper [which she does], you’ll feel the sorrow yourself. I’m going to finish now, pretend to cry.” She does so and walks off.97 For Ling, any quality she possesses—her attractiveness, her assertiveness, her ethnicity—is fair game to exploit for her personal advantage. While reiterating stereotypes of vicious Asian sexuality or acquisitive women, she cannot be reduced purely to those stereotypes because she uses them as conscious strategies. Just as Richard boldly displays his own obnoxious opinions without guile or deceit, Ling unashamedly adopts stereotypes as consciously chosen poses and then discards them when it suits her. Such a complicated set of identities necessarily makes it impossible to find Ling’s “core,” and unsurprisingly Ling is the only major character who has no origin story for her specific pathologies. She is exempt from the doggedly psychoanalytic focus of the series, which could be attributed to a stereotypically Asian “mysteriousness” or alternatively to her position as poseur supreme. In any case, the value that the series places on honesty clearly disadvantages Ling’s elaborate enactment of strategic personae. Because Ling can lurch from verbal predator to faux victim to sexual dominatrix so quickly, it becomes impossible for her to achieve the honest emotional relationship that Ally seeks.

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Ling’s bluster, therefore, is exposed as a defense mechanism to keep her from the risks that intimacy poses. She is drawn to Richard as a romantic partner and to Nelle as a friend because they both share her fear. In an especially forthcoming moment, Ling acknowledges her bond with Nelle and their similar choices in men: “Neither of us wants a man to go spelunking to our emotional core. The echo would kill him. I like Fish and you like John because we know they’ll never get there. They’re fun, we laugh, they pick up the check.”98 The offensive barbs are meant to keep people at an arm’s length, so that Ling cannot be touched. She fights, Nelle asserts, because it is easier to deal with conflict than with thoughts about her own loneliness (the very thoughts that Ally openly acknowledges). As Ling herself says, “Fighting is better than pity.”99 Certain individuals can reach Ling’s heart, as we discover when she gives herself over to an unexpected night of passion with Jackson Duper. Over several episodes, we watch her pine for him secretly, but when at last they have the opportunity to become a couple, Ling refuses to take a chance, saying she is afraid of losing control.100 In occasional moments Ling acknowledges the pitfalls of choosing such a distancing strategy. She admits to Richard that she has second thoughts about being a judge: “It’s lonely on that bench. I thought I’d like being in a place where people can’t get to you, but once in a while. . . .” Richard completes her thought: “You need to have somebody who can get to you.”101 Her stance before the world provides her with protection, but it also hems her in, as opposed to Ally’s vulnerability. Ling’s defensiveness and distance, combined with her viciousness and lack of psychoanalytic explanation, can make her seem irredeemably cold. Ling admits this herself: “It must be hard being human. I wouldn’t know. I never tried it.”102 Ling is the character most often portrayed using animal effects. She frequently responds with a range of animal growls and snarls; she breathes fire like a literal manifestation of the dragon lady. This imagery reinforces the bestial undertones of the Asian stereotype. At best, her antagonistic stance can make her seem powerfully defiant; at worst, it can make her appear inhuman. One wishes that these excesses of character did not play into a racial stereotype, but Ling demonstrates Ally McBeal’s tendency to push its characters toward their logical extreme. Although Ally does not seek to position Ling as a melodramatic villain (e.g., J. R. Ewing) or an unrepentant buffoon (e.g., Archie Bunker), it creates a remarkably heartless character in Ling. It is difficult to maintain such a characterization, given the primetime television norm of making popular characters more lovable over time. So Ally makes halfhearted attempts

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to redeem Ling, to show the softness behind her hard facade. The series does so in fits and starts, never making a convincing case for the kinder, gentler Ling. In part this is because Ling is not the protagonist and therefore does not receive the extended attention that Ally necessarily does; in part this is because of how convincingly ruthless the character is drawn initially. We discover that Ling volunteers as a dance partner at a nursing home and that she arranges for Barry Manilow to appear in order to cheer up a despondent John Cage.103 Ling also turns down a man she is interested in so that she will not destroy his wedding plans with a friend of hers.104 These moments ring false as we are not sufficiently prepared for her isolated acts of charity. One understands the desire to soften Ling (especially considering the racial politics of her characterization), yet the show’s token efforts to humanize her feel cowardly, as if the show were not sticking to its guns. Late in the series Ling herself acknowledges the pressures and dramatic need to make television characters evolve. In a lovely bit of metacommentary, Ling notes that “her character wasn’t growing enough”105 and therefore needed new narrative material. Ling is a remarkable character partly because of this awareness of herself as a character, as someone who chooses to manipulate her ethnicity, her femininity, and even her fictional status for her own ends. Here Ling embodies a different narrative lesson from the one we learned from Richard. Whereas Richard, a comparably constructed character, is redeemed when the character network needs someone to grow, Ling remains entrenched in her initial boldly hostile personality with only token efforts to make her nicer. Someone in the character network needs to remain assertively unlikable in order for conflict to continue. Ling reveals both the tendency of serial television to create stably defined aggressive supporting characters and the difficulties caused by the pressure to make them likable. Nelle: The Consequences of Realistic Compromise and Career Control Nelle Porter is the most contradictorily constructed supporting character on Ally McBeal. The series never appears to know exactly what to do with her, so its judgment of her seems the harshest of all. Although she shares many points of comparison with Ling, her character trajectory is not so singly focused. Sometimes the series uses Nelle to present its most chilling portrait of a driven career woman; at other times Nelle wanders confusedly

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from situation to situation. Unlike Ling, therefore, she demonstrates how a character can wax and wane based on the varying needs of the overall character network. Nelle shares Ling’s competitive nature, and her initial introduction to the firm depicts her as a woman who loves to stage and win contests. Even a simple handshake becomes a competition. When Nelle shakes hands, she does not proffer her hand fully, making the other person meet her more than halfway, which stages a brief standoff when she is introduced to Ally.106 Because she is Ling’s friend, they rarely end up on opposing sides, but when they do, they bring out each other’s competitive nature. When Nelle and Ling enter a charity date auction, they end up in a war of words as they argue over which of them would receive the largest bid for her romantic company.107 The women in the firm instantly dislike Nelle, creating an understanding of the professional world of women as a female-only competition. Nelle’s introduction does not seem to destabilize power relations among the men of the firm (who ogle her good looks unashamedly), but the series depicts Nelle as a threat to Ally, Georgia, and Elaine, in terms of both their ability to receive admiring looks from men and their professional respect. Although the three initial women in the firm were fairly supportive of each other, Nelle upsets these fairly stable relations and makes it appear that the resulting competition is her fault. Although not directly competitive with the men in the firm, Nelle is quite assertive toward them, especially in sexual matters. As she and John Cage begin a romantic relationship, she is the one who pursues him, leaving John tongue-tied: “Can we go out on a real date with a beginning and an end? [ John’s nose whistles.] I know you’d prefer to covet me from afar, but it’s driving me a little crazy. Whistle once for yes [ John does].”108 When John tries to muster his courage to kiss her, she instead plants a kiss on his lips.109 Even outside the context of a dating relationship, Nelle is the sexual aggressor. She consistently makes playfully lascivious comments to Billy, often in front of his wife. When Georgia questions an especially ludicrous case, Nelle explains, “Actually I’m just trying to tie us up in court while I tie up Billy. Kidding.”110 Finally Billy confronts her about her behavior, and she tops him in this interchange: Nelle: [Ling] didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Show me the boo boo. Let me kiss it. Billy: I’m getting tired of that, too, you treating me like some beanie baby. Is it to titillate me or to offend Georgia? Nelle: Let’s see, Georgia’s not here. It must be to titillate you.

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Billy: [Music begins, “There’s a New Man in Town”] You want to turn me on? Try acting a little older than a high school sophomore. Nelle: How’s this? [She grabs his crotch, and the music slows down] Junior. [Both Nelle and Ling laugh as he leaves]111 One reading of Nelle’s behavior is that she is aggressive. Another reading would be that Nelle is highly capable of articulating her needs. She is remarkably forthcoming with her romantic partners, for example, telling John that she is losing interest as he flounders around finding a way to approach her. She boldly lets John know that she enjoys the thought of sex in public places. Concerning more emotionally intimate matters, she can be just as clear about what she wants. When she and John discuss the problems posed by their different personalities, she retorts, “This Ally McBealit-takes-two-to-make-one mind-set, it just makes me vomit. . . . I want to be with someone different from me.”112 Although she believes in a different concept of relationships than does Ally, she nevertheless depicts the honest communication in relationships that Ally aspires to and eventually attains. Ally learns to be more like Nelle in this respect but without some of Nelle’s more problematic characteristics. Although Nelle is frank in her discussions of relationships, in her professional dealings she leans toward guile and strategic falsehood to a remarkable extent even for a lawyer. Nelle is capable of doing many more dirty tricks than either of the other primary characters on the show to advance her ambitions. In the final season she finally finds a partner who is just as committed to using underhanded dealings in the practice of law (Wilson Jade, played by Bobby Cannavale), and the slimy Wilson recognizes a kindred spirit: “I must say that so many women lawyers have that disgusting heart of gold underneath that slick exterior, but you, you’re so refreshing.”113 The two of them conspire to win cases with a combination of playacting and outright deception. They team up to play good cop/bad cop to win a bigger settlement; they blackmail someone suing their client by creating a fake sex video digitally. One client tells them, “You are the scummiest, most disgusting lawyers I’ve ever encountered. . . . They set the bar so low, and you just slithered right under it.”114 The combination of Nelle’s personal maliciousness and professional capability makes her a more dangerous threat than either Ling or Richard, the less legally proficient vicious characters. Unlike Ling, success does not happen magically for Nelle; she is not afraid of hard work to get what she wants. Nelle, therefore, is the clearest depiction of a stereotypically strident and capable career-centered

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woman, and the series’ depiction of her fate is its strongest indictment of the exclusively careerist path. Nelle’s boldest, most aggressive career move is when she tries to stage a hostile coup at Cage and Fish. Initially employed as a rainmaker to bring in clients, Nelle later becomes disgruntled and uses a range of underhanded tricks to lure clients away to start her own firm. Borrowing a page from Ling’s playbook, she represents herself as an innocent victim of Cage and Fish’s hostile work environment, and she plays her part well. When she finally gets what she wants and what she worked so hard to achieve (a firm of her own), Ally McBeal shows that the end result of this hard labor is utter isolation. The “Hope and Glory” episode ends with a long shot of the profoundly sad figure of Nelle, sitting alone in her new office, pouring herself a “celebratory” glass of wine. There is little nuance here, little acknowledgment that a professionally driven woman could gain success without backstabbing and without engaging in bitter competition with other women, and the lack of nuance helps give the character’s fate its rhetorical force. Here is the series’ ultimate portrait of the career woman as supremely capable and blindly ambitious, and its condemnation of her is complete. Having gained what she thought she desired, Nelle almost instantly flip-flops. She says that she was happy at Cage and Fish, and she tearfully repents and returns to the fold, saying that “the practice of law is only as good as the people you work with.”115 Thus Nelle is shown as unscrupulously ambitious but pathetically lacking in conviction in her own course of action, doubly damning her. More than any other major character, Nelle has the drive and the ability to control her life, both professionally and personally,116 and the series portrays this desire to control her fate as too constricting, causing her to become “Sub-Zero Nelle.” This nickname makes partial reference to her sexual coldness, but Nelle provides a variation on Ling’s sexual frigidity. Whereas Ling actively dislikes sex but uses it as a weapon for her own gains, Nelle says she enjoys sex but within limits ( John says that he is not sure Nelle is in favor of orgasms: “She’s big on control. She doesn’t like to let go”).117 Her desire to control her sensuality, to keep it within the bounds that keep her feeling safe and comfortable, has less to do with her sexuality, however, than with her emotional coldness. Like Ling and Richard, she fears the possible damage that emotional vulnerability can bring about. Sex for Nelle, therefore, allows her to experience a semblance of intimacy without incurring destabilizing emotional risks. Ling tells Nelle, “[You are] emotionally inept. You like sex because you can mistake it for passion, convince yourself you have a heart.”118 Ling recognizes that both she and Nelle

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have chosen their lovers so that they will not be threatened with the exposure that comes with intimacy (“You like [ John] because he won’t force you to up your thermostat”).119 When she does let her guard down with John, she becomes hurt because of the image of herself she sees in her lover’s eyes, and we eventually learn that her entire impetus to start her own firm came from this interpersonal wounding.120 The primary charge that Ally McBeal levels against Nelle is that her tight-fisted emotional control will result in isolation both in work and in her emotional life. In the Ally universe personal qualities affect success in work, and eventually even Nelle’s professional acumen cannot keep her emotional coldness from bringing about her downfall. When Ally, not Nelle, becomes a partner after John steps down, Richard argues that Ally’s advantage is not that her legal skills are superior to Nelle’s but that her personal qualities would make her a better partner. On becoming a partner, Ally’s first advice to Nelle is that she should become nicer. Repeatedly Nelle tries to gain success in the Ally universe through hard work, but she remains unwilling to do the emotional work that is rewarded in this fictional world. Instead Nelle concentrates her efforts solely on the professional sphere, and as befitting a fairly broad portrayal of a career-driven woman, she is totally uninterested in having children. The Ally world depicts raising children as one of the highest callings, so to reject that option is to reveal a lack within the character. Nelle’s negative reaction to children seems to be both an instinctual distaste and a reasoned position. When she and Ling see a mother ogling her babies, both stick their fingers in their mouths in a gesture mimicking gagging.121 In one of her diatribes against child rearing, she emphasizes the visceral disgust that accompanies a child. When asking if a client would be willing to bear the brunt of responsibility for a child, she asks, “Is he prepared to stay home, give up his job, scrape vomit off the burpy blanket, aspirate mucus out of its little plugged nose, wipe its bottom clean of lime green poopy?”122 For a person desiring more control of her fate, children and the chaos they bring necessarily represent the antithesis of such tidy instincts. Nelle integrates her longest rant against childhood into the summary argument for one of her cases, in which she defends a law firm from charges that they did not make one of their attorneys a full partner because she was a mother: Women want to have it all these days, but when you look at the men who have risen to the top, they’ve sacrificed a little on the family side.

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Women can’t do that; it’s unthinkable. We have to be there for the children. If a woman puts in 14–16 hour days while she has kids, then she’s a bad mother. Where the gender bias lies is in the automatic assumption that every woman wants to be a mother. There’s the bigotry. Not all of us want to get pregnant? What about those women who choose 14-hour days? Should they cede advantage to those colleagues who choose motherhood? She’s not asking for equal treatment; she’s asking for special consideration. There are women like me who want to earn their partnerships under the same standards as men. You [the woman bringing the suit] chose to cut back on work. You probably know joys I’ll never imagine. I chose to concentrate on work, not family. You could bestow on her the same privileges I enjoy at work, but you can’t do it in the name of fairness.123 Here Nelle broadens her argument about childhood from personal distaste to understanding of the professional consequences of the choice to raise a child. Again, that word “choice” factors in, as it does in all postfeminist discourses, but the sore spot is not whether femininity is a series of choices but whether postfeminist images present those choices as being free.124 Ally McBeal does not make the choice of a primarily professional life look easy. Nelle is quite clear about the trade-offs she sees in how she spends her time, and she attacks the use of legal definitions of fairness as mechanisms to defend the choice to have a family. Here Nelle articulates one of the series’ eventual stances about the distinctive realms of the law and the family: a society can choose to give special status to parenting, but to do so using legal arguments about fairness and discrimination is to misuse those concepts. Nelle’s clear-eyed understanding of the professional and personal costs of child rearing echoes her honest stance toward other aspects of her life. The twist that the show presents is to argue that the world (or at least the Ally universe) does not proceed in a rational fashion, rewarding those who work hardest with the goals they desire. In Nelle we see and hear the show’s most articulate and consistent argument for a career orientation, but Ally reveals that these desires for advancement are rooted in childhood fears. Nelle does not want children for cogently argued reasons, but she also rejects them because of unresolved issues in her own childhood. Not surprisingly, Ally McBeal reveals the early traumas that resulted in Nelle’s controlling, cold stance toward the world. Nelle’s long closing argument about parenting and discrimination cues John to guess correctly

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that her parents divorced (when she was six).125 (Here the legal argument provides evidence for John to uncover the personal hurt underneath, showing the ever-present connection on Ally McBeal between legal positions and personal stances.) In the musical episode Nelle presents the story of her father abandoning her, and we later meet Nelle’s estranged father when she has to defend him in court.126 Nelle’s father (played by William Windom) is in danger of losing his job as a teacher because he has delusions of being Santa Claus, and we see a teacher who is closer to his pupils than to his daughter. For her father to appear as Santa Claus seems to answer a childhood wish voiced in an earlier episode in which Nelle discusses how she used the fantasy of Christmas to suture the hurt from her parents’ divorce: “I remember I didn’t like Christmas when I was little because my parents were apart, so I went to Newman’s [department store] and sat on [Santa’s] lap, and it became real. Everything else went away. He was magic.”127 Like Richard, Nelle’s closed-off stance betrays a fear of abandonment and conflict dating to her upbringing. Although she mounts a more coherent legal and personal defense of her single-minded pursuit of a career, the series traces the origins of this defense in her early life. In the above-mentioned Santa-themed episode Nelle actually serves as the voice of childhood, articulating the importance of fantasy as an early coping mechanism, but in other episodes she makes clear that this strategy was only a childish one. Nelle says she used to believe in a Prince Charming, but “then I turned nine.”128 She draws a hard and fast line between fantasy and reality, as John discovers when he tries to enact Nelle’s sexual fantasies in real life. He overhears Nelle discussing her fantasy of being spanked, but when he attempts this in their lovemaking, she reacts with shock and horror.129 Nelle’s understanding of relationships is utterly grounded in reality. She makes openly reasonable negotiations about finding compromise positions, just as she does in court. Nelle asserts that everyone settles for less than their ideal hopes when choosing a romantic partner, unlike Ally’s constant search for her true soulmate.130 Nelle is brutally realistic about how she functions in a relationship. She refuses to admit that her attraction to John had nothing to do with his social status but says that she probably would not have considered him as a romantic partner if he were not professionally successful. She defends her classist prejudices against the “little people” (i.e., those without money or ambition) as making more logical sense than being attracted to a person’s looks, and she refuses to discount the importance either of John’s professional status or her good looks in their initial attraction to each other. “I fell

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for your package, you fell for mine,” she tells John. “The packaging counted. Why should we apologize for it?”131 Thus she acknowledges another one of the series’ primary concerns about the importance of presentation, refusing to deny the reality of her own prejudices about “packaging” to fall under the sway of an overromanticized, unrealistic notion of love. Nelle’s very adult ability to compromise her romantic ideals is not total, however. She (quite generously) tolerates John’s many eccentricities, but she draws the line at participating in his imaginative world, and it is this inability to integrate fantasy with reality that is the downfall of their relationship. At a basic level, she is unable to share John’s inner world, unable to channel Barry White through her imagination.132 She has become too adult, losing her capacity to integrate childish play into a grown-up world. Nelle is eminently sensible in her romantic dealings, but this adult ration­ ality is shown as a limit to her ability to imagine something better and to find a lasting romance. In many ways, Nelle is the anti-Ally: she is entirely grounded in reality, focused solely on a career, scornful of emotionality, always assertive in love and business. According to the logic of the series, it makes sense that her way is most firmly rejected. And yet when Ally leaves the firm, Nelle moves into her office, a token that Nelle inherits the mantle Ally leaves behind. This gesture also indicates the series’ internal conflict over what to do with Nelle’s character. Having drawn such a strident, forceful foil for Ally’s romantic sensibilities, the show then waffles in presenting her position, as if it is afraid that Nelle is too much a caricature of a careerist woman. Just as in Ling’s case, Ally McBeal makes occasional efforts to reveal a heart of gold beneath Nelle’s corrosive exterior. When John’s pet frog dies, it is Nelle who buys him a replacement.133 When Elaine blows her chance at an audition for A Chorus Line, Nelle intervenes on her behalf, recognizing in Elaine the passion that she herself cannot feel.134 In these cases Nelle seeks to keep her behind-the-scenes niceness a secret so that it will not violate her public persona, allowing the series to add a token display of generosity without coming to terms with the character’s discrepancies.135 Occasionally, the show also attempts to melt Sub-Zero Nelle’s sexual frigidity, though without revisiting her fundamental stance toward intimacy. When a man wins her in an auction, she becomes unexpectedly aroused by him, and she engages in passionate, spontaneous lovemaking, not knowing that her relationship with him is doomed.136 Nelle sleeps with a hot salsa dance instructor, and although she eventually rejects the short-term,

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noncommittal sex he offers, she clearly has to struggle with her physical desire for him.137 She even engages in playful sex talk with Renee when both find themselves watching the various couples dance at the bar. Nelle: If this keeps up, you and I will have to be friends. Renee: It’ll never come to that. Nelle: Promise? Renee: You don’t fool me. If I offered you some of my jelly roll, you’d step right up. Nelle: How would you know? You’ve never offered.138 The series presents isolated out-of-character moments such as this one that hint at Nelle’s possibilities for emotional warmth or sexual ardor, but it does not pursue them. Not only does the series leave Nelle without significant achievement in relationships or work; it also abandons her as a character without moorings. This examination of Nelle’s fluctuating position within the narrative recognizes the difficulty of maintaining character consistency while simultaneously satisfying the story needs of a given episode. Plotlines in individual episodes have their own internal logic and therefore can call on recurring characters to perform functions that do not fit the characters’ continuing position in the broader narrative. Ally uses Ling to make fun of this tendency for television characters to gain surprising capabilities when an episode calls for it (Ling announces that she is a champion swing dancer or that she owns a mud wrestling club). Nelle, on the other hand, gets caught in this varying narrative pressure, making Ally’s portrait of a careerist woman even more damning because it makes Nelle appear fickle. Elaine: Inventing the Performance As a variation on Nelle’s careerist but sexually aggressive character, the series presents Ally’s secretary, Elaine Vassal, who has little desire for professional advancement (as befits her surname). Instead of longing for the career success that Ally and Nelle pursue, Elaine is portrayed as a person who chooses to situate her identity outside of work. Through Elaine we see an alternative to the dead end of a solely professional orientation that Nelle represents. If Nelle is all work, Elaine is almost entirely play, although her play has serious consequences. Elaine pursues her hobbies with an intensity that rivals the lawyers’ labor and becomes both the butt of their jokes and

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a reminder that there are other important goals besides professional status. She embodies a challenge to the series’ guiding assumptions about work, but the series must then reveal her way to be flawed. Ally pities Elaine for her lack of material signs of professional success, but Elaine exposes Ally’s elitist assumptions by refusing to share her beliefs about ambition: “What you don’t realize is that not everybody wants to be a lawyer or a professional. I like my job. I like being a secretary. I like that it gives me free time to do other things, to dance, to invent my stupid face bras, and I’m really sorry to disappoint you, Ally, but I like my life.”139 She refuses to compete with Ally or the other lawyers in the professional arena and instead focuses on developing a series of hit-or-miss novelty gadgets. Quite a bit of Elaine’s comedy comes from her attempt to design and promote her wacky inventions, many of which are supposed to improve one’s self-presentation. The pregnancy dress allows a woman to masquerade as an expectant mother, thus gaining advantages in gentle treatment by others.140 The face bra and the ice goggles combat the effects of aging on the face, and the pheromone marinated pants, flavored underwear, and vi-bra (a remote-operated vibrating bra with elaborate motion control) enhance the person’s appeal to romantic partners.141 Similarly, the cool cup (refrigerated underwear for men) and the customized condoms seek to bolster sexual performance.142 These inventions extend the series’ preoccupation with how to prepare oneself to make the best possible public impression. The characters, who are very aware of the importance of self-presentation, will try almost anything to enhance their personae, and many of Elaine’s inventions are concrete attempts to appeal to these instincts. Other of her inventions are designed to provide creature comforts, consolations in the face of a harsh world. She creates a remote toilet warmer so that one may avoid the discomfort of sitting on a cold toilet seat.143 She tests a “husband CD” that plays a variety of husbandlike sounds and phrases to serve as a substitute for having a real spouse.144 Through Elaine’s inventions Ally McBeal pokes fun at the capitalist notion that products are the key to gaining confidence, attracting lovers, and achieving peace. Just as the series sends up the sometimes facile solutions posed by pop therapies and therapists, it laughs at our tendency to seek solutions to relational problems through commercial products. Though Elaine has chosen not to compete with the lawyers professionally, she does compete for the social spotlight, especially in music performance. Instead of embracing Ally McBeal’s “everybody sings” attitude, Elaine latches

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on to those moments in which music is framed explicitly as a contest with clear winners and losers, and she stakes much of her self-esteem on besting others. When Ally surprisingly wins a contest to appear onstage with Tina Turner, a disappointed Elaine confides, “I need to believe that I’m better at some things than you. Dancing was one of them.”145 Elaine’s ego crests and falls with her performance in these competitions, and when Ally is not competing with her, she works to support Elaine’s desperate pursuit of these prizes.146 The series addresses her ardent musical competitiveness most explicitly in an episode in which Elaine wins a twist contest featuring Chubby Checker. Afterward, Elaine sits in the office admiring her trophy, a scene that elicits Larry’s advice: You should enjoy [the trophy], but it’s where you display it that matters. If you put it on the mantlepiece, it says this is who or what you are. If you stick it in a drawer, then it’s something you’ve done, you’ve accomplished, and it doesn’t tarnish so easily. You won it; keep it, it’s yours. Just don’t hold yourself up to it.147 The episode ends with Vonda Shepard singing, “They say that she once won a contest/She wanted to be Betty Grable/But now she sits there at that tear-stained table/Thinking of all those dreams she never got/All those dreams that never came true.” We see Elaine embrace and kiss the trophy while opening up a cabinet, presumably to store the trophy, although the episode fades out with the trophy still in her arms. Elaine holds too tightly, clings too desperately to the trappings of victory: trophies and recognition. The series overtly pities her for locating her self-esteem in other people’s acclaim. Elaine is so competitive that she creates contests where there are none, constantly revealing her appetite for attention. She bypasses no opportunity to offer to do a musical number so that she can be center stage (much to the groans of her colleagues), and when she shares that stage with someone for a duet, the performance becomes another, sometimes violent battle for the microphone.148 For Elaine, musical performance is not about the joy of singing but about gaining the approval of applause. As Elaine herself admits, it’s “all about me.”149 Ally recognizes this as a characteristic that she and Elaine share: “I think there’s something a little desperate about you; it takes one to know one. You need to be in the middle of things, you invent ways to put yourself in

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the center.”150 The word “invent” is carefully chosen here, for it positions everything Elaine does, including her outlandish inventions, as one of various ways to get attention. Ally portrays this competitive desire for praise as an individual character flaw, but it also recognizes that competitions between Elaine and her bosses are not waged on equal ground. The series explicitly acknowledges the disparity between Elaine’s and Ally’s station in life: a secretary has clear, structural disadvantages in a competition with a lawyer. In the twist contest episode, Elaine says, “You people win at everything. I’m sick of you people. . . . I don’t have a law degree, I didn’t even go to college, what’s there for me to . . .”151 Because the odds are stacked against her, Elaine opts out of the unequal competition for professional advancement. She remains competitive, but, according to the Ally universe, she chooses the wrong things to value. Elaine’s pursuits are depicted as silly wastes of time; they should be avocations, not vocations. The series offers Elaine as an alternative to Ally’s and Nelle’s strongly professional values, but when she pursues the “simpler pleasures in life,” she pursues them doggedly, as if they were the defining facts of her existence. Elaine is just as diligent about pursuing the spotlight in everyday office chat. Even when she is not the center of attention, she wants to be in the middle of things, which causes her to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. One of Elaine’s primary narrative functions in the series is to be the busybody. Having someone who spies on others’ private conversations allows plot information to be passed from character to character, and Elaine embraces her role as office snoop. Just as Richard and Ling are honest about their personal foibles, Elaine openly admits that she wants to know everything about everyone else’s business. “I can’t help notice what’s going on,” she says, “perhaps because I pay people to listen.”152 She freely admits the pleasure she gets out of listening in on other people’s dramas. When Billy accuses John of an especially damaging courtroom attack, Elaine asks if she can be part of the proceedings: “Could I come down? It all sounds so vicious, and it’s unfair for me to miss out.”153 Elaine listens at doors and is disappointed when she is barred from hearing, so she devises several electronic means of snooping: a parabolic dish microphone, a video camera, and a tape recorder.154 Just as John is obsessed with gaining technological control over his environment with a series of remotes, Elaine appears to want to preserve her environment on record. Although everyone eavesdrops on Ally (a crucial reason the unisex bathroom exists is to maximize chances for overhearing other people’s conversations),155 Elaine

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is the character entrusted with keeping track of the other characters’ personal lives. Another of Elaine’s primary narrative functions is to serve as the office tramp, and one can read Elaine as a fairly standard male fantasy figure of sexual availability. When Richard and Whipper are having romantic difficulties, Elaine offers herself to Richard: “I’m a slut. In high school the boys called me the human window of opportunity.”156 She frequently presents herself for recreational, commitment-free sex to the men on the show: “If you need a friend to turn to, I hope you know I’m here for you physically, so you don’t make rash decisions, which men sometimes do in sexual frustration. I’m here to keep you clear headed.”157 She lays out the terms for these sexual offers, and frequently those terms are overtly functional. She volunteers to serve as a “fluffer” for John, to rev him up sexually so that he can function more confidently. She pins him against the bathroom stall, licking and biting his ear, running her hands down his front, saying, “You hot, hot biscuit. I could fry eggs on you and your hot, hot sausage. I look at you and I see brunch.”158 Elaine is so open about her own desires and so forward in expressing them that it opens up another reading of her as a woman asserting her sexual power. She models a bold form of sexual confidence for a woman on television. She voices her needs explicitly, and she actively pursues what she wants without shame. Elaine sees no reason why women should not make the same open admissions as men about their desires. Ally McBeal opens up radical possibilities by suggesting that Elaine’s sexual behavior is a conscious strategy designed to gain advantage, morality be damned. Elaine suggests that Georgia should have an affair as a reasoned plan for regaining Billy’s affection: “Men want what they can’t have. Billy certainly didn’t want Ally when he had her, or else he wouldn’t have left. If you were to have an indiscretion then it would make him insecure and he would want you. He knows he can have you, and that’s a problem.”159 She extends and elaborates on this strategy in a later episode when Ling discusses her own conscious technique of keeping Richard at bay sexually. Elaine says, “Initially they want what they can’t have, but eventually the little divining rod points them to what they can have. I can support that anecdotally.”160 Ally McBeal creates Elaine as a figure who is not ashamed of her promiscuity and who seems to use her sexual allure for her own purposes. The series is remarkably free of moral condemnation of Elaine, at least early on, and thus asks us to consider, why not? Why shouldn’t someone

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use his or her sexuality openly among consenting adults to gain advantage? Characters on Ally McBeal are concerned with finding strategies that work for them, no matter how unorthodox, no matter how irrational. Certainly there should be strategies available other than sexual ones, and power inequities can be accentuated when accompanied by sexual extortion, but, the series asks, why should attraction be ruled out as a means of gaining what you want? Elaine’s assured, sexual forthrightness asks us to reconsider our judgments about sexual assertiveness, about sluttiness as a consciously chosen attitude.161 The show backs away from the radical potential of such an unabashedly sexual woman, in part by showing that her sexual forwardness is yet another expression of her need for attention. A cousin of Elaine’s says, “Elaine was always desperate to be noticed. In high school none of us ever wanted to bring our boyfriends around because we were afraid she would try and steal them.”162 The ultimate cause of this linkage of sexuality and fervent attention-getting is found in Elaine’s childhood: “When I was in the 4th grade my best friend got a new bike. Everyone admired her. My parents couldn’t afford a bike. I tried selling myself to the boys at recess for a nickel. I saved enough to buy a bell. I never got that bike, but I made a lot of noise with that bell.”163 The disturbing blend of sexual favors for sale and the childish image of the bell confirms the central connection of Elaine’s spotlightgrabbing with her sexually aggressive persona. Just as her inventions are made to seem less serious than a truly professional business pursuit would be, Elaine’s hypersexuality is ultimately revealed not as a conscious adult strategy but as a compulsive expression of childhood. Sexual assertiveness is merely the adult Elaine’s version of ringing the bell to get noticed. In addition, the series becomes increasingly unsure about Elaine’s forceful sexuality, with Elaine eventually admitting that her sexual talk was no more than talk. The shift from Elaine as aggressor to Elaine as posturer occurs most strongly in a Christmas-themed episode from the third season in which she finds an abandoned baby and decides to fight to adopt it. During the court proceedings, Elaine’s promiscuity becomes an issue in deciding whether she would be a fit mother, and she asserts that she portrays herself as the office slut “in fun,” that most of her “alleged promiscuity” is “just talk.”164 This episode is an important precursor of Ally’s surprise motherhood. A child almost magically appears in Elaine’s life without having a man around, just as it does later in Ally’s, and Elaine, like Ally, finds unexpected and sudden fulfillment in her role as mother. To play this maternal part, Elaine

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must necessarily compromise herself; she can no longer pursue the spotlight. Instead she coaches other people (Ally) to take her place singing center stage at the bar, which leaves her offstage holding her child, mouthing the words to the song Ally performs. Ally McBeal is fundamentally concerned with motherhood, and its version of motherhood requires that Elaine give up a good deal of who she is: her overt sexuality and her performing. Despite these sacrifices, the series cannot reward her with its ultimate payoff, a child. Elaine has not earned the privilege of motherhood, and so she must give the child back. Ally must work through her own childhood issues (as I discuss later) before she is ready for a child, but Elaine’s sexual posturing endangers her ability to become a mother. Exposing Elaine’s overt sexuality as mere “talk” leads the character into some absurd inconsistencies. In the “Just Friends” episode, Elaine is shocked to discover that people think she is promiscuous. She checks her image with Richard. Elaine: If you could describe me with one word, what would it be? Richard: Blonde . . . Elaine: If a friend of yours were about to date me, what word would you use? Richard: That’s easy. Elaine: What would it be? Richard: Easy. Elaine: Thank you. That’s exactly why men date me, because I’m easy. They think that I’m easy. Well, I’m not! You can spread the damn word!165 Ally herself tries to put a more wholesome spin on Elaine: “You enjoy putting yourself out there as a sexual person, and if people misconstrue that and think you’re a slut, they just get it wrong, that’s all.”166 Just as the series attempts to redeem Ling from the excesses of her cruelty, Ally tries to position Elaine’s sexual assertiveness as not voracious but merely playful. Apparently uncomfortable with a character whose sexuality is so prominent, the show retrenches and attempts to reclaim Elaine’s forcefulness within one of the series’ other concerns, performance. Elaine’s sexuality is uncovered as merely an act. She performs this outlandishly sexual role to get attention, not as an expression of her own desires. Oddly enough, Ally McBeal is rather prim in its treatment of Elaine, despite its overall emphasis on sex and love. Uptight Ally gets a passionate, spontaneous scene of

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lovemaking with a stranger in the beginning of the third season, but wild and crazy Elaine does not get an explicit sex scene until nearly the end of the fifth season, when it is clear that the series has been canceled.167 Elaine’s potentially destabilizing emphasis on direct physical pleasure, which is so different from Ally’s angst-filled overexamination of sexual signals, is kept out of the series’ visuals, despite the obvious prurient appeal of such imagery. “Elaine the slut” becomes a role that she performs through wordplay, not an expression of her personality. Elaine, then, becomes the performer par excellence for the series, but she performs for the wrong reason: to compensate for her own loneliness. “When you get on stage in the spotlight, you become ‘it,’” she says. “People don’t see you for what you are: at the Christmas party alone, dateless.”168 The compensation that performance provides is not in the music itself but in the acclaim it brings her. Elaine says, “[Singing is] more about applause for me. Without a stage and an audience I have no use for music.”169 She acts and sings not to participate in the community but to distinguish herself from it. Thus her performances are positioned as embarrassing, not because she lacks talent but because she invests too much in them. Just as the series portrays her oddball inventing as a waste of time, it treats her performing as too enthusiastic an expenditure of energy. When Elaine is feeling very down, she decides to pick herself up by performing a classic piece of schmaltz, “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie. She assaults the audience by belting the number with astonishing force, seemingly unaware of how desperately this plays (“[The song is] about waking up to a better world. It’s about finding somebody. I chose it because it’s poignant”).170 She gives a similarly vigorous performance of another camp classic, the theme from Flashdance. She duplicates the film’s original performance as a way to try to impress a potential boyfriend, only to horrify him and much of the audience. Although Jane Krakowski is one of the most vocally talented actors in the cast, Ally gives clear signals through character anticipations and reactions that we should read her proclivity to perform as negative. Although the series seems to value a wide range of eccentric behaviors, it seems to condemn Elaine’s. Her enthusiasm is both a flaw and a source of her appeal. Both Ally and Nelle have expressed their admiration for Elaine’s passion, something that neither of them matches.171 But the enthusiasm that Ally wants to emulate is also the source of her disparagement. Elaine’s fault seems to be to want something too badly that should be tangential, or to want it for reasons rooted in childhood anxieties. And so Ally’s narrative whittles away at the value of particular motivations: if you want the wrong things (like Elaine wants the spotlight or Richard wants money), or

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if you want things for the wrong reason (like Elaine using performances or Nelle using professional effort to salve childhood hurts), these pursuits narrow your character. Enthusiastic, clear desires can make a vivid character, as countless mainstream Hollywood films have demonstrated. On Ally McBeal, however, these enthusiasms exclude characters like Elaine from the narrative center of the show. Renee: The Prosecutor’s Practical Defense If Ally had only one character as sexually aggressive as Elaine, it would risk associating such assertiveness with Elaine’s lower-class positioning, so the series gives us another character who is Elaine’s equal in sexual openness and Ally’s professional peer, district attorney Renee Radick. Renee is confident where Ally is most hesitant, in relationships with men. Her most common narrative function on the show is to serve as Ally’s confidante,172 but the advice she gives is almost always assertive. She prods Ally out of her self-doubt, urging her toward taking action to get what she wants. Renee takes a more realistic stance toward relationships to counter Ally’s overromantic notions. Her late-night tête-à-têtes with her roommate reveal that she has little tolerance for Ally’s notion that love is a kind of divinely inspired craziness. Renee is the voice of reason regarding relationships. For her, relationships are a functional source of passion and comfort, qualities that everyone needs in their lives. To overinflate them is to set oneself up for disappointment. Love is not passionless, as it is for Nelle, but it is practical, and one should pursue it in sensible ways. Nor should one unnecessarily limit oneself in pursuing love. While Ally can get hung up on social prescriptions about her lovers (whether she should date someone who is lower class than she is, for instance), Renee advocates charging forward. She is unashamed about using a full range of strategies to pursue her desires. Like Elaine, she has no problem using her sexuality as a lure for men. She unabashedly considers sex appeal a power move, and she sees no reason why she should limit herself in attracting lovers. In one episode she reveals how she discovered early on the effectiveness of sexual allure: When I was a little girl, I went to a musical, and there were all these can-can girls jumping around. But then this one beautiful woman came out and started singing to this powerful man, and suddenly she had control of him, and I didn’t see her as a victim, and I didn’t

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see her as a bimbo, and I didn’t think she was an anti-feminist. I saw a woman whose gift was sex appeal, charismatic, even contagious sex appeal, and she wasn’t ashamed of it. These women tell her she should be ashamed of it, just like some people tell me that I should be ashamed of it. I’ve heard that all my life: if you use your sexuality, you set the feminist movement backwards. That’s ridiculous.173 Renee sees no contradiction between using sex appeal as a way to achieve personal gains and the larger social politics of sexualized imagery and women. As one would expect with a postfeminist portrayal, Renee chooses to foreground her sensuality. Just because women historically have been confined to the sexual arena as a primary source of power does not mean that today’s woman should remove herself from that arena, according to Renee. For her, the issue is one of pure utility: if you’ve got it, why not use it? And if one uses sexual allure to get the partner you want, why be constrained by society’s prohibitions? Renee pursues who she wants, even if that potential partner is in a committed relationship. Although there are norms against taking someone else’s partner, Renee has no qualms about breaking up a couple. “Boyfriends are not taken,” she says. “People find each other, and sometimes there’s a bump involved.”174 Like Nelle, Renee uses all her strategic wiliness without being limited by common moral censure; such moral rules are merely “bumps” in the road to their goals. But unlike fellow professional Nelle, Renee is more interested in deploying her wiles in the sexual arena, not the business world (a quality she shares with Elaine). Just as the rules of fair conduct need not interfere with Nelle’s ambitions, Renee tramples on the unwritten rules of relationship etiquette. Nor is Renee in favor of social proscriptions to be honest in relationships. Ever practical, she freely admits that honesty is not the best policy in love. Realist Renee can be almost as cynically flippant about love as Richard. “Every relationship starts with dishonesty,” she says. “It sets the stage for marriage.”175 She participates in the show’s continuing consideration of the pros and cons of honesty in relationships: “Dating is not a truthful business. You put on a little extra makeup so they don’t see what you really look like, you laugh at his jokes even when you think they’re not funny. Dating is about presenting the person you think he wants to see. No girl ever lets a guy see who and what she really is.”176 As Ally McBeal explores the importance of presentation in the professional and personal worlds, Renee acknowledges that truthfulness is necessarily compromised if you have hopes of gaining the romantic partner you desire.

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Renee dispenses practical romantic advice to Ally when Ally explores her current situation aloud, but Renee herself is remarkably closed-mouthed about her own doubts. She is depicted as having a tough shell to penetrate, and she heightens her defenses at moments of vulnerability. “When she’s hurt, that’s when she puts on the most armor,” Ally says. “You [Renee] don’t open up to people, even me, your best friend. When I ask how you’re doing, you say you’re fine, and unless there’s visible wreckage, I can’t tell. You don’t open up.”177 So Renee serves as a clear contrast to Ally, who pours out her doubts to her friends. Renee is tough and decisive where Ally is not, and she is closed and self-protective where Ally is most open. Like many characters on Ally, she represents a particular blend of forthrightness and hiddenness, assertiveness and vulnerability. True to form for the series, we see the origin of Renee’s combination of protection and passion. After Renee lures a man with highly sexualized behavior, she stalls his advances, and she enforces her “no” with her kickboxing skills, breaking the would-be date-rapist’s neck. In the discussions after this incident, Renee reveals her childhood sexual trauma in a vivid black-and-white flashback: When I was eleven, I started to develop, the first girl in my class to get breasts. Boys would grab at me. One day I snuck into the boys’ room because I heard there were some things written about me, awful things. I ran home and started crying. Mom told me they chase me because they like me. I clung onto that one, started using that. It was easy. Look at me now, gone to law school, Harvard even, and I can’t bear it if a guy doesn’t want to grab me a little. But if he does grab me I’m on that playground again. This thing that happened in here with that guy, I’ve been waiting my whole life for it.178 Renee’s aggressive sensuality is explained as an outgrowth of early sexualized experiences, much as Elaine’s is. Despite her professional achievements, the adult Renee is still reenacting these childhood moments. Although she appears to be stronger, more decisive, and less wracked with anxiety than Ally, we discover that these behaviors are merely overcompensations, and therefore Renee’s strategy is denigrated. In fact, after the series traces her behavior to its origins, it seems not to know what to do with her. Her narrative function shrinks to being Ally’s sounding board or a singer at the bar, and both these roles have minimal impact on the narrative action. Once Renee has been explained in this psychoanalytic investigation, she virtually disappears from the narrative.179

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Despite her apparent self-assurance, Renee eventually loses confidence in her professional abilities. In a series of cases she tries unsuccessfully against John, she becomes increasingly rattled by John’s courtroom antics until she begins to focus irrationally on John’s tricks rather than on the case. Her assertiveness is exposed as a strategy that gains her certain advantages in sexual arenas and in work but that ultimately collapses, leaving her alone personally and with limited professional effectiveness. The systematic character network needs Renee’s combination of qualities to be less functional than Ally’s, so it eventually denigrates her combination of vulnerability and surface toughness. Georgia and Billy: The Normal People Unlike the characters who pose primarily thematic counterexamples to Ally, Georgia is a more purely narrative alternative. Georgia depicts what Ally’s life might be like had she chosen another path—marrying her childhood boyfriend, Billy—and that alternate future is less idyllic than Ally usually recognizes. Billy and Georgia’s relationship gives us Ally McBeal’s central portrait of a marriage. Instead of fulfilling romantic dreams, marriage turns Georgia and Billy into the two consistently least interesting of the cast of characters. They become a “corporate Stepford couple.”180 Initially Georgia and Billy serve very limited narrative purposes, defined almost entirely by the love triangle that exists among Billy, his former girlfriend, and his wife. The first two seasons are devoted largely to the fairly traditional serial pleasure of will they or won’t they? Will Billy and Ally maintain a friendship and a work relationship, given their past romantic history, or will their unresolved feelings break up a marriage? The series establishes Billy as the central love of Ally’s life, and in such a romancedriven universe as this one, the pressure for Ally and Billy to reclaim that love, regardless of the strictures of marriage, is enormous. A series that explores issues in such a dilatory way benefits from a strong central narrative question, at least initially. While we are learning about the foibles of the more complex characters, the ever-present hope of requited love (in the form of Billy) keeps the plot moving forward.181 To serve this purpose, Billy and Georgia need be little more than narrative conveniences with little character development. In fact, other characters acknowledge that Billy is boring: “Billy isn’t even capable of a crisis. He has the personality of a nail, minus the sharp end,” Ling says.182 The constant temptation posed by working with a former lover destabilizes the Billy-Georgia relationship, but the central problem in the marriage

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appears to be boredom. Other characters comment viciously on the sexual malaise of marriage, but Georgia and Billy enact the arid repetitiveness of married sex. Billy says, “I know it’s normal for passion to wane, but Georgia’s just ended. When’s the last time we had sex anywhere but the bed? When’s the last time we had sex three times in a week? When’s the last time we had sex when I didn’t initiate it? . . . I think there’s been an erosion with Georgia and me, and my question is does it happen with all couples.”183 To counter the discourse on Ally McBeal that positions marriage as the ultimate solution to loneliness, the series also asserts that marriage destroys the passion that engendered it. Therefore, Georgia and Billy repeatedly have to find new ways to reawaken their physical desire. To spice up their sex life, they have intercourse on the conference table at work or in a bathroom stall in the office’s unisex bathroom.184 But their attempts to revitalize their sexuality need not be limited to each other. Both Georgia and Billy explore other romantic options to solve the problem of boredom. Of course, Billy and Ally flirt with their on-again, off-again status, but Georgia also spends considerable time expressing desire for other men. She is drawn into taking a sculpture class when she hears Ally and Renee discussing the nude model’s monumental penis.185 In one episode Georgia actually uses Ally to get close to one of her former boyfriends, trying to be a matchmaker for Ally as a means of reliving Georgia’s former passion.186 When Georgia’s digitally enhanced tongue hits the floor in reaction to The Practice’s Bobby Donnell, Billy becomes disturbed at her open expression of desire: “I don’t expect you never to be attracted to other men, nor do I expect you to share those attractions with other people. . . . What does it say about our marriage that you want to [kiss him]? Maybe nothing, but definitely nothing good.”187 Billy is also bothered when Georgia starts to flaunt her attractiveness by wearing revealing clothing.188 These extramarital explorations finally result in two pivotal kisses: one between Ally and Billy (which prompts a fundamental reevaluation of their attraction and finally the end of their romance) and one between Georgia and Ally’s father (which opens up the central psychoanalytic revelation of the series, as we shall see later).189 So instead of showing marriage as a way to find satisfaction, the series reveals marriage as opening up new hungers for intimacy and desire. Marriage falls far short of the idyllic state Ally envisions, and Georgia angrily attacks such idealism in the closing arguments of a case in which she defends a department store being sued for replacing its traditional Santa Claus:

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You want to know the number one affliction of today’s adults? It’s disillusionment. Maybe if we could cure this addiction to the dream, maybe it could spare them pain down the road. [The judge tells her she is getting off track.] We all get off track, that’s my point, believing in fairy tales. At the end of the day, life is this big wall of reality that we all crash into. Maybe kids should get a dose of it when they’re young. Maybe it would give them thicker skin. My client isn’t killing Santa Claus. He doesn’t exist.190 When Georgia, recently separated from Billy, breaks down in the middle of this argument, it is clear that she is mourning the loss of her own marriage. Here we see a portrait of what Ally might have become. Had she ended up in the soul-numbing boredom of marriage to Billy, she might have ended up pouring out an impassioned eulogy for her own illusions instead of being the primary proponent of believing in fairy tales of love. Georgia exists almost entirely so that she can participate in the love triangle and depict this passionless understanding of marriage.191 Billy, although he is initially as boring as his wife and exists for similar purposes, eventually brings other facets of Ally into relief. He shows a possible alternative for Ally that is less tied to fantasy and that is more geared toward career advancement. In this way Billy is a toned-down male version of Nelle: competent, ambitious, and rooted in reality. He is more interested in keeping up professional appearances as a lawyer, policing Ally’s and Renee’s dress when they transgress his idea of courtroom decorum.192 In the crossover episodes in which Cage and Fish share a murder case with the lawyers from The Practice, Billy is the one who protests that the firm’s idiosyncrasies keep them from being taken seriously: “I’ve had it! This firm is a joke. We do stupid cases. We look like clowns . . . I’m embarrassed to be here. . . . This case is a chance for us to play on another level, a level I want to play, I can play on. We’re little league. Didn’t you see them laughing at us?”193 Billy’s ambitions are the traditional ambitions of lawyers, to be respected and to win important cases. Although it becomes clear that Billy shared much of Ally’s fantasy life when they were children, he has turned away from childish things to take on a traditional understanding of his role as lawyer and husband. Ally argues that Billy has embraced his traditional adult roles too completely, that he has neglected his childhood sense of wonder. Billy eventually recalls the time Ally saw a unicorn as a child, though he had forgotten it. Ally then comments that she had not seen his whimsical side for a while

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and that she feared it was dead.194 Billy admires Ally’s openness to fantasy, and from time to time he senses its appeal, but he has clearly chosen to be grounded in reality. “I envy somebody who can be so in touch with their dreams,” he says, “but to choose to live in them is not sanity.”195 Billy therefore shares Ally’s early history but shows us a version of what Ally might have been like had she grown out of her fantasy life. Once the question, will they or won’t they? has been settled, Billy needs a new narrative purpose. He takes on the only role on the series that is explicitly not an alternative for Ally. In the third season, Billy dyes his hair blond, starts walking around with a chorus of silent, sexy “Billy girls” in identical leather dresses, and fundamentally changes his attitude to become a proud chauvinist. Throughout the first two seasons, Billy served as the “designated sensitive male”196 in the firm, and in the third season Ally McBeal uses him to discuss the politics of the sensitive man. This plotline reveals Billy as the worst kind of chauvinist—one whose appearance of sensitivity to women’s concerns merely disguises his deeply conservative attitudes about gender.197 While supporting feminism as a broad concern, he has a different set of assumptions about what he wants for the woman in his life: I’ve never been opposed to women working. I certainly have no problem with Janet Reno being Attorney General. I’d probably be thrilled to have a woman president. I’ve always believed that if women ran the world there’d be less war. I’m here because, as much as I’m for women’s rights, when it comes to my wife I don’t want her dressing in sexy clothes. I don’t want her to become a partner at work. I really don’t want her to work at all. I’d like her to stay at home, to come home at the end of the day and find a nice meal on the table. I’d like her to be there waiting, maybe with a pair of slippers, maybe she rubs my feet a little, fixes me a drink. I want her day to be beginning for real just because I’m home. I need to feel more . . . worshiped.198 When this deeply conservative mind-set emerges from the formerly docile, sensitive Billy, it is a startling depiction of one of the central concerns of the series—the distinction between a person’s politics in the public and private spheres. In Billy we see someone who advocates feminist beliefs about the workplace but whose personal attitudes are at odds with his larger political beliefs. Because of his deep-seated assumptions, he cannot tolerate in his own house the same behaviors that he supports in the larger world. On Ally McBeal characters struggle with the discrepancy between what they want

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for their own lives and what they want for the world, and Billy depicts one of the most dramatic of these struggles. As one might expect in a series deeply concerned with the notion of the child, Billy later reveals that his assumptions about gender have less to do with the role of wife and more to do with the understanding of what a mother should be. He alters the old-fashioned assertion that a woman’s place is in the home, changing it to a mother’s place (“I have no problem with women working,” he says).199 Ally McBeal conceptualizes motherhood as an ultimate form of femininity with higher standards. Although women on the show spend a great deal of time trying to find fulfillment in work or in romance, the series argues that there is a higher moral calling with even greater possibilities for fulfillment, motherhood. In motherhood larger political concerns are put into private action with the added burden of shielding a child, not protecting another functional adult as he or she participates in the work world. Much of the series’ discussion debates the pros and cons of legal protections concerning gender in the workplace and argues that such protections are at times misguided when applied to business conduct (see chapter 5). Child rearing, however, becomes the sphere that requires even more protection but of a moral sort. Billy’s third season argument allows the series to discuss the difference between the public face of the sensitive man and his private opinions, but it also links these concerns to the overall argument about the position of motherhood. Once Billy’s chauvinist opinions have been aired, the series backs away from their force, revealing that these are not really Billy’s thoughts but that they are prompted by his brain tumor. This again reveals the pressure to make a character nice in a continuing television series. Billy cannot possibly mean the harsh things he says, since he is, after all, a nice guy. His antifeminist beliefs are so outside the pale that they must be blamed on a medical condition. Ally McBeal voices these beliefs but then seeks to undercut their rhetorical force by attributing them to a cancer. Regardless of whether one thinks that such politically retrograde opinions should be aired, the larger question of how to resolve tensions between one’s larger politics and one’s personal attitudes is evaded because we discover that the real Billy does not actually have this conflict, that it is merely a symptom. Billy dies in the courtroom in the middle of a closing argument. He becomes confused, starts talking about his marriage to Ally, and delivers a stirring defense of the institution of marriage and a vow of devotion to Ally (instead of to his actual wife, Georgia).200 After Billy’s dramatic death, Ally McBeal extends his stay on the show, permitting the series to engage in one of its two long discussions of grief.

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The nature of the serial form allows for a portrayal of mourning that occurs in something like real time, and Ally’s nuanced portrayal of grief is one of its crowning achievements. Ally goes through various stages of grief, seeming to make progress and then backsliding, her sadness sometimes erupting when she least expects it. She holds onto Billy’s memory, and this summons him from the grave to visit her, especially in moments of crisis. Here Ally’s tendency to hallucinate opens up the possibility for a self-aware dialogue about the usefulness of mourning. Billy appears as a reflection in the window or in the privacy of her office, and Ally openly acknowledges that she is actively summoning her own version of him when she needs to talk to him most. Slowly Ally convinces herself that summoning Billy’s “ghost” is not healthy for her, that she needs to say good-bye to him, so she weans herself from the hallucinations. The model of mourning here is quite mature for Ally—acknowledging the desire for a continuing connection with the dead, using fantasy to work through her loss, and then choosing to reduce her dependence on the fantasy of his “haunting.” Even then, the mourning process is not complete. After a spat involving her next boyfriend and her father, Ally suddenly lashes out at her father for not attending Billy’s funeral.201 Billy’s name pops up again and again in later conversations, letting us know that he is never far from Ally’s thoughts. After Ally works through her central psychoanalytic issues, she is free to use imagination for her own purposes, and after Billy dies, she models how to use her fantasies in a controlled fashion to work through her mourning. Instead of being ruled by her hallucinations, Ally summons and interacts with them, until eventually the “ghost” Billy is a figure embodying memory and fate, appearing as a way to evoke the past, his physical form showing the presence of the past in current happenings, a literal embodiment of the psychoanalytic emphasis of the show. In many series Billy and Georgia would be the obvious choice for central characters, allowing the “normal” people to serve as our envoys to the world of the weirdos, assuming that the audience needs a sanitized point of identification from which to examine the various characters’ eccentricities. A primary distinction of Ally McBeal (as I argue in chapter 4) is that the series chooses to show us eccentricity from the inside, asking us to adopt the perspective of one of the non-normals. Billy’s and Georgia’s normalcy, from this perspective, becomes scrutinized just as other people’s oddities do, and normality in this environment seems to be yet another inadequate strategy for coping with modern life’s complexities.

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Billy’s and Georgia’s roles point out how characters in a serial function sometimes as thematic reflections and sometimes as narrative obstacles. This is true for almost any network of television characters; a certain episode’s plotline may directly involve certain characters as classic narrative opponents while other characters comment on the conflict from their positions as temporary observers. Ally initially uses Billy and Georgia to provide a fairly familiar narrative engine, a love triangle. Once this straightforward narrative thread has run its course, the overall character network calls for Billy to serve some thematic purpose, so it makes him the mouthpiece for blatant antifeminism. Billy and Georgia exemplify how characters change their function according to the requirements of the serial network. John: Eccentric Sensitivity Falls Short If Billy and Georgia represent Ally McBeal at its most “normal,” John Cage presents Ally’s most detailed portrayal of eccentricity. Ally, the protagonist, is herself an oddball who hallucinates, but in terms of sheer quantity of quirks, John outdistances even the lead character. Through John, the series shows us a male version of Ally’s insecurities and foibles, allowing us to examine how such behaviors are read differently through gender. As the character who most closely resembles Ally, who most seems to share her inner world and her outer peculiarity,202 John comes closest to following Ally’s way and therefore is closest to redemption, in the series’ logic. But even John loses his way, eventually wandering aimlessly through romantic near-encounters and losing his professional status. In John we see a strongly therapeutic orientation toward using the past, as one would expect with Ally’s closest companion, but John’s public use of his past does not help him mature in the way that Ally’s private uses do. Unlike Billy, the “designated sensitive male” in the firm, John actually is a sensitive male character. He actively cultivates emotional experiences, as opposed to protected characters such as Richard and Ling. John hires Nelle, a woman he is infatuated with but also a woman he believes is unattainable. Ally, who understands the difficulties of working beside an impossible love object, asks why he hired her. John: She makes my heart go boom. Ally: Won’t that torture you? The last thing you want is to be in love with someone you can’t have. That’s something I know.

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John: What the client said about men going dead inside as they get older is true. You can start to prioritize your career. A person who can make you flex your romantic muscle and make you feel is good company. Ally: Even if your muscle never gets to compete? John: Nelle may be the kind of girl I can only dream about, but there’s something to be said for the dream itself.203 John actively chooses emotional discomfort over the future Billy embodies: dulling one’s feelings through safe, stable choices. Just as Ally does, John prefers holding onto an unrealized romantic dream rather than compromising. Because they both “circle the earth in similar orbits” (as Renee says),204 Ally and John appear to intuit each other’s thoughts, so John’s sensitivity is heightened when it comes to his soulmate, Ally. She says to him, “Just like you can tell when I’m seeing something, I can tell what’s going on with you.”205 Ally and John sometimes “catch” a gesture from each other as if gestures were contagious (for instance, Ally might start humming to herself in the way that John frequently does).206 Both of them are linked through a rich internal fantasy life so that John even seems to be able to hear the voiceovers in Ally’s mind.207 John not only senses what is happening in Ally’s inner world but he is also hypersensitive to what is going on in others. When Elaine spearheads a lawsuit against the firm because the men have ogled a voluptuous mail clerk, it is John who intuits what is really going on with Elaine underneath her litigious posture.208 John and Ally trade gestures, but he uncontrollably imitates gestures from other people as well, sometimes to his dismay. When John begins blinking as an echo to a client’s nervous habit, he confesses, “It’s a little Tourettsian. I pick up on the body language of others. It’s not intentional. When I’m in trial with Ally my hands swish [to imitate her frequent gesture].”209 When John dates women, he recycles his lover’s physical habits, echoing Kimmy’s facial twitches and eventually incorporating a whole range of tics and whoops when he finally dates someone who actually has Tourette’s syndrome (Melanie, played by Anne Heche). John seems so sensitive to others’ internal states that his boundaries are perhaps too permeable. He cannot prevent himself from imitating others, which can undercut his effectiveness in the courtroom. Being sensitive to others is a positive quality; being taken over by others demonstrates an inability to maintain control of oneself and reveals a lack of internal stability in the character’s makeup.210

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John, therefore, is more vulnerable than most characters on the show to being wounded. Richard and Nelle give the appearance of being impervious to personal attacks, but John frequently feels “disparaged” (to use his term). His sensitivity allows him to monitor the nuances of personal interaction. As a result he can blow up in reaction to the tiniest perceived slight. John: [Nelle] called me an imbecile. Ally: No, she didn’t. John: She implied it. She did it with tone. She disparaged the idea of us going [to Los Angeles]. Her putdowns are tone. I don’t have to take it. I’m senior partner. Check out the firm resume. Senior partners don’t have to tolerate snippy-assed tones from platinum dyed popsicles.211 John’s blurted-out retaliations can be as vicious as anyone’s on the show, but they usually occur as a defensive reaction to his feeling disparaged in some way. He can be wounded most by people making fun of his stutter, a defect he tries to cover up in a variety of ways, including repeating a standard word (such as “Poughkeepsie”). We discover that he is more defensive about his speech impediment than his other eccentricities when the local television newscast emphasizes his stutter during a high-profile case. Their treatment of him affects his professional image, and for John this is the worst possible humiliation: I’ve been ridiculed my entire life. I’m quite used to it, but not when I enter that room, the courtroom. That’s my room, that’s the room I win in. Anybody who mocks me in that room regrets it. Other lawyers fear me, and I like that. It’s been my haven from ridicule until today. I poughkepped my way through every newscast, and I was made a fool of in my one haven.212 The courtroom opened up a space that is entirely based on ability, not on how others judge his quirks. The only thing that matters in that space is how effectively the lawyers can argue, and this allows John the fantasy of transcending his social weaknesses as a “funny little man.” Ally McBeal constructs several fantasy spaces: a unisex bathroom where gender literally does not matter,213 a bar where the talent to perform does not count, and

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a courtroom that offers the possibility that argument alone will prevail. John’s stutter threatens to destabilize that fantasy of a world where his verbal mastery compensates for a lifetime of social disparagements. It is this litany of disparagements that makes John sensitive to the plight of others, and he turns his own personal history of humiliation and disappointment into an advantage, frequently using his own experiences to win cases. Throughout the series he tells story after story about his life history. We hear about how his stuffed toy horse used to kick paper cutouts of the kids who bullied John and how he licked his junior prom date’s hearing aid out of her ear.214 Sometimes John’s closing arguments are packed with such embarrassing memories: When I was six I thought I wanted to be a nun, thought it would enable me to fly. I suppose TV can cause these misperceptions. I once asked Santa Claus for one of those super feminine napkins so I could bike and swim and ride a horse.215 At other times he mobilizes memories of his personal triumphs in the courtroom, as he does in his defense of a young man hitting another to protect his girlfriend. He tells the story of a boy cutting in front of him in line at the movie theater, a humiliation he says is “at the root of my identity as I grew up: a kid afraid to physically stick up for myself.” He follows up that anecdote by telling the tale of an adult physical confrontation that begins as a shoving match in a bar, and Ally McBeal interlaces John’s closing argument with flashbacks of the two stories to depict the importance of the past on the present: This was about to be a fight, my first fight. I raised my right hand. My father told me about planting my back foot, and I planted it. As he came to hit me, I hit him, and he went down. I stood over him. I’ve had my successes as a lawyer and performed public services that brought me gratification as a human being, but as a man, medieval as this may sound, that was the most satisfying moment of my life.216 More than any other character on the show, John Cage makes use of his past for functional purposes. His anecdotes are one of his most effective courtroom strategies. On a show so concerned with the notion of honesty, John Cage demonstrates a fiercely open sharing of his past. Both his humiliations and his successes may be mined and refined for the present.

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On a show deeply involved with uncovering painful childhood memories so that their power might be transformed and harnessed in adult life, one might expect that John’s savvy use of anecdotes would make him the model of mental health. Instead, John is the character most acutely involved in a range of nonsensical therapies. Ally McBeal pokes considerable fun at the modern therapy industry, and it does so most often through its most eccentric and yet most emotionally open characters, John and Ally. John adopts several seemingly inane coping techniques, such as his “smile therapy.” When John feels especially put upon, he adopts a distorted fake smile to cue his wounded ego to feel better. John uses other physically associative movements to induce a better mood, sometimes dancing with wild manufactured joy, sometimes hitting things with ludicrously oversized boxing gloves.217 He is so aware of the power of unconscious mechanisms that he can trace his own word associations (when he says “Frank Sinatra” instead of “Poughkeepsie” to stop his stuttering, he traces the connection between the two via Sinatra’s standard “New York, New York”).218 These nonsensical “therapies” send up psychological practice, but they also reveal John’s eccentricity and forthrightness. Like Ally, he is bold enough to appear stupid if he feels it can help him, but the therapies position him as an odd little man who uses odd little mechanisms to feel better. Just as John repurposes his painful memories to his advantage, he repackages his oddities and uses them as techniques in the courtroom. John’s nose whistles at moments of stress—he has learned to “throw” his whistle like a ventriloquist—making it appear that the opposing attorney’s nose has whistled. He distracts the jury by wearing squeaky shoes or shoes that produce sparks, or he uses a clicker to click his objections when his voice fails him.219 John brings props into the courtroom (an animated monkey doll, a model airplane, recorded horse sounds, a blowtorch, a jar of beans) to undercut the opposing argument.220 He disturbs the other attorney’s rhythm by “taking a moment” (an overly somber pause for reflection) and stalls by pouring a glass of water in an agonizingly slow manner, accompanied by thunderous nondiegetic bells.221 He can even interrupt his own witness’s long-winded answer, saying that he has become bored with his own question, or he can rule that an opposing attorney’s objection is sustained.222 For John, a trial is theater, and he is a performance artist. John Cage is named in honor of the modernist composer who integrated noises and silence into his musical compositions, and John Cage the character is similarly a poet of dissonance and pauses, using them in place of words to create an effect. Just as illogical therapies help him control his

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moods, distracting ploys help him control the courtroom. John’s logical legal appeals can win the day, but he is not above other means to gain advantage for his clients. These tactics are quite helpful when there is little foundation for his case, which is especially useful given the bizarre cases on Ally McBeal.223 His tricks acknowledge that logic has it limits and that staying solely within a logical framework constrains one unnecessarily, both personally and professionally.224 To complement his prescribed therapeutic techniques and his distracting stunts, John develops a set of individualized rituals that focus his power when he weakens. As mentioned in chapter 1, he channels the spirit of Barry White when his sexual confidence ebbs. When he rehearses for a difficult closing argument, he paces on the office carpet in his bare feet, and members of the firm can calculate how ready he is by examining his pacing. He plays bagpipes in moments of deep sorrow. He does gymnastics in the unisex bathroom, swinging on the bar above the stall door, trying to perfect his dismount. In many ways these odd mechanisms make perfect sense in the illogical Ally world. The series applauds his self-awareness and his honest acceptance of his weaknesses as well as his open-minded desire to overcome his deficits by any means possible, however illogical. Through his frequent selfdeprecating anecdotes and stunts, John demonstrates the ability to transform his wounded past and his oddball persona into advantages. This is not far from Ally’s chosen mode of using hallucinations, fantasies, and memories for functional purposes. But the sheer number of these foibles adds up to portray John as a character who requires a remarkable amount of psychological maintenance to make it through an ordinary day. He is so sensitive that he needs to surround himself with comforting props to keep the hostile world at bay. Instead of having a central trauma (such as Ally does) that needs to be overcome through psychological exploration, John has multiple childhood traumas, all of which are fairly small and commonplace: being bullied, embarrassing actions, and so on. As part of the criticism of the therapeutic industry, the series depicts him as someone applying extraordinary tactics to ordinary problems. For John, the odd psychological mechanisms become crutches that perpetuate his own weaknesses. Instead of working through his problems, he works over them repeatedly, fetishizing and compounding his eccentricity.225 John’s fears and foibles combine to make him more passive interpersonally than most of the other characters on the show. Like Ally, he struggles

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with romantic self-doubt, but unlike her, he too often settles for inaction instead of bravely forging on toward success or failure. For a long time he dilly-dallies without making a definitive move toward having a real relationship with Nelle, and he explains his trepidation this way: I’m afraid of accelerating the relationship toward extinction. If we fondle, we make love; if we make love, we might begin a serious involvement. We’d likely find that we weren’t ultimately meant for each other. We’d part, and I’d miss you. By not going down the road, it remains the road ahead. It excites me. It even brings me joy.226 John can be so imprisoned by his fears that he prefers the idea of a relationship to the reality of one. He can gain pleasure by keeping himself in a suspended state of anticipation instead of taking action and making himself more vulnerable to hurt from others. John all too often contents himself with the consolations provided by his fantasies.227 Ally, after an initial period of self-doubt, much more boldly pursues her dreams, and John credits her example and influence as helping him to overcome his shyness enough to speak to people.228 But instead of fully working through his fears, John relies on short-term solutions, such as summoning Barry White to activate his sexuality. John’s boldness deserts him outside the courtroom, and his gimmicks and stunts can only provide temporary interpersonal courage. Therefore, though he seems to participate in similar mental processes, John cannot follow Ally into psychological maturity and self-acceptance, and the series keeps us at a certain distance from his thoughts. We hear John’s internal sound track, just as we do Ally’s, but the series draws the line at giving us visual access to his mental states. Instead the series shows us John’s eccentricities as a set of tics. Since the unusual external behaviors we see are not balanced by a correspondingly deep internal perspective, this strategy reinforces John’s foreignness. We get more of John’s aural perspective than any other character except Ally, yet the series needs to withhold some access to keep Ally central. Because John’s external oddities, however functional they are, do not advance him toward emotional maturity, he is denied the initial goal he shares with Ally, a permanent romantic relationship. After Ally works through her lifelong romantic interest in her soulmate, Billy, the obvious intimate alternative for her is John, the person who most seems to share her inner world. Having abandoned Ally’s fixation on the “normal” guy, the series sets up the question, why not the oddball who can understand and appreciate her

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own peculiarity? On a soap opera, long-running characters can travel from relationship to relationship over time, allowing us to see how they change in different configurations. Why not then pair Ally and John as a way to show us more about each?229 But the series does not unite them, and to deny this connection given the forces that work to bring them together (the similarities in their characters, the narrative emphasis on their eccentricities, and the demonstrated chemistry between the two actors) helps Ally McBeal make one of its points about the irrationality of love and romance. Regardless of how much one can summon conscious strategies to manipulate one’s inner feelings, there are limits, according to Ally McBeal, and a person cannot make himself or herself love another. In a logical universe Ally and John are perfectly paired, but in spite of their best efforts, they cannot incite a mutual desire for each other, although both make attempts. The final such attempt, instigated by John, is the most explicit. John: I decided to take the road less traveled, one of simple maturity, of being direct. I love you, your nuance, your idealism, your beauty, your body, everything about you. Admittedly you’re slightly nuts, but I love that too, it’s something we have in common. I think we could be a good couple. I would like to try. Ally: John, I so want to be loved by you, but not in the way you’re interested in loving me. John: Ordinarily this would be the moment where I would retreat in humiliation, but with the stakes being what they are, I’m going to ask: are you sure, and if so, why are you sure? Ally: I don’t feel any physical passion for you. John: I could be wrong, but sometimes that can be discovered along the way. You can hardly be accused of knowing what you want in a man. Ally: But I’m good at recognizing what I don’t want. I think that you are the most lovely man that I’ve ever met or could ever hope to meet, but I just can’t love you in the way that you’re asking me to. John: That’s the trouble of coming at people with honesty. They sometimes counter with it.230 By this point Ally and John have matured enough as characters to have an open conversation that acknowledges both their desires and the bound­ aries of those desires. They provide honest, self-aware explanations for their

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irrational feelings, and they deal with those feelings logically, making this interchange one of the most mature on Ally McBeal. From this point on, however, John seems to lose his way. He disappears from the firm to go on an identity quest, looking for a mythic Mexico that exists only in popular culture and revisiting sites from his past.231 He flirts with possible intimate relations with women, but nothing develops. No lasting romances happen in Ally’s life, but she has worked through her psychological traumas and therefore is no longer desperately seeking a man to fulfill all her needs. Unlike John, she is rewarded for her efforts with professional success (a partnership in the firm) and personal fulfillment (in the form of a daughter). John is the character closest to Ally’s idiosyncratic stance toward the world, but, like all the others, he falls short. The most extended argument presented through John Cage has to do with eccentricity. John has some of Richard’s oddities, but he manages to channel them usefully. He shares some of Elaine’s idiosyncratic ways of presenting himself to potential lovers (including wearing a bodysuit of fake muscles).232 He echoes Ally’s emphasis on romance and her self-doubt about interpersonal relations but also duplicates and even exceeds some of Nelle’s professional confidence and success. He lacks Ally’s assertiveness, preferring the emotional safety that Richard values so highly, which limits his maturation. In John we see the uses and limitations of eccentricity in great detail. Ally McBeal is deeply concerned with judging the costs and benefits of accepting unusual behavior in the work world, and in John it finds a tireless advocate for acceptance, as this intimate portrait of an oddball sways the audience toward tolerance of the abnormal. The show denies him the peace it proffers to its protagonist. The Center of the World: Ally and Her Redemption By asking us to compare the protagonist with the ensemble cast of oddballs that surround her, Ally McBeal builds our understanding of its central character bit by bit as it unveils information about the supporting characters. We learn that Ally can be quite overtly sexual (like Elaine and Renee), but she remains open to intimacy in ways that those characters (and Ling, Richard, and Nelle) fear. Like John, she is sensitive but not so much that she avoids honestly pursuing her heart’s desire. We see characters model honesty in different arenas: Richard blurts out his opinions in public, while Nelle and Renee are brutally honest about private matters. Ally clearly articulates her doubts in private, while in public she combines Nelle’s and Renee’s legal

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competence with Richard’s and Ling’s overt ambition. She maintains a bit of Richard’s childlike playfulness but is able to defer gratification (unlike Richard and Ling). By comparing Ally with those other characters, we are prompted to endorse Ally’s mode of being-in-the-world. Let me turn now to the linear narrative traced by Ally’s own actions. Our knowledge of Ally depends on both her place in the character network and her individual pursuit. To miss either narrative impulse is to miss part of the careful construction of the show’s argument and its appeal to our sympathies. As one might expect, given the complicated nature of narration in Ally McBeal, its linear storytelling is not so straightforward. The show sets up an obvious goal for Ally, gaining romantic fulfillment by finding and marrying “the one,” the man she is meant to be with.233 Ally McBeal puts a twist in this time-worn narrative; while doggedly pursuing her heart’s desire, the universe switches goals, rewarding her for her good work but giving her a payoff different from the one she expected. This allows the series to argue that a person’s apparent desires will not necessarily satisfy their deepest longings.234 Unlike all the characters discussed previously, Ally maintains impractical romantic ambitions without compromising them. Her primary ideal is the fantasy of a soulmate whom she calls “the one,” the romantic partner who is “meant for her” and who will fill the void she feels inside.235 Ally has imagined this fantasy figure in great detail: I’ve spent my entire life . . . loving someone who’s not there, the man I never met. I have a rough idea of what he looks like. I have a more specific take on what he thinks and feels. I have an almost exact sense on how he makes me feel. I’ve never met him. I may never meet him. I’ve actually been told that he’s not even out there.236 This dream of hers undergoes several attacks, but Ally remains steadfast in her hopes that “the one” will someday appear. A caricatured feminist character voices the objection that a woman should not conceptualize herself as essentially lacking.237 “I don’t condemn you for wanting someone to love,” she says. “I guess I just reject the notion that your life is empty if you don’t have a man.” Ally corrects her: “It’s only half empty.”238 Instead of asserting that the lack of a romantic partner makes her life fundamentally empty, Ally acknowledges this lack and gives it boundaries. The absence of a romantic partner for her is tangible and

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intensely felt, but it is not destabilizing. All too often the left sanctimoniously asserts the “correct” way for people to feel, as if a simple mental acknowledgment of the power of ideology can free us from the patterns of feeling we have grown to accept over years. Instead of simply accepting herself as whole (and therefore denying her own perceptions as false consciousness), Ally accepts the lack she feels, and she pursues her elusive soulmate. The other primary objection to the fantasy of “the one” is that this notion is unrealistic and therefore damaging. Most people, according to the show, make compromises in their expectations instead of clinging to childish illusions about a soulmate. Ally refuses to give up on this hope, and in an episode dealing with her central childhood trauma, John and Ally give the show’s most pointed discussion of the tension between practical compromise and romantic fantasy. John: Women feel pressured to get married before their biological clocks run out. If they haven’t found that special soulmate, they compromise. Ally: I would never do that. John: You’re just less afraid of being alone than most. Ally: What are you talking about? I’m terrified of being alone. John: That is your biggest fantasy of all. The truth is you’d probably be happier alone. Sad as it is to want something you don’t have, it’s worse to have something you don’t want. If you do get married, ultimately he’ll end up being something you don’t want, because what you do want isn’t out there. Secretly I think you know that. That’s why you develop this ability to look at a judge and see Al Green, to look at a cloud and see cotton candy. At some unconscious level I think you know that the only world that won’t disappoint you is the one you make up. Ally: That isn’t true. I do all those things because I’m nuts. I will find somebody. I’m just crazy. That’s why I see things that aren’t there. I love this world. John: Fine. Then perhaps one day you’ll choose to live in it with the rest of us.239 This interchange makes clear the relationship among Ally’s hallucinations, her desire for the perfect romantic partner, and her notion that the world centers around her. John argues that her creation of a fantasy world is a way to avoid the real world around them, that to compromise is

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part of being a sane, functioning adult. Ally, however, would rather claim she is insane than admit that the world is fundamentally constructed on compromise. Ally therefore functions as the primary advocate for the craziness of love on the show. She advocates for the appeal of romance as insanity in her closing defense for a man who chopped off his dead wife’s hand as a token of love: Last night the DA who knows me best [Renee] called me hopeless. That I have to take issue with. Sometimes I think hope is the only thing I’ve got going. The thing that I hope for most, I’m embarrassed to admit, is emotional dependence. Probably why my friends think I’m crazy. Who would actually want that kind of weakness? But I do. I want to meet, fall in love with, and be with somebody that I can’t live without. I envy a little what [the defendant] had. Of course it isn’t normal what he did. I could never see myself doing something like that, as I’m sure nor could you. As for the love that made him do it, I pray that some day I’ll know some of that madness. . . . We all want to be madly in love, don’t we?240 The best things in life, Ally says, defy logic: “Love—beauty—it’s in the eye of the beholder. Even humor; if you think about it, it doesn’t make sense. Who can explain what people find funny. To me it’s the insistence on making sense that doesn’t make sense.”241 Ally argues that, at its core, love is resistant to commands from the intellect. She recognizes that the logical choice of soulmate for her is John Cage, and she ponders making the rational choice with her therapist, Steven Milter. Ally: Should I love John? He represents so many of the things I want in a man, and he would be the greatest of fathers. Milter: You’re begging the question that love can be voluntary. True love can often be reduced to three anecdotal questions: how would you feel about raising children with him? How would you feel about sitting around the fire and talking about life, a movie, perhaps a book you just read? And how would you feel about him sucking a little whipped cream out of the cup of your navel?242 Ally cannot summon romantic ardor for John, in spite of the knowledge that their relationship would make perfect sense. She asserts that to ignore the mad voices of passion ultimately would not make sense and that instead

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a sensible person should factor in such longings (however hallucinatory they are) instead of quashing or manipulating them. Ally, therefore, advocates a romantic ethos over what Eva Illouz calls the “therapeutic ethos,” the notion that “just as people can acquire knowledge about any other area, they can control their romantic relationships through work and the application of appropriate strategies and techniques.”243 This assumption, which started with psychoanalytic practice, has now extended to popular culture and the general public. No longer is a therapist’s presence required to view romance instrumentally; the therapeutic ethos is spread throughout the culture, inescapable in magazines, television shows, and everyday conversation. Ally and her friends have frequent arguments about the advantages and disadvantages of therapeutic strategies, and Ally herself has a complicated relationship to therapy. On one hand, the broad narrative of Ally McBeal boldly asserts the advantages of clinging to madness and illusion. The very symptoms that most therapists would seek to eradicate (such as her hallucinations) are the ones she chooses to value. On the other hand, Ally continues to visit counselors, partly as a familiar narrative mechanism to let the audience hear her thoughts and concerns but partly as a mechanism for potentially transforming the character into a more mature self. Ally McBeal both participates in and satirizes the therapeutic conception of romance through a series of counselors who are as wacky as their clients. Judging from the parade of unusual psychological practices, therapy would seem to be an unlikely source of insight on Ally McBeal. Most of the therapists on the show are guest stars and function to provide a particular case study in abnormal behavior. Unlike the other guest stars on the show, the guest therapists are allegedly voices of reason that should be helpful to Ally and company, but they show a range of conflicting strategies that would distort anyone’s psyche. Rhea Perlman dispenses advice without even bothering to know the details of the case. Rosie O’Donnell is a therapist who is so instantly and hostilely judgmental that she barely listens to her clients. Fred Willard, on the other hand, seems to have internalized a Rogerian unconditional positive regard that valorizes his patients right up to the point where he snaps and savages their feelings. Betty White bypasses talking cures, instead placing her trust in an array of pills from a change dispenser she wears at her waist.244 John Michael Higgins has several guest appearances in the first four seasons playing Steven Milter, an attorney with a speech impediment whenever he uses the word “comfortable,” but in the fifth season he changes professions for an extended arc as her therapist. Therapist Milter starts by pushing Ally toward having

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recreational sex with a younger man and continually asks to hold her hand when he imparts advice. On Ally it is hard to spot the “mental health” in the mental health professional. The longest-running and most pivotal therapist on the show is Dr. Tracey Clark, played by Tracey Ullman. Tracey violates many of our preconceived notions about what a psychiatrist should and should not do. She blatantly calls Ally “nuts” (“I didn’t think a therapist was supposed to call her patients nuts,” Ally says. Tracey replies, “You’re a cracker”).245 When Ally says something especially naive, Tracey not only laughs at her but also cues (via remote) a recorded laugh track to add to the humiliation.246 She blatantly lies about her own life, appropriating a sob story from the Bette Davis film Now, Voyager and presenting it as a real-life memory of her own love.247 Like Richard Fish, she unprofessionally admits judgments and motivations that most would keep hidden (she acknowledges aloud that she is bored during a session or that she listens to people like Ally only because they provide enough money to heat her pool).248 As would befit such an unusual therapist, Tracey advocates alternative strategies. She is responsible for John’s smile therapy and for Ally’s theme songs and imaginary backup singers, the Pips. “This is not normal therapy,” Ally says. “You’re not a normal person,” Tracey retorts.249 And yet, in spite of Tracey’s oddness, it is her therapeutic work that provides the most pivotal recognitions in the show’s serial narrative.250 Although the series seems to be having elaborate fun at the expense of therapists, it ultimately values plumbing the past and confronting one’s harshest memories. The serial narrative of the show and the overall character development of Ally McBeal turn on moments of emotional honesty that take place in Tracey’s office. Ally McBeal eventually tells one of psychoanalysis’s oldest stories. Ally is intensely aware of the absence of a romantic partner, and in the first couple of seasons we see her dating several prospective men, including, most important, Dr. Greg Butters ( Jesse L. Martin). When it seems that Ally and Greg are becoming serious, Billy intrudes and declares his affection for Ally, bringing the Ally-Billy-Georgia triangle story to its climactic moment. In an episode appropriately titled “Sideshow,” Ally McBeal interrupts its normal structure of cases and trials to concentrate solely on the fallout after Ally and Billy kiss. A great deal of this remarkable episode takes place in an extended session in Tracey’s office, and Tracey’s unusual therapeutic process finally provokes Billy into a startling admission of what he thinks about Ally:

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The therapist as insightful fool: Tracey (Tracey Ullman)’s buffoonish behavior results in the series’ emotional turning point. (Ally McBeal © 1998 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All rights reserved)

Love is wasted on you, Ally, ’cause you’ll always be unhappy! That’s why I left! I wasn’t gonna waste it. . . . You may go through your good times, dance with your unicorns, but we both know the place you’ll always go back to. If we stayed together, you don’t give yourself credit for how strong you are. I couldn’t have pulled you out of your world. You would have pulled me into yours.251 The episode concludes soon afterward with the click of a door as Ally leaves Billy in Tracey’s office. The revelation that Billy thinks love is wasted on Ally and that he is afraid of being pulled into her world essentially ends the possibility of Billy as Ally’s romantic destiny. They remain intimately linked, even after Billy dies, but this intense, superbly acted therapy session makes Ally move on to other concerns. This clears the way for uncovering an even more central concern, one that is the source of Ally’s romantic fantasy world. Ally finally confronts her own defining childhood trauma, which we learn is psychology’s oldest scenario, the primal scene. After Ally and Greg break up, she descends into depression, which at first appears to be a consequence of the breakup, but

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then Ally recounts the primal scene that gave rise to her collapsing fantasy world: My mother never loved my father. They’re still together, but she never loved him. When I was three and he was away, I got up in the middle of the night because my ear hurt. I walked into my parents’ bedroom, and she was there with a man I’d never seen before, and that was the day I started pretending. People want to know how I’m able to romanticize love into this big illusion. It’s because I got an early start.252 Ally later confronts her parents, George and Jeannie McBeal (Broadway musical veteran James Naughton and 1970s feminist icon Jill Clayburgh), with her memories, and her mother retaliates. Jeannie: Why don’t you just stay inside your dream universe? There’s obviously something to it. Ally: I don’t live in a dream universe. Sometimes I retreat to it. Jeannie: The problem is you think of it as reality. Ally: Well, I don’t. A dream world is when I walk into my bedroom, close my eyes, and see a unicorn. Reality is walking into your parents’ room as a three-year-old and seeing you in bed with another man. I know the difference. You think I don’t remember . . . ? Don’t make fun of my fantasy life, Mom; you inspired it.253 Ally and her parents end up in a prolonged, intense session in Tracey’s office, where other revelations complicate Ally’s simple understanding of her trauma. We learn that Ally’s mother has always been jealous of the deep connection between Ally and her father and that the father-daughter love left no room for true love between husband and wife. In spite of the horribly compromised affection at the heart of this family drama, Ally’s father managed to engender Ally’s belief in true love, as Ally’s mother recalls: Do you remember a song you used to sing with your father . . . about loving someone you’d never met. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and he’s not in the bed, and I’d creep downstairs, and I’d find him at the piano just singing that song, because your father, he never met the love of his life. . . . He’s been a wonderful father to you in so many ways, but where he’s been the most heroic is the way

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that he’s raised you to believe in your dreams, to believe they’ll come true when they never came true for him.254 The very foundation of Ally’s romantic fantasies, the understanding of romance that she learned singing wistful love songs like “Dulcinea” (from Man of La Mancha) with her father, is revealed as a lie.255 Her father and mother did not have a “one true love,” and her belief in a romantic soulmate comes from her father’s longing for such a relationship, not from a relationship that is actualized. The characters must then live with the messy, complicated drama of love, betrayal, and familial jealousy revealed in the therapist’s office, and in the process Ally begins to mature as a character. Having confronted the ugliest central moment in her life, she can now grow, according to the narrative. In true psychoanalytic fashion, admitting the pathological and pathetic truth about her family interaction frees her from being entrapped in childish patterns. Ally becomes more able to articulate what she wants and does not want in a romantic partner, and she fearlessly makes decisions about her relationships, as we see with her next serious boyfriend, lawyer Brian Selig (Tim Sutton). After six months of pleasant but passionless dating, Ally breaks up with Brian, letting him know her rationale without couching it in pleasantries or without denying her own faults. Brian asks, “Aren’t you afraid of ending up alone?” Ally replies, “I’m more afraid of ending up with the wrong person.”256 Far from being a desperately needy woman in search of a man, Ally is increasingly able to analyze a relationship’s shortcomings and to determine if the romance has potential. Remarkably, she does not jettison her romantic dreams once she learns that their origins are false. She continues to pursue her heart’s desire, fully aware of the illogical nature of her faith in love, brutally honest about her own feelings. So Ally, always the emotional and narrative center of the show, becomes its moral center as well. All the other primary characters, the ones who articulate alternatives to the road Ally takes, have failed to find a suitable balance between love and work. This leaves Ally alone, having come through her psychological trials with her faith in romance intact. That faith has become a mature choice instead of a remnant of a childish dream, and therefore Ally, still racked with doubt but no longer so flighty, becomes a primary advice giver to the other characters on the show. Throughout the fourth season, she is the character who consistently dispenses guidance to her friends, confronting them when their cowardice jeopardizes relationships, consoling them when those relationships fail.

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Even after her lover Larry Paul (Robert Downey Jr.) leaves, she is able to give forceful counsel to John and Richard about their relationships, prompting Richard to note, “We’re supposed to be taking care of you this week with Larry gone, but you’re taking care of all of us.”257 The mature Ally takes care of her friends, dispensing wisdom with newfound assurance. Larry represents her last, best chance at finding a romantic soulmate, and after he leaves (largely for reasons external to the show) Ally McBeal performs its final major narrative twist in its larger narrative. Ally suddenly discovers (due to circumstances that are possible only given the bizarre logic of this series)258 that she has a ten-year-old child named Maddie (Hayden Panettiere). Much to Ally’s surprise, Maddie fills the emotional void in her life: I’ve always had a hole. . . . I always thought it was going to be filled up with a man, and yet I could never picture him. Maybe the man turned out to be you. Maybe it’s been you. I know that this sounds crazy, but it’s as if I always knew you were out there. It’s as if a part of me knew, and now it makes so much sense you’re here. If only you knew how much money I’ve spent at therapists trying to figure out who is that guy, and now it turns out that that guy was a ten-year-old girl, and she’s home.259 One might argue that seeking completion in a child would place pathological pressure on the parent-child relationship. Or one could decry the fact that Ally is simply replacing one emotional need with another rather than building a better self-concept without the sense of incompleteness. Substituting her need for a man with her need for a child is a remarkably unfeminist choice. Yet this switch acknowledges that the universe sometimes gives people what they need, even if they do not know they need it. Ally has determinedly pursued a man as the obvious answer for her emotional needs throughout the series. Ally McBeal rewards her for her faith and hard work, but it does not give her what she desires. In a synchronistically unexpected version of bait-and-switch, Ally finds satisfaction not in a man but in a child, and in so doing the show reveals itself to have been fundamentally concerned with children throughout. In its fifth season the series comes full circle, returning to the image of the dancing baby from the series’ early years.260 The baby was the figure that embodied Ally’s fears of being alone (not a phantom male lover), revealing that her desire for companionship was at its center a desire to have children.

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Although children rarely appear in the show’s plotlines and Ally’s professed desires appear to deemphasize the figure of the child, in retrospect we can see how vital the concept of children has been to the show’s argument. Such a psychoanalytically driven series necessarily emphasizes the child. The continuity between the adult versions of the characters and their childish actions is often explicit, acknowledging that unresolved childhood conflicts still guide the adult.261 Ally’s breakup with Larry Paul is caused by his responsibility to his child. Larry must move to Detroit to be closer to his son in crisis, and there is little doubt expressed about choosing the child over the relationship. This choice presages Ally’s departure from the series and the law firm for a similarly unquestioned child crisis. “When you do have a child,” Larry tells her presciently, “no matter how much you prepare for it, you’ll be stunned by your capacity to love someone.”262 In this child-centered universe, the child’s problems clearly trump professional and romantic relations. The capacity for loving a child becomes a litmus test for characters on Ally. The series evacuates other key female characters (Ling, Nelle) from the promise of motherhood, and their lack of interest in parenting is one of the series’ most apparently damning criticisms of purely professional women. John’s most potentially promising romantic relationship, besides Ally, ends when he discovers that Melanie (Anne Heche), an elementary school teacher, does not want to have children. John asserts that having children is the “essence of getting married,” and Melanie accuses him of wanting to relive his own childhood. John retorts, “No, I’m looking forward to a future with someone who neither believes in marriage nor in having children, and it’s rather bleak.”263 Finally Melanie admits that she does not want children because she cannot believe that relationships last forever. Here the comparison with Ally uncovers another primary justification for Ally’s faith in romance. Ally is able to conceive of “forever” in a relationship, and it is this hope that buoys her until she finally becomes a mother. Ally McBeal appears to be concerned with the romanticization of the “one true love,” but in the end it reveals itself as focusing on the romanticization of children.264 Given this focus, Ally’s mishandling of the plotline concerning Ally as mother is frustrating. Once Ally finds her emotional fulfillment as Maddie’s mother, Maddie only intermittently appears as a narratively important figure. We occasionally see Ally do parenting tasks that hint at the difficulties of raising a daughter, as opposed to the beatific fantasy of child rearing as being all-fulfilling. Ally (moving to the beat of the Leave It to Beaver

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theme) tries to wake her cherubic daughter, only to see her transform (via special effects) into a feral, snarling demon. We see an uptight Ally grilling a school administrator about a range of policies from bullying to bees in one of the most rapid dialogue exchanges in the series.265 But, through the magic of television, Ally is given a hunky, sensitive, always available male baby-sitter (Victor Morrison, played by rock star Jon Bon Jovi) who can help her take care of Maddie without too much impact on her law practice (which seems to have a remarkably flexible work schedule). All working parents should be so lucky. Using this narratively convenient figure allows the series to maintain its emphasis on the professional lives of its main characters, but it deemphasizes the inconveniences of child rearing.266 After glorifying the notion of the child, the child almost disappears. The child is a reward for Ally’s good works, but she is little more than that.267 Ally McBeal, however, rewards its central character not only with a personally fulfilling object to love but also with professional success. When John’s personal crisis forces him to leave the firm as a participating senior partner, Richard offers Ally a partnership at the exact moment that she decides she does not want it. The more overtly careerist Nelle is incensed at the choice, but Richard explains that Ally’s personal qualities have given her the professional edge. In choosing Ally, he is replacing John with someone of equal heart and compassion, qualities that Nelle does not have. In the end it is Ally’s personal growth that distinguishes her as qualified to run the business, reiterating the integration of personal and professional life that the series explores throughout.268 Once Ally attains the pinnacle of legal success, she instantly becomes an efficient managing partner, running the morning meetings. Entrusted with saving the firm from financial disaster (caused by John’s and Richard’s overly compassionate management), Ally must fire unproductive staff members, and she chooses the associate she is closest to ( Jenny) while preserving the lawyer she has the most difficulty with (Nelle). She is businesslike and rational in her dealings with members of the firm, but she also displays compassion (she loans Jenny out instead of firing her; she encourages Coretta to recruit clients over lunch so that she can have a personal life at night).269 In short, Ally becomes an ideal professional manager, making tough business decisions and treating her employees with kindness and empathy. Having rewarded Ally with success, the show demonstrates how her work on her personal life prepared her to do work in the legal realm.270 Having given Ally unexpected compensations for her efforts, the series

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ends with Ally leaving the firm for child-related reasons. Maddie has a form of nervous breakdown due to “relational aggression” from friends, and Ally decides to move her back to New York and her old circle of friends, thus uprooting her law practice at the moment of its greatest success. The series finale feels abrupt as the producers try to bring the recently canceled series to a conclusion,271 but they rely on the already established unquestioned valuation of the child to provide a series-ending rationale. Thus the child remains more a primary fantasy than a fully developed character in Ally, a figure who dominates the present because of the influence of past traumas and who guides the future because of the value placed on child rearing.272 In the Ally universe childhood can become a trap if you remain prisoner to the fears you learned there. But if you reject childish impulses totally, you become deadened. The trick is to transcend the defensive strategies you learned in childhood without losing the childish sense of openness and playfulness. Closing Words on Seriality This lengthy discussion of Ally McBeal’s complex narrative makes it clear how involved the narrative technique of the serial can be. Some of the strategies examined here are more widely shared (the pressure to make important characters nicer over time; using blurts to air rhetorical excesses; the way verbally aggressive stances tend to keep characters isolated from the narrative center). Almost every series positions its characters in a network of thematic oppositions, enriching the possibilities for conflict among different values. Every primetime serial must decide on its individual balance between elaborating its thematic concerns and making us care about what happens next in the plot. Early on, Ally provided audiences with a clear narrative question that provided serial interest: will Ally be able to share a workplace with her former lover Billy, or will the soulmates find love again? Along the way to answering that question, Ally provides small narrative payoffs (will this particular guest star be found guilty or not guilty?) that simultaneously shed light on its thematic matrix. As different supporting characters defend their personal stances while they represent their professional clients, we learn how these characters differ from Ally in their understandings of ambition, aggressiveness, sexuality, romance, compromise, honesty, professional competence, personal confidence, materialism, performativity, childishness/maturity, selfcontrol, fantasy, competitiveness, sensitivity/vulnerability, and eccentricity. The ensemble cast structure allows Ally to distribute these qualities across

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gender, class, and race. Sharing characteristics lifts the argument of the series above the one-to-one linkages of character and attribute, encouraging us to focus on the issues as independent from a certain character’s fate. So the serial progresses in terms of the depth of our understanding of the characters while it also moves forward toward answering narratively foregrounded goals. Embedding this linear narrative of individual change with the larger thematic network of character alternatives, the serial endorses a particular set of values that its protagonist embodies. Given the complexity of the narrative tasks, it is easy to see why some viewers might have missed the elegant substitution of protagonist goals and the resolution of the psychoanalytic enigma at the turning point of Ally’s character change. If you miss several of the episodes on Ally’s crucial therapeutic sessions, you might notice that Ally has changed, but you do not know exactly why. Similarly, if you do not recognize that Ally has taken the remarkably difficult step of substituting the protagonist’s seemingly primary goal, it is easy to argue that Ally has “jumped the shark,” since it no longer provides the narrative payoff you initially expected. Thus one of the difficulties of the primetime serial—judging how much information an on-again, off-again audience needs to have reiterated. The narrative form of daytime soap revisits key plot moments numerous times through flashback and other devices. A primetime serial like Ally does this less frequently, making such a complex narrative more difficult to handle. In part, this chapter rearticulates the serial’s progression, unearthing an elegant, demanding architecture that might otherwise have gone unexplored in television criticism. I do not argue that Ally’s particular use of narrative is representative; instead Ally’s narrative elements are distinctive in many ways, showing the further possibilities of serial narrative to make nuanced arguments.

Four

“Is It Possible to Love Somebody Only Two Days?” Guest Stars and Eccentricity

The makers of a television show rely on the emotional power of

viewers’ connections to a network of familiar characters, thus enacting the thematic tensions of the series in their most dramatically weighted form. Events in a serial have power because they happen to characters in whom we have invested considerable time. But the primetime serial cannot take care of all of its narrative business by staying solely within the bounded world of core characters. It needs guest stars. Ally McBeal provides a case study of the narrative function of guest actors. Here I demonstrate that guest appearances provide conflict in ways that the core ensemble cannot and articulate how Ally in particular balances guest stars with recurring characters to make its larger argument about eccentricity. By making its case about eccentric behavior, instead of about a more obviously politically loaded difference such as race, Ally McBeal frames its argument in ways that seek to bypass resistances to questions of difference. It marshals our allegiances to long-running serial characters and balances them with the more targeted rhetoric of guest stars to create a complex appeal to audience attitudes. This chapter occupies a transitional position in this book. I continue to investigate the workings of the narrational system, but I begin to turn my focus toward the details of Ally’s argument about its key issues. Three Cross-Dressers, Three Strategies Most dramatic and comic television narratives eventually rely on guest stars to provide conflict.1 Nonserial dramatic television such as Law and Order

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builds the guest performance into its basic structure, and shows dealing with police officers, detectives, or lawyers are especially oriented to the guest. The outsider creates the conflict; without them there would be no case to solve, prosecute, or defend. Situation comedies do not rely so heavily on the guest appearance. Conflict defines the “situation” in a sitcom, and frequently these conflicts come from within the established sitcom “family.” On The Cosby Show one of the Huxtable children will try to sneak some misbehavior past the parents, causing the crisis that the wise mother and father must resolve. But a long-running sitcom must reenergize itself with fresh characters because eventually the options for conflict among the principal characters are exhausted. Sometimes the answer for a sitcom is to add another recurring character: a new child on The Cosby Show, a wife for Robert on Everybody Loves Raymond. Other sitcoms enliven relationships by having guest characters drop by (a primary character’s sister, an old friend from high school), thus giving the Friends someone new to react to. Because characters in these series essentially return to their initial states at the beginning of each episode, because very little about the overall dynamic of the characters changes, nonserial primetime shows eventually rely on conflicts outside the ensemble. Daytime serials, with their more relaxed pace, are more likely to rely entirely on their primary network to provide conflict.2 The appeal to the distracted viewer who may be engaged in household tasks and who may not attend to every moment of each day’s episode makes the daytime serial less plot intensive and less likely to call on guest stars for important narrative functions. Economic factors also make a difference; the soap opera is less likely to be able to afford pricey guest stars (except for certain splashy cameos by soap fans who are celebrities, such as Elizabeth Taylor) than the primetime series, which can feature Brad Pitt or Christina Applegate for a very special episode that the network advertises heavily. Primetime serials, usually airing only once a week to an audience that expects rapid narrative progression, demand more plot more often than a small group of core characters can dependably produce. The sheer quantity of conflict required to keep a primetime audience interested often necessitates that a primetime serial be replenished by guest stars. Different primetime serials handle the balance of guest and recurring characters in different ways. Buffy the Vampire Slayer understood that new recurring characters may be more accepted by the audience when they had served as guest performers previously. Anya the vengeance demon (Emma Caulfield) and Jonathan the nerd (Danny Strong) both began with

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appearances as conflict-causing guest stars for a single episode before they returned to join as part of continuing story lines.3 Ally McBeal has its own version of this strategy: it uses Ling and Clare in story lines about individual cases, eventually hiring both of them at the law firm. This strategy allows the serial to audition a character, to see how a character fits within the world of the show, and to test the chemistry between the guest and the regular cast. Clare’s outlandish blurting (and her liminal sexuality as embodied by transvestite Dame Edna Everage/Barry Humphries) worked well in the sexual negotiations of Ally, so she became a candidate for promotion to recurring character. Such former guest stars resonate more deeply within the established network of characters than a new primary character who appears suddenly in the cast.4 Ally McBeal, like other serials about professionals, uses the structure of the individual case to provide narrative payoffs for single episodes. Because primetime viewers have grown used to a rapid narrative pace, they are unlikely to be satisfied solely with the long-term pleasures of watching even beloved characters evolve slowly. The legal case provides a clear binary narrative event that provides a bit of closure within the serial whole. The accused is found guilty or not guilty, in our eyes and in the jury’s, thus bringing to a halt the conflict brought about by the guest star while continuing the character negotiations within the primary cast. Ally McBeal, with its strong continuing story lines of character development, rarely has a case that extends over more than one episode,5 whereas The Practice (a show oriented more to the actual case outcomes and less to the serial growth of characters) is more likely to use cases that last several episodes. Each serial must determine the appropriate balance of long-term serial character growth and short-term narrative payoff to keep its audience’s interest. Guest stars are especially useful to a primetime serial because of their transitory nature. If a network of serial characters must handle the continuing ramifications of narrative actions, then the advantage of a guest player is that they do not have to deal with these consequences. A guest character can create a serious conflict and then depart, thus satisfying the series’ need for drama without requiring a full commitment of its resources. If an issue is of serious dramatic import to a continuing character, then the serial tends to give those tensions free rein, exploiting our investment in the character over time. Core characters cannot disappear from the show easily, which means that it is more difficult for them to interject temporary conflicts of serious dramatic weight. Not every dramatic conflict must be played out

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The guest star as plot engine: Kimmy’s (Jami Geertz, with Don McManus) court case provides an episode payoff for the serial. (Ally McBeal © 1998 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All rights reserved)

for a lengthy period, and guest characters can pose issues that are of vital importance to them without burdening the serial with a continuing narrative obligation. To introduce the relative narrative functions of guest and recurring characters, I examine three Ally characters who open up similar challenges to the show’s articulation of sexuality. These three transgendered characters who appear for different lengths of time on the series show us the kinds of purposes that guests serve. An individual episode of Ally titled “Boy to the World” presents a young transvestite (Stephanie, played by Wilson Cruz) in trouble with the law, raising issues about eccentricity/difference without getting fully caught up in issues of homelessness, runaways, and prostitution.6 A guest star’s appearance almost necessarily opens up more concerns than can be closed down by a single jury decision within an hour’s screen time, and therefore the narrative structure of using guest performers must simplify and shortchange complex issues. To look at single episodes alone is to miss the complicated handling of issues across the serial, but to look solely at the long character arcs is to gloss over how individual episodes short-circuit complicated debates.

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Of all the possible themes raised by the plot of “Boy to the World,” the episode activates the meaning that is most central to the show’s overall concerns: the notion that eccentricity/difference is seen as deviance. Ally is assigned to defend Stephanie on her third charge of prostitution, which means that the gentle-spirited youth could face prison. Ally befriends the fragile runaway and suggests that they use an insanity defense, arguing that Stephanie’s transvestite fetishism is a pathology. Stephanie refuses to choose the practical defense, arguing that she left her home in Ohio because people called her sick, and she does not want to label herself a freak in an official court. Stephanie would rather choose prison than call her behavior deviant, even for legal expediency. Stephanie’s poverty and her position as a sex worker provide narrative urgency to her case, but the dialogue emphasizes the emotional scars caused by labeling cross-dressing deviant. Her poverty and her desperate state are caused by parents who refuse to acknowledge their son’s transvestitism and by a small-minded midwestern culture that condemned her existence and drove her to the streets. The episode itself works hard to make sure that it does not argue that prostitution is a worthy individual lifestyle choice, nor does it argue that transvestitism actually is insanity but instead that it could be used as a strategy to exonerate oneself legally. Yet the show’s psychologist agrees that Stephanie is “messed up,” and everyone expresses concern in serious, hushed tones about her plight. The overt signs of Stephanie’s “messed up” state are her poverty and her illegal actions, though the focus of the dialogue is her choice to cross-dress. It is easy, therefore, to be confused about whether the episode condemns her transvestitism or her unemployment as the source of her trouble. In an hour it is difficult for the show to make sure both that the situation is dire and that transsexualism is not responsible for that direness. Ally negotiates that the case will be continued without any legal finding for a year, conditional on Stephanie being employed. Ally offers to give her a job at the law firm, and she is accepted into the off-kilter world of Cage and Fish (Elaine says, “Men here . . . mentally undress us constantly. You should be safe because there are parts of you that even their imaginations will want to stay clear of ”). Here Ally acts as savior to halt Stephanie’s decline, but now there is the potential for Stephanie to become a member of the primary cast. Given the series’ focus on sexual politics in the workplace, it would be difficult for a transvestite office worker to stay in the background, making transgendered sexuality an unavoidably central issue for the show. Since Ally devotes itself primarily to the difficulties of heterosexual romance, this new emphasis would be tangential, and so

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according to the narrative logic of the serial, Ally McBeal must excise Stephanie. Although she has been employed, Stephanie returns to the streets; an assignation goes awry, and she is murdered. Unfortunately, the need for the serial narrative to remain focused on its thematic core causes Ally to rely on one of the oldest conservative narrative strategies for dealing with deviance: killing the character and expunging her confusing presence. The core characters are free to move on without her, carrying only the memory of the lesson she taught about deviance.7 The episode ends with Ally asking, “Is it possible to love somebody only two days?” This question is indicative of the difficulty of having a guest performer raise crucial issues. Ally McBeal and other serials create characters that we can grow to love over time, so these familiar characters can give strong emotional weight to issues they confront. But can we love characters we know for only an hour? Can we sympathize with their plight in a way that gives serious consideration to their concerns? Of course we can, because of the seductive power of narrative, acting, and cinematography, but our bonds to a guest performer are necessarily limited. The well-made serial uses the different emotional weights of long-term and short-term performers to make its argument about how the world should be constructed. Consider how Ally depicts other transvestite characters and the issue of deviance and tolerance. The show’s fourth season introduces a recurring guest character, Cindy McCauliff (Lisa Edelstein), a closeted crossdresser we meet when she does not want to take a required physical at her workplace. Mark ( James LeGros) notices the attractive client in the law office, and when her case is over, he pursues her romantically. Cindy is both drawn to him and afraid of his reaction when he discovers her secret. Finally she pulls him close to her during a slow dance, thus revealing her penis, and Mark initially recoils in shock. He later regroups and declares that he wants to continue to have a romantic relationship with her. This is a remarkable moment in the history of primetime portrayals of sexuality: an avowedly heterosexual character chooses to stay in a same-sex romantic relationship because he “can’t see [her] as anything other than a woman.”8 To Mark, the gender Cindy chooses is more important than her physical sexual characteristics, thus giving Mark (a fairly un­developed continuing character added near the end of the third season) his grandest gesture. Soon afterward, Mark discovers that he has difficulty following through with his bold declaration. Nelle discourages him on both moral and professional grounds (“How much credibility do you think you’ll have when your

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colleagues find out your girlfriend has a man missile? It’s not gay rights; it’s a circus act”). Even normally tolerant John cannot support him, and he recommends that Mark and Cindy visit a therapist (played by Louie Anderson) who specializes in couples facing “distinct challenges” in “getting them to accept each other [and also] gaining acceptance for them as a couple in the society at large.” They visit the therapist’s group session along with several other couples: a young man and an elderly woman, an obese woman and a small bald man, a dominatrix and a very prim-looking man, and male conjoined twins (joined at the head) with an average-looking woman. Here the episode clearly emphasizes the obvious discrepancies between the couples as the camera pans among them, encouraging us to view them as society is wont to do—as a freak show. In this moment of comic spectacle, Ally positions us as outsiders judging these incongruous couples, thus duplicating for a moment the politics of othering by reducing them to their externally observable differences. After having built up sympathy for Cindy by providing us with access to her conflicted feelings over a couple of episodes, the camera abruptly turns its harsh gaze on her, grouping her with other “freaks.” In this moment, because the camera briefly reminds us how easily we would judge such an unusual couple, we see the potential cost of maintaining this relationship given society’s norms. Cindy flees the group session, refusing to accept herself as one of those aberrant persons, which leads to the breakup of her relationship with Mark. Mark shows an impulse toward tolerance and acceptance, but when exposed to the harsh judgments of the world, he cannot follow through. His politics leads him toward a bold coupling, but he learns that his romantic feelings cannot go where his well-meaning politics intend for him to go.9 By placing our sympathies with Cindy over several episodes, then suddenly othering her as a freak, the show pits the liberal instinct toward tolerance against the personal forces of sexual attraction in order to illuminate the problems posed by difference. Using a continuing guest character allows for a more subtly nuanced depiction of this tension. Cindy is one of several characters who have extended stays on the show while they date a principal character. When the firm hires Clare to serve as Richard’s secretary, it “promotes” her from a continuing guest role to a central member of the core ensemble, and in so doing it demonstrates yet another argument about the acceptance of difference. Clare is played by Barry Humphries as a variation on his cross-dressing portrayal of Dame

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Edna Everage, a character he created. From her initial introduction to the series, Ally McBeal treats Clare as a true oddity. Jenny solicits her sight unseen as the lead plaintiff for the sole case on Ally McBeal that continues for multiple episodes, but when Clare arrives in person, her bizarre appearance takes all the attorneys aback. Opposing attorney Raymond thinks that Clare is a joke that the other lawyers are playing on him; in the final episode, one look at Clare is enough to send a narcoleptic minister (Carl Reiner) into unconsciousness.10 This blue-haired, stocky, ebullient, garishly dressed woman quickly demonstrates her tendency to shock people verbally as well as visually. She blurts out inappropriate sexual comments, which eventually leads to her being accused of sexual harassment (she tells one man that he fills out his trousers nicely and she invites another to “share a hot dog under her canopy”).11 Clare’s cross-dressing figure could pose some of the same difficulties noted in “Boy to the World.” Here again a transvestite is hired by the firm, so once again there is the possibility of derailing Ally’s focus on heterosexual romance. Stephanie is so destabilizing that she must be eliminated in one episode; on the other hand, Clare’s verbal frankness and eccentric passion for frankfurters and colonial homes is accepted into the oddballcentered world of Ally McBeal. The key difference here is that Clare is a female character, not a transvestite. The cross-dressing by the actor who plays Clare is never overtly mentioned. Clare is an avowedly heterosexual character who expresses desire for men and pursues them. That the actor playing Clare is a biological man in drag obviously queers the character in ways that set up a host of sly, winking jokes. When John Cage wears a rubber body suit under his clothes to make him seem more buff, Clare says, “One of us isn’t being honest with himself, is he?”12 When Clare introduces new employee Liza (Christina Ricci) to the concept of the unisex bathroom, she notes that “here at Cage, Fish, and McBeal we don’t distinguish between the sexes.”13 Clare represents another milestone in the history of transgendered imagery: a transvestite actor plays a “real woman” in a primetime ensemble. Certainly this achievement is a mixed bag. Unlike most previous examples of cross-dressing, Clare’s narrative purpose cannot be reduced to her transvestitism (by comparison, we get very little personal information about recurring character Cindy McCauliff except for her transvestitism). Clare avoids television’s tendency to present drag as funny in and of itself (a simple appearance by Milton Berle in drag would be enough to bring laughter), but she is the butt of slier jokes.14 She also becomes a figure of

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“noble othering,” dispensing wise advice from her liminal position, serving a similar function at times to the Wise Old Black Person or the Sage Indian Shaman stereotypes. Because Clare joins the ensemble as a continuing principal cast member, the depiction of tolerance here can be much more fully elaborated than in Cindy’s case (in which tolerance is raised as a political option, only to be closed down by romantic difficulties) or Stephanie’s example (in which the destabilizing transvestitism must be quickly expunged). A single-episode guest raises more issues about tolerance than can be dealt with fully, and so the episode’s closure short-circuits the elaboration of those issues that the serial makes possible. If a character has a more extended stay on the show, the serial can weave together Othering moments with empathetic appeals. If an eccentric becomes part of the primary cast, then a certain amount of tolerance becomes necessary, though (as in Clare’s case) she can be made liminal through a variety of strategies. In the example provided by transvestite characters, Ally McBeal shows how the serial can use the narrative capabilities of single guest appearances, continuing guest roles, and primary characters to raise a variety of issues about tolerance. Difference versus Eccentricity The strategy of overtly disavowing Dame Edna’s cross-dressing offers hints about the way Ally McBeal treats difference. Ally McBeal is deeply concerned with balancing the complexities of modern heterosexual romance with the tensions of the contemporary workplace. In America key laws and courtroom rulings helped to dismantle many official gender barriers, encouraging society to renegotiate its assumptions about men and women and thereby leaving romantic gender norms in crisis.15 At the same time, the extension of legal protections into more “private” matters in the workplace has created uncertainty about professional conduct. The Ally cases in which guest stars appear have to do mostly with elaborating this set of larger social concerns. Unlike most other shows about lawyers (which frequently deal with a large range of different criminal cases to maximize the dramatic possibilities),16 Ally eventually concentrates almost exclusively on a relatively narrow specialty of sexual harassment, annulments, prenuptial agreements, and wrongful termination suits that allow the show to explore its primary foci. Cases that do not advance the show’s central issues are relatively rare, allowing Ally to explore the workplace/romance dynamic in detail (when the firm does take on a criminal case, Ally confesses that she is

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afraid of criminals).17 Again, the narrative construction of the show makes it possible for Ally to sculpt fairly precise arguments about certain issues. Another primary focus of the show is the status of the eccentric in modern society, an issue that works in tandem with the emphasis on romance. Positioning the show as being about eccentricity instead of a more specific category such as race is a clear ploy to separate the issue of difference from its current political baggage. Although there still remains much work to be done in achieving real-world racial tolerance, on television the topic of accepting racial difference has been repeatedly portrayed by the vaguely feelgood politics of mainstream media. Blatantly racist characters in present-day media are hissable, melodramatic villains, making it difficult to portray the politics of tolerance to hip contemporary audiences without after-school special preachiness, and therefore fictional media present many of their arguments about difference in disguised form (films and television programs detail invasions by “aliens,”18 for instance, or superheroes discuss tolerance for “mutants”). In a media era that constantly needs new material to fill five hundred channels, the danger is that arguments for tolerance will be so sanctimoniously familiar that they will be heard as yesterday’s news. Over­ familiarity with a message can create a resistance that dramatic programming must overcome to make the message fresh. Ally McBeal chooses to bypass the more familiar frames for discussing difference (race, sexual preference, etc.) by creating a world where differences are not significant. Ally is admittedly a fantasy in which race does not exist.19 Renee’s status as a black woman never affects her professional activities, nor are black judge Seymour Walsh’s (Albert Hall) decisions ever questioned on racial grounds. Racial attitudes never cause tensions when African American doctor Greg Butters ( Jesse L. Martin) and Ally date.20 Although the vilification of Ling owes much to the history of the Dragon Lady stereotype in Asian imagery, again the racial difference poses no overt problems when she and Richard are in a relationship. In a series that looks to explore the difficulties of modern romantic relationships, race would seem to be an obvious source of conflict, and its absence is conspicuous.21 This absence can be explained in part in terms of the show’s focus. Ally McBeal is by design an interrogation of gender. By narrowing its case law and its characters’ personal crises to those dealing with our changing expectations about what men and women are, Ally McBeal mines its primary material in remarkably rich fashion. Because it is difficult to imagine dealing with race and gender in this level of detail, one could argue that Ally should not be expected to handle racial difference with the same aplomb that it does gender.22 It is a matter of necessarily choosing an emphasis.

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This is not to say that Ally’s strategy of ignoring race is apolitical, nor is its politics uninformed. It is an extension of an earlier tactic from L.A. Law, Kelley’s first series. I recall being struck by the appearance of a black judge whose race on the bench was not significant to the plot. On further consideration, I realized that the obvious point being made was that we should not expect that a black character necessarily exists only to address black issues (any more than a white character must bring up his or her race as a narratively important element). L.A. Law consistently placed black judges on its fictional benches until eventually I stopped labeling them as “black judges” and simply thought of them as “judges.” While this casting strategy clearly reflected a real-world push to put African Americans on the bench, it also was a progressive move in television representation. The conspicuous absence of the mention of race was, in this instance, a powerful political tool to acclimatize the viewer to accept African Americans in a position of judicial power. By repeatedly not addressing the judges’ race, L.A. Law made the argument that an African American on the bench was normal, not a remarkable exception. Politics necessarily involves matching specific tactics to the needs of a specific time and place. There are no global strategies that apply equally well to all scenarios; a strategy that was effective in the 1980s might not work in the year 2000. So one could certainly argue that the Kelley tactic of not naming race had lost its effectiveness by the time Ally McBeal aired, that not to address race as a potential barrier to romantic attachments is a cowardly act. And yet Ally McBeal attempts a more elaborated version of Kelley’s earlier argument for tolerance. Instead of displacing questions of race onto “aliens” or “mutants,” Ally reframes the question as being about “eccentricity.” “Eccentricity” is a more general notion allowing us to discuss a broader range of people than the more concrete categories “race” and “sexual orientation,” just as the cooler term “difference” allows academics to bypass the particularities of color to discuss broader patterns of discrimination. On Ally people are discriminated against because they are “odd,” because they do not fit into established business norms or romantic expectations. Sometimes these distinctions are based on bodies (obesity, baldness, or simply being “funny looking”); sometimes they are behavioral (the desire to fly with wings, a foot fetish); at other times they are concerned with identity politics (homelessness). The notion of eccentricity is a more abstract idea, in the same way that the law attempts to circumscribe general behavior without regard to particularity. It does not matter to the legal system whether you burglarize a pawn shop or a jewelry store; both are “breaking

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and entering.” The implementation of the law deals with the specifics of the individual case, which governs the severity of the sentence, and so on, but the notion of the law is necessarily abstract. Ally McBeal attempts to frame its argument about tolerance at a similar level of abstraction, thus bypassing any resistances we might have to familiar questions of race and asking us to examine more general questions. How much difference should a society tolerate? In today’s image-oriented professions, are there norms about “self-presentation” that limit the expression of one’s identity politics? If an employee’s “oddness” has a negative impact on a business, does the employer have an obligation to continue to employ him or her? What is the relationship between the public politics of accepting workplace partners and the private politics of selecting romantic partners? Can a tolerant person discriminate against people as lovers, or is the heart’s desire more malleable to match the mind’s politics? The issues are the same as the romantic tolerance of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner or the workplace discrimination of Philadelphia, but reframing these issues as eccentricity can help a jaded audience that has seen one too many sanctimonious pleas for tolerance, encouraging them to revisit the issues with a fresh perspective. Certainly there are dangers in the political choice of changing race or difference into “eccentricity.” Eccentricity can make social difference seem freely chosen, as if an individual chose to be fat or to blurt uncontrollably due to Tourette’s syndrome, and thus eccentricity can threaten to reduce identity to the less politically potent concept “lifestyle” (as third-wave feminists have noted about the current defanging of feminist politics in the media).23 Eccentricity also can tend toward “cuteness,” as opposed to the more disturbing barriers of difference.24 In addition, what eccentricity gains in generality, it loses in specificity, and many alternative voices ground their challenge to mainstream media silences by grounding their expression in the particularity of individual experiences of discrimination. Again, no political tactic is one-size-fits-all; I merely wish to acknowledge the complex set of advantages and disadvantages of Ally’s eccentricity strategy. Given this strategy, the serial weaves together plot material from guest stars and series regulars to make a complicated argument for tolerance. In many of the guest roles it is physical appearance that brings about discrimination. In one case, the legal claim is clearly race presented in a disguised version; a woman whose skin has permanently turned orange sues because she is discharged from her job, and Billy argues before the court based on racial discrimination laws.25 In other cases, the guest’s physical

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appearance causes more complicated claims. A graphic design firm becomes successful in part because of the work of a set of “weird”-looking employees: a man who claps and repeats words compulsively, an obese woman, a transvestite, and a man whose face “scares children.” When the company becomes more successful and moves to an open studio where the employees can be seen by clients, the owner fires these longtime employees because they were not “commensurate with the image” of the firm, because they alienated clients, and because they did not bring in new clients (which was one of their new job responsibilities). Although their design work did not suffer, the function of their jobs changed as the firm grew, and image, not craft alone, became included in their performance evaluation. In such cases, the customers can be blamed for the firing. John: Don’t you consider it a prejudice to judge somebody on looks? President: I wasn’t doing it. The clients were. John: How do you not foster that bigotry when you respond to it in this way? Who cares! Eccentricity could be a selling point. It goes with distinction, individualism. President: Is that what I’m supposed to say? Look at the distinctive defensive tackle wearing a dress? . . . Do you have any idea how hard it is to survive in today’s market? . . . Clients make quick decisions. They choose companies that instill them with confidence. These four people, they couldn’t do it, as wonderful as they are, and as president of my company I had a responsibility. . . . It isn’t always about product; it’s about selling. That’s business: selling, selling, selling.26 If success depends on the customer’s trust in the company’s employees, then a whole host of personal factors may become relevant to their jobs. In another case, an aging insurance salesman who combs his remaining hair over his bald spot is fired because the “combover” makes him seem untrustworthy. The opposing attorney asks him, “Did [your employer] ever tell you that what’s on top of your head is a lie and what people see when they look at you is a deliberate intent to conceal? A combover by its very nature is a fraud.”27 Blaming the customer’s judgments for the company’s hiring and firing is an old standby for racial discrimination, and in these cases Ally extends the logic of discriminatory arguments so that we may see them still at work in the age of the kinder, gentler corporation. The modern manager more

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clearly understands the importance of intangible factors on business performance, as addressed by countless business best-sellers. As public relations personnel institutionalize the significance and shapability of corporate image and as branding becomes a sellable quantity, the logical extension of such practices that blend business with appearance is to consider the conflict between personal expression and job performance. Ally McBeal, intensely concerned with the changing balance between workplace norms and private matters,28 places the individual employee in the middle of the conflict, asking us to examine the competing claims of the modern workplace and individual rights. Ally raises the argument that a modern business employs the worker’s looks as well as his or her physical or mental labor, just as Arlie Russell Hochschild has argued that certain jobs pay for “emotion work” (airline stewards or customer service personnel maintaining a kind, polite attitude in the face of irate customers, for instance).29 In such an economy of style, there is a clear (and, from a business’s point of view, justifiable) reason for preferring more traditionally attractive employees over unusual-looking ones. Ally forces us to recognize the impasse between the politics of liberal acceptance and the blurring of product and image, although most modern businesses pledge overt loyalty to both principles without acknowledging conflicts. Ally cases clearly exaggerate for dramatic or comic purposes, but they make us see discrimination with new eyes. When appearance and job performance clash and result in unemployment, we have a long-standing expectation that the court (after years of promoting gender and racial equality) will tend to continue to promote acceptance. In some sense, then, these Ally cases about tolerating eccentric appearance in the workplace are easier for audiences to accept because we understand the precedents for enforcing official, public tolerance. Ally pushes the issue further, however, when it interrogates whether individuals should necessarily accept eccentrics as lovers. In these episodes guest stars pose a more personal question about whether the politics of tolerance extends from the public sphere of employment to the private sphere of sex and romance. Again, Ally stacks the odds in improbable ways (if a viewer is concerned with how “true to life” the cases are), but this enables the guest appearances to focus the show’s rhetoric sharply on the particular difficulties posed by one’s romantic tastes and one’s larger politics. In one episode a woman meets a man through an online dating service, and she falls in love with him during their phone conversations, stating that physical appearance did

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not matter to her. When she finally meets him in person, she discovers to her surprise that he is a dwarf, and she breaks off the relationship, causing him to sue for emotional damages. This forced setup allows Ally to concentrate purely on the issue of the romantic partner’s height. Like Stephanie, the dwarf risks a trial in the hope that the official voice of the court will declare that his difference does not make him a freak, acknowledging the importance of court decisions for promoting tolerance in our society. The official approbation of a verdict, he believes, will help to overcome the voices of parents and others who told him that he could not be loved by an average-sized woman.30 An episode such as this one is set up narratively to align our sympathies with the rejected man, hoping that he will find love or at least justice. Ally McBeal acknowledges that extending one’s romantic love to someone you do not find attractive is more easily done in the movies and on television than in real life. In an episode in which an obese man breaks off his engagement to perform an Ally-like act of impetuous romanticism and ask Ally if she would date him, she refuses him purely on grounds of lack of attraction, though she initially denies this reason. Renee: Why did you automatically dismiss the idea of dating him? Ally: Didn’t think he was my type. Renee: You ruled him out instantly because of looks. Ally: No, I knew he was in questionable health. It isn’t that simple. A person gets a vision of how a date might go and I couldn’t picture it. [Ally immediately imagines getting in a car. The overweight man gets in the other side, and the car tips over onto its side.] Renee: Sad thing is, in a movie we’d both be rooting for the gal to date the guy.31 The show acknowledges the power of popular narrative to encourage us to extend our sympathies to the less attractive romantic underdog, but it simultaneously admits that this choice is easier to make from the comfort of a theater seat or a living room recliner.32 Such narratives typically depend on giving the underdog a faux unattractiveness, making minor cosmetic alterations (such as wearing glasses) on a glamorous Hollywood star. Such facile obstacles disappear, thus rewarding the wise lover for seeing deeply and transforming the ugly duckling through a loving choice. By using the same narrative logic that it uses to champion acceptance

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of eccentricity in the workplace, Ally argues that its characters should be open to a full range of romantic possibilities, but it does not let them live comfortably with that utopia. On Ally the unattractive guest performer does not become a more easily loved beautiful swan. The fat man and the dwarf, however sympathetic, remain the same physically, thus forcing Ally and others to acknowledge the awkward difference between their political acceptance and their romantic inclinations. Ally argues that these characters theoretically should be able to extend their romantic predilections to include everyone equally (just as our society has done by extending at least the promise of equal rights through the implementation of law), but that love does not necessarily follow politics. Searching for a soulmate on Ally McBeal explicitly involves testing the social discourses of popular culture about what love is against the characters’ personal experiences. The show asserts that (to the characters’ dismay) the boundaries of acceptance in romance are bound up in a set of thornier judgments than our official public tolerances. A well-intentioned left-leaning person may argue for acceptance for all in the workplace but still hold very specific prejudices about potential lovers, according to Ally, because the heart does not always follow the head. In an era of touchy-feely narratives of acceptance, Ally reminds us that all acceptances are not equally easy. Pitfalls The potential dangers here are myriad for reasserting old social prejudices, and Ally McBeal certainly has numerous difficulties presenting its guest weirdos. First, the show pokes cruel fun at the oddballs, forcing us to make harsh external judgments that would seem to undermine its attempt to gain our tolerance. Ally makes no attempt to camouflage the oddness of its guest eccentrics; in fact, it makes a visual spectacle of them. In the case dealing with the balding man’s combover, the lawyers force him to lift up his hair, slowly unspiraling a Rapunzel-sized lock of hair as the lawyers laugh.33 The woman who has turned orange is introduced to us as the object of the lawyers’ stares. As Billy and Georgia look offscreen in astonishment, we hear an offscreen voice saying, “Feel free to gawk. I’m orange,” before we actually see the strangely colored person.34 The show creates scenes that are intended to make the guest oddballs look ridiculous. When Richard questions on the stand a man who compulsively claps and repeats words, he asks the man to repeat his answer.35 Such tactics necessarily make these guest characters appear to be Other and therefore asks us to participate in making external

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judgments about them. However, the show does so while also structuring the narrative to make clear that their suffering is unwarranted. Ally McBeal makes an argument for tolerance of a wide range of eccentrics in the workplace, but it does not make this choice easy. We must first recognize the utter foreignness of the compulsive clappers and orange-skinned women before the show asks us to take up their cause. It is uncertain whether the redemption through viewer sympathy outweighs the spectacularization of the character’s difference, but the show does attempt a complicated appeal first to our shared prejudices and then to our narrative understanding. While making fun of its guest eccentrics, Ally can reiterate long-standing social judgments against certain kinds of bodies. The show sometimes attempts to bypass our histories of prejudice by presenting novel physical or behavioral oddities (the orange-skinned woman, for example, or the man who hits happy people).36 This allows us to examine the notion of eccentricity with a certain level of abstraction, since we are not accustomed to thinking about these characteristics. Ally also deals with judgments about more familiar identity politics. Perhaps most important, given the public controversy about the thinness of actress Calista Flockhart, the show returns several times to images of overweight people. The lawyers talk an overweight, bald, millionaire client into getting a prenuptial agreement before he marries an attractive younger woman, and the man’s personal history repeats the parental warning heard in the case of the online dwarf. The obese man says, “When I was seven my mother put me on a diet, said if you’re fat no girl would ever love you.”37 Ally temporarily lends us the perspective of someone who has received such harsh social judgments, making sure that the person has compensating virtues that theoretically should outweigh their body issues (the millionaire worked and studied hard to gain his money, for instance). Yet weight creates a seemingly unassailable barrier to a frequently expressed goal on Ally McBeal: finding one’s soulmate, the lover you dream of. In “The Promise” a fat man (Harry Pippen, played by Jay Leggett) on the verge of marrying an obese woman asks Ally for advice because his fiancée does not inspire his romantic ardor, although she is a good friend. After Ally advises him to follow his passion, he breaks off the impending wedding, causing the large jilted bride to confront Ally: “People like me and Harry don’t get the partners of our dreams. Sometimes when you hold out for everything you end up with nothing. Remember that the next time a fat man asks you for advice.” Ally concurs and changes her advice to the large man, encouraging him to settle for companionship. She advises someone to

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give up the quest for a soulmate, arguing in essence that a separate system exists for those not fortunate enough to be within the conventional realm of attractiveness. Ally protests the inequity of the situation while also acknowledging the seeming unshakability of these physical judgments, thus making fat a clear disqualifier for entering the romantic sweepstakes. Ally forces us to examine the claims of popular culture that “love is all around” and confronts us with the idea that romance is not conducted on equal grounds. Romance remains (despite the American embrace of the ideal of equality) a fairly hierarchical endeavor, according to Ally. When someone partners with a person considerably more or less attractive than they themselves are, characters greet the union with surprise or suspicion,38 as in the example of the wealthy client who is encouraged to sign a prenuptial agreement to protect his wealth from possible golddigging. Pop culture conceals this hierarchy by casting most of its lovers from the set of generally attractive star actors. In interrogating the power of the popular myth of romantic love, Ally exposes the unacknowledged hierarchy of attraction; unfortunately, it does so by labeling fat as the quintessential example of an admittedly unwarranted but still powerful limitation on achieving one’s romantic dreams.39 The more common the difference depicted on Ally McBeal is, the more difficult the issue is to handle within the fantastic world the characters inhabit. Ally simply does not know what to do with a serious real-world problem such as homelessness. Homeless guest characters appear on Ally to disturb her comfortable class position through antagonistic and anti­ social acts, but these disturbances are always made safe by revealing that the character is not truly a street person. As Ally passes one such beggar, he lashes out: For God’s sake don’t look at me, corporate hollowed-out. . . . Walk by me like I don’t exist. I exist, lady! You don’t have to give me change, you can say no, but I exist! I am not beneath an answer. . . . Rich single lonely heart lawyer. . . . Bet this is the longest conversation you’ve had with someone not dressed in Prada or Calvin Klein.40 Later we discover that this “street person” who pegs Ally so ruthlessly is really an insurance agent masquerading in order to collect information about homelessness in America. Similarly, we encounter “Mr. Bo,” a threatening bum who stalks John Cage, only to discover that he is Melanie’s father. She tells us that he chooses to live on the streets as an escape from the pressures

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of everyday life.41 Both these homeless figures offer the chance to puncture the insulated upper- to upper-middle-class world of the show, and the violence of their language skewers the main characters’ class pretenses. But in the end they are revealed to be middle-class persons themselves, who either chose their ragged state (unlike myriad real people who have lost homes because of financial or mental breakdowns) or are disguised.42 This harkens back to the strategy of making an actress “unattractive” by putting glasses on her and pinning her hair up; the great advantage of this strategy is how quickly it can be undone by removing the eyewear and loosening the hair to reveal the attractive person underneath. Just as Hollywood tends to cheat in its portrayal of ugliness, Ally McBeal cheats in the way it depicts homelessness. Frankly, the world of the show is so prone to flights of fancy that the raw, despairing fact of homelessness seems out of place in this universe. By choosing to construct this world as centered on middle-class fears about attractiveness, sex, and the workplace, the makers of Ally McBeal necessarily limit the appearance of true outsiders such as street people. One side effect of emphasizing “eccentricity” over “difference” is that real-world problems can become trivialized.43 By positioning homelessness as a choice similar to that of an aging man who decides to comb his hair over his bald spot, the show overall seeks to create a more generalized argument for tolerance. In so doing, it trades away the raw particularity of familiar, threatening difference such as homelessness. The choice of emphasis and the fantastic structure of the show limit the types of guest characters that can penetrate its insular universe. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of Ally’s preferred eccentricities is dwarfism (or at least characters who function as dwarfs). One recurring “little person” on Ally McBeal is lawyer Oren Koolie, a precocious ten-yearold with a hormone deficiency (played by 3'2" Josh Evans). Koolie uses his short stature to legal advantage, making opposing attorneys seem like bullies and deploying tantrums to elicit larger settlement offers, and thus he is part of a continuing tradition of guest characters on Ally who use their obvious difference to their professional advantage. “Little people” are relatively safe eccentrics for Ally to portray, since the difference dwarfs pose is obvious and yet clearly not the result of any blamable action on their part. They exist in real life (unlike, say, orange women) but in such small numbers that they are rarely seen in broad society (unlike the obese or the homeless), making it easier for them to serve as the butt of politically incorrect physical humor (Ally kicks Koolie, mistaking him for a hallucinatory dancing baby;

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he disappears under the table in court proceedings and must be picked up bodily to make legal arguments).44 Dwarfs on the show convey a dependable sense of strangeness with little of the potential fallout of portraying more politically powerful minorities. Another byproduct of the emphasis on eccentricity is that it opens the category of difference to be used by the dominant: heterosexual white people. Sectors of white (male) America have voiced well-publicized protests about the “preferential treatment” given to minorities. This backlash against affirmative action and other civil rights mechanisms recognizes the rhetorical power of claiming the status of victim and bemoans the white inability to use the same moral claims to advance their own cause.45 By framing its argument in terms of eccentricity, Ally McBeal widens the category of the oppressed to include an enormous range of unusual appearances and behaviors, including people who sweat profusely, who are inappropriately happy, or who have foot fetishes.46 In almost every case the eccentrics who guest star on Ally McBeal are white.47 The political liabilities of the eccentricity strategy here are clear: by extending a primary tool of the subordinate group for use by the dominant group, the show potentially evacuates the political effectivity of discussing actual differences. By making the prejudices against transvestites, the homeless, and sweaty people appear interchangeable, the show lumps together sexual mores, economic or class oppression, and social distaste as if they were all the same thing. The abstraction of the argument about eccentricity has its costs. In helping us to see that the battle for tolerance is not solely about race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, that our prejudices extend into many more behaviors and appearances, Ally McBeal risks blindness to the very categories of identity that started the discussion of tolerance. Deploying a variety of guest stars (and relying on the limited sympathies they elicit) makes it possible for Ally to translate difference into eccentricity, a narrative strategy that has both political effectivity and costs. Guest Delusionals Eccentricity is a perennial favorite subject of David Kelley’s, one he has pursued on other television series, thus allowing us to distinguish different strategies for using eccentric characters. Picket Fences, for instance, depicted a small town full of eccentric characters (similar to Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure), harking back to the tradition of the southern Gothic.48

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While Twin Peaks extended David Lynch’s uncovering of the horrific under­ belly of the placid image of the small town,49 Picket Fences (more like Joshua Brand and John Falsey’s Northern Exposure) gave us a more benign, whimsical version of rural oddballs. Both Picket Fences and Northern Exposure use the time-honored narrative strategy of placing a “normal” couple at the center of the drama, thus providing audiences with emissaries into the odd community, giving a “person like us” as a comfortable locus for our identification. We can view the community weirdos in Picket Fences from the perspective of the most “normal” persons in the cast (the ostensible stars of the show), the town sheriff and the doctor ( Jimmy and Jill Brock, played by Tom Skerritt and Kathy Baker).50 Though this tactic has advantages (the normal couple can model for us the correct tolerant attitude for accepting unusual behavior), it also has disadvantages. By keeping the “normal” couple central and the eccentrics at the margins, Picket Fences still Others the oddballs, making them the object of our gaze without having to take on their perspective. Because of the narrative structure of the show, there are limits to the argument Picket Fences can make for tolerating eccentrics.51 Ally McBeal takes a bolder step because it makes an eccentric the center­ piece of the show. Though we are free to identify with a range of characters, the series asks us to take on a self-doubting, hallucinatory woman as our primary locus of identification instead of the tangential “normal” people (Billy and Georgia). As I have discussed, fantasy sequences, music, and voiceover give us extraordinary access to the interior of a “wackadoo” (to use Richard’s word) instead of seeing her from the outside. The Allycentered narrative construction of the show accentuates the difficulty of a central eccentric. Being forced to take on the perspective of an overtly delusional character could be frighteningly off-putting, given the norms of mainstream media.52 Part of Ally’s argument about tolerating eccentricity, therefore, depends on making an oddball its protagonist. I have discussed previously some of the narrative mechanisms that attempt to make Ally’s behavior more palatable; one other way is through judicious deployment of guest stars. One of the major purposes of the guest character on Ally McBeal is to depict someone even more eccentric than Ally. Guests can show us a road that Ally has not taken; they can depict the consequences of more radical stances than Ally’s, just as recurring characters do on the show. Because of their brief tenure on the show, however, guests may push these pathetic/admirable/ outlandish tendencies further because they do not have to gain continuing

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sympathy on other episodes. As John notes, the primary lawyer characters remain safely within the boundaries of more appropriate behavior, leaving the guest stars to venture deeper into uncharted territory: “We look at [our eccentric clients], and we think, ‘How pathetic.’ Well, maybe we’re the pathetic ones. They’re out walking planks; we stay tucked inside ready to represent them when they fall.”53 Therefore, these guest stars are freer to embody eccentric extremes that the show can only tolerate for the limited time required to compare these characters to Ally. Guest stars provide basic narrative structures that make Ally’s eccentricity seem more acceptable over time. Above I examined guest characters whose physical appearance makes them stand out, but Ally presents an even larger range of characters whose mental stability is in question. This provides a useful context for judging the central character, who herself is prone to have hallucinations and stubbornly held delusions. Early in the first season Ally is hauled before a disciplinary board that questions her sanity after she gets into a fight in a supermarket over a can of potato chips. As the legal panel discusses Ally’s case, more and more odd behaviors come into question, such as her irrational rant when a man bumps into her on the street or her speech at the funeral of a married former professor who was once her illicit lover. When Billy accuses Ally of being “off balance,” she defiantly snaps, “Who wants to be balanced? Balanced is overrated!”54 Ally clings to her most apparently pathological quality: her tendency to see hallucinations of pop singers, dancing babies, and others. When an imaginary Al Green begins to intrude into her work, causing her to confuse reality with fantasy, she begins to consider taking medication but decides against it: “One of the reasons I don’t try to control [my hallucinations] is because I like it. It’s magical. I feel nourished by them spiritually, emotionally.”55 Ally McBeal romanticizes the notion of mental illness, the possibility that those whom we label “schizophrenic” are a sort of seer who is more aware of the world’s disjunctures.56 Such portrayals, if taken literally, do considerable disservice to the horrors of actual mental illness. But I argue that Ally uses mental illness not as a literal portrayal of real-world conditions but as a metaphor, as a rhetorical device to articulate a certain set of concerns. This is difficult to do, given the realistic properties of the television medium. Because film and television cameras capture the physical world placed in front of them, it is more difficult for these media (in their mainstream forms) to convey abstraction without getting bogged down in the particularity of the literal portrayal.57 But by placing actual guest stars in

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the context of the Ally world, which so frequently blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, the show asks us to consider its guests not as real-life embodiments of actual conditions but as figures for rhetorical comparison to Ally. The series pins much of its hopes for reclaiming Ally’s “normalcy” not in her own personal evolution but in the parade of seemingly more mentally unbalanced guest performers. For instance, what if the law firm literally organized itself around Ally’s hallucinations instead of Ally venturing alone into the realms of fantasy? Ally McBeal provides an instructive comparison in a charismatic senior citizen named Marty Brigg (Orson Bean), whose elaborate fantasies about pygmy hunts both terrorize and delight the inhabitants of a nursing home. At first it appears that he spins his stories as a public service, as a means of enlivening the institutional dreariness. He therefore refuses to admit publicly that he fabricates these tales: “If [the other residents] heard me deny, there’d be no game to go along with. They need me to believe. I’m the one who delivers them to that other world.”58 Eventually, however, it becomes apparent that he actually believes in and sees the pygmies, causing him to be thrown out of the home because of the chaos he causes. Ling offers him a place to live, but just as Ally McBeal could not handle the addition of the unstable young transvestite runaway Stephanie to the firm’s staff, it has no place for a live-in character who is more subject to hallucinations than Ally. The narrative, therefore, is forced to kill off this guest. This episode causes us to consider the possibility that Ally’s fantasies serve to enliven the potential tedium of the law firm, just as Brigg’s do for the nursing home. Furthermore, Ally’s dogged belief in her romantic daydreams makes it possible for others in the office (and by extension, in the audience) to believe in romance as partly or fully as they/we can. Brigg, however, shows us what a workplace would be like if it were organized around fantasies. By leading his fellow patients on pygmy hunts, he becomes a destabilizing force that must be excised, and this shows us what might happen to Cage and Fish if that workplace more fully embraced Ally’s hallucinations. Only rarely do guest stars on Ally McBeal veer toward serious mental illness, and when they do, they (like Marty Brigg) are frequently killed off. One episode presents the case of Helen/Helena Greene (Kyra Sedgwick), a woman with multiple personalities: a caustic and financially successful self and a loving but painfully shy self. The verdict in her case forces her to take medication that effectively snuffs out the life of the more sympathetic personality, reducing the woman to her cold, heartless persona. This guest appearance literalizes the dichotomy that is most frequently used to

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describe contemporary womanhood—as being torn between a nurturing, warm life partner and a professional (and therefore less emotional) worker. Helen/Helena depicts these two positions as an either/or choice, and thus she throws into relief Ally’s ability to combine both by being an effective lawyer and a caring confidante. Purging the Helen personality by means of a psychological “death” shows that a true separation between the professional and the personal, between the public and the private, is not a viable option for the show.59 Death also ends a guest stint by Harvey Hall (played by Murphy Brown veteran Joe Regalbuto). Hall, a not very successful man, obsessively tries to recapture his one moment of glory: his childhood memory of being able to fly out of his bedroom window. He claims that this memory is not a fantasy, that he actually was able to fly under his own power, and he attempts to re-create this feeling by crafting feathered wings and leaping from the roof of his old family home. Hall echoes Ally’s attempt to locate her fantasies in the wonder of childhood, and Ally McBeal is deeply concerned with returning to childhood as a way to keep oneself “open” and to guard against the deadening pressures of adulthood. In a more extreme manner, Hall is kept prisoner by his childhood, unable to succeed as an adult and forced to reenact his childish obsession literally. Instead of comforting himself with flights of fancy, he attempts actual flight, and in so doing, he is killed.60 His brief appearance and his death remind us that although Ally at times comes perilously close to confusing reality and fantasy, she manages to keep them separate. Her childhood fantasies remain an instructive source of inspiration without completely sidetracking her professional achievement. Given that guest stars are by definition temporary, one wonders about the narrative reasons for why certain ones of them must die. After all, the end of the episode is a kind of death for the guest character on a serial. Why compound this by killing off the character in the narrative? Death clearly raises the dramatic stakes of the narrative, though the death of a character we do not know very well rarely has significant emotional resonance, so the convenient deaths of guest characters risk trivializing the impact of their demises. Death can seem too ponderous for Ally’s flighty universe. In a world where people argue over the height of hemlines and where lawyers try cases dealing with Santa Claus, death feels like an unwelcome intrusion into the rarefied, frivolous play environment.61 But guests die on Ally McBeal when they represent too radical an extension of Ally’s madness for the dramatic universe to tolerate. For Ally, the mechanisms of fantasy do not take literal shape; they remain a personal forum for her fears and desires, and they are

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integrated into her personality. There is no room for people who pursue their fantasies literally (Hall), share them publicly in the workplace (Brigg), or separate their lives into distinct selves (Helen/Helena). Ally also depicts excessive delusion in romance. Ally takes on the case of a beloved former teacher of hers whose deathbed wish is to be placed in a coma. In this unconscious state, the teacher is able to connect with a dream lover whom she has fantasized about for decades, and she greatly prefers that dream world to the real one she inhabits, filled with doctors and procedures.62 Ally’s romantic dream world also offers her the possibility of escape; her hallucinations are a refuge from the difficulties of actual romance. This episode depicts a possible future for Ally if she chooses to value the instantaneous gratification of fantasy over the physical world around her. The episode recognizes the obvious link between these two women who maintain rich, romantic fantasy worlds, but it also points out the bound­ aries of Ally’s relatively healthy fantasies. Ally’s guest delusionals frequently recognize her as a kindred spirit, for example, the fake homeless man who is able to summarize Ally’s life just by looking at her, much to her chagrin.63 Harvey Hall the winged flyboy notices her from afar during his arraignment, and he hunts her down after­ ward to hire her as his lawyer because he recognizes her as someone who has flown. Although Ally initially denies it, his recognition eventually prods a long-forgotten childhood memory that she thought was a dream. When her parents argued, she tried to drown them out by playing music; when that didn’t work, she would fly out the window.64 Hall recognizes her flying past even before she does. Similarly, when a powerful executive is fired from an investment firm for reasons of mental instability when he admits that he sees unicorns, he asks Ally when she saw one. Ally admits that when she was a child she not only saw a unicorn but also petted him. The executive says that only people who share traits with the unicorn (they are “lonely with virtuous hearts”) can see them and that only “a person of pure spirit” can approach the mythical beasts.65 Again, we have the concept that the hallucinators are merely people who have not lost a childish sense of the world, who are able to maintain their beliefs in spite of growing up, and thus Ally simultaneously romanticizes both childhood and mental instability. Both children and the mentally unstable have a kind of second sight, able to see unicorns and able to recognize each other as fellow believers. Since the world of Ally McBeal is shaped around Ally’s idiosyncratically fluid notion of reality, the show populates this world with people like her, thus creating a sense of the diegetic world as making unicorns and dreams of flight possible.

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Sometimes the delusionals have to alter or give up their eccentricity to fit into the world (although the unicorn seer wins back his place in the financial corporation, Billy warns him that he should keep his next unicorn sighting to himself ).66 Sometimes the world cannot accommodate them at all, and the eccentrics must be killed. At other times the world has to change to make room for unusual individuals with alternate visions. The court overrules the hospital’s objections and allows Ally’s former teacher to rejoin her imaginary lover in a coma.67 When an elementary school teacher is removed from his job because he contends that he is Santa Claus, the court forces the school to reinstate him.68 As Ally articulates the changing boundary between the workplace and private matters, it argues that the workplace sometimes must change to accommodate alternate voices. One important narrative function of these guest characters, therefore, is to serve as an object lesson for Ally. Whether the guest delusional’s experiences caution Ally that her own eccentric tendencies should have limits, or whether they remind Ally of the importance of her own values, or both, these temporary characters refocus attention on the principals. The jury’s decision in Ally cases is not so important, although having most serial episodes end with the clear closure of a guilty or not guilty verdict provides both a narrative urgency and a temporary payoff. But the focus of these legal arguments is less on the actual client’s plight and more on the relevance of the client’s circumstances to Ally and company. What is important here is not the eccentric characteristic itself but the rhetorical argument embodied in the guest delusional’s characteristic. The legal system asks jurors to perform a balancing act. On the one hand, the court must abstract the details of a case and judge the potential precedentsetting impact of its decision on future court cases. On the other, it must examine the particularity of the case and determine the appropriate punishment. Ally McBeal leans toward the abstracting function, using the particularities of guest eccentricity as a springboard to advance its overall argument. And so the show’s relationship to eccentricity is complex. It foregrounds the conflicts that emerge when the modern workplace (with its emphasis on image) confronts notions of tolerating individual expression and identity that have emerged from multiple court decisions concerning race, gender, and sexual orientation. By positioning its guest characters as “eccentric” (and not necessarily clear-cut members of legally protected categories), it asks us to extend the comfortable notion of tolerance to a broader set of less comfortable behaviors and appearances, thus reengaging our jaded

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sensibilities with the difficulties of tolerating the Other. In so doing, it risks denigrating identity politics to “cuteness” and “lifestyle” choices. It also opens up the category “Other” to dominant white characters. While arguing for broader tolerance of its guest eccentrics, Ally simultaneously asks us to look past them to examine the possible impact of these characters’ choices on the principal characters’ lives. Happy Trails Ally McBeal gives us eccentrics who appear for a single episode and a primary eccentric at the center. But it also constructs a constellation of in-between characters, allowing us to consider the politics of eccentricity at greater length than a guest spot but without necessarily involving the protagonist. A serial’s network of characters has the capacity to reveal a range of possible viewpoints on any given event or issue, and Ally takes full advantage of this possibility by populating its network with recurring secondary and primary eccentrics. I close this chapter with a brief consideration of three oddballs in a single episode: guest character Rob “Fitzy” Fitzsimmons (Rob Schneider), recurring character Judge “Happy” Boyle (Phil Leeds), and primary cast member John Cage. Examining how the “Happy Trails” episode balances the narrative possibilities presented by characters of varying longevity provides a final case study of the different ways such characters participate in a long-running discussion of the value of eccentricity.69 Audiences’ familiarity with Rob Schneider’s portrayals of various losers on Saturday Night Live and The Waterboy allows him to be instantly recognizable as “Fitzy” Fitzsimmons, an obnoxious suitor for Ally. In Fitzy’s initial scene, we see Ally fall to the floor of her office, trying to conceal herself from him after a bad first date. Elaine helps by pretending Ally’s body is a fresh corpse, but Fitzy, undeterred, tickles her. Elaine, pretending to be overjoyed at Ally’s resurrection, kisses Ally deeply, but Fitzy continues to pursue his romantic quarry (“You think you’re the first chick I ever dated who pretended to be dead or gay? Get in line”). Much of Fitzy’s plotline involves Elaine advising Ally on how to get rid of the loser, in spite of his romantic persistence. “Give him the straight hard dump,” Elaine recommends. “It’s the only thing these bastards understand.” The episode unabashedly shows his humiliation at her rejection. While he sings Donny Osmond’s “Puppy Love” at a karaoke bar, his dismay is displayed in closeup on a large video monitor as Ally leaves the bar. Ally recognizes a sort of kindred spirit here in this man who pursues his

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romantic dream in spite of obvious discouragement, but she also recognizes that her impulse toward tolerance does not extend enough to have a romance with an unattractive man. Finally she gathers herself for a definitive breakup. Ally: You may be a really great guy, and maybe I should take the time to see if you’re a really great guy, but I’m not going to take that time. I never want to see you again. Ever. Ev-er. Fitzy: It’s too bad. Something told me you might have been the one. Ally: Not everybody gets the one.70 This is one of the show’s most explicit acknowledgments that not everyone is equally entitled to Ally’s often expressed faith in a romantic soulmate, that romance is not a level playing field. This guest star’s character exists primarily to be expelled. Fitzy appears long enough for us to understand that his fervor for love equals Ally’s but that the tactics of romantic pursuit (serenading, sending flowers) seem more like stalking when used by an unattractive eccentric rather than a handsome suitor. Contrast Fitzy’s tenure on the show with that of a recurring eccentric role, Judge “Happy” Boyle. Happy is an obviously senile man whose fixation on orthodontia overrides his legal capacity. Witnesses and lawyers frequently have to show the judge their teeth, and their dental health is a primary determining factor in Happy’s verdict. For example, when one witness reveals his teeth on Happy’s command, Happy sees a bit of spinach in his mouth and then proceeds to lecture the jury that “the most nutritious vegetable can turn into Vietnam in your mouth.”71 In another episode Happy must decide if an elderly artist is mentally competent enough to decide to marry a younger woman. The comedy of one senile man getting to evaluate the mental capacity of another is made explicit when Happy tells the artist to show him his teeth, and the artist pulls out his dentures. “This was bound to happen,” Ally says in voiceover.72 In his several appearances Happy is mostly a one-joke eccentric, a way for the show to poke fun at the incapacities of elderly judges and therefore to lampoon the idiosyncratic application of the principles of justice by humans with foibles. In the “Happy Trails” episode this one-note recurring character suddenly dies while rendering his verdict in the aforementioned case of the orangeskinned woman. After Happy’s death many of the principal Ally characters discover the surprising depth of feeling they had for such a laughable, tertiary character. Billy in particular feels the loss and eulogizes Happy at the funeral:

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I didn’t know him that well, either. Many of us were caught off guard by the void he left, left with the feeling that this was a person we should have taken the time to know better. That makes it worse, the sense that he’s gone before we could. . . . He made us smile. There are three things that you could do to make Happy happy. Go home today and give a call to somebody you should have called yesterday and tell ’em how you feel about them. Go to lunch with somebody with someone you’d like to know better. Show him your teeth.73 The lesson learned in this episode entails a plea for reaching out to those “eccentrics” on the edges of people’s awareness, arguing in a fairly sentimental way that we should engage them in conversation “before it’s too late.” Ally relies on our experiences with Happy as echoing those of the primary characters. Over time we naturally relegate Happy to the margins of the show as one of the amusing but unimportant supporting characters who exist to populate the Ally universe with eccentrics like the protagonist. He seems no more or less important than the lawyer ( John Michael Higgins) who has a facial tic whenever he says the word “comfortable” or the woman ( Jami Geertz) who is so insecure that she cannot go out on dates without being accompanied by her mother. By bringing one of these tertiary characters into the spotlight for one episode, the show makes us aware that similar attention could be paid to any of several supporting characters. Because we have much less experience in the serial with Fitzy than with Happy, we are more easily able to accept Fitzy’s dismissal for being eccentric and to mourn Happy’s departure. This episode also puts on display the eccentricities of one of its primary characters, John Cage. It begins with John confessing his nervousness about kissing Nelle for the first time, thus prompting Richard to give John explicit face-to-face coaching on how to kiss.74 The “Happy Trails” episode is the culmination of a story arc dealing with the woes of John’s pet frog. In previous episodes Stefan the frog has been flushed down the toilet, then miraculously saved only to be smacked against a bathroom door by Nelle. In this episode John is trying to nurse his beloved pet back to health by playing recorded cricket sounds to soothe him. “Nuts,” Richard says. “No, he doesn’t like nuts,” John replies. “No, you’re nuts,” Richard retorts. Much to his horror, John accidentally swats Stefan against a window, causing the lawyers to stage a ludicrous, protracted rescue from the ledge. In the final indignity, the lawyers go to a Chinese restaurant and ask to have the frog fed; instead, the restaurant cooks Stefan by mistake and feeds him to John and friends. Even by Ally McBeal standards, this is spectacularly weird behavior, and

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The primary eccentric: John (Peter MacNicol) unwinds in the unisex bathroom with some toilet gymnastics. (Ally McBeal © 1998 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All rights reserved)

the episode draws out these sequences to accentuate John’s oddness.75 The show can risk depicting such ludicrous eccentricity because of the sympathy John has accumulated over several dozen episodes. Happy’s foibles about teeth are a cute quirk compared to the deeply obsessive fixation John has on keeping his abused frog alive. No character on Ally is made to look quite this foolish for such a protracted period as John is in this frog plotline. Ally pushes the boundaries of what might be an accepted level of odd behavior even from a well-liked, familiar character. At this moment the episode presents Happy Boyle’s funeral, which serves as a moment of reconciliation for all. Happy’s sendoff is a riotous celebration, featuring a black gospel rendition (by Broadway star and Ally regular

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Jennifer Holliday) of the title song from the musical Pippin, altered for the occasion (“Think about your life, Happy . . .”). The mourners parade down the church aisle, old people move their walkers in time to the music, and they shower a picture of Happy Boyle with thrown dentures. Just at the point when the episode makes series regular John Cage appear at his most pathetically odd, the show celebrates the joys of eccentricity in the figure of Happy Boyle. The substitution is elegant, not forcing John to recant his unusual behavior but instead reclaiming the value of eccentricity through a recurring minor character. The “Happy Trails” episode encourages us simultaneously to judge John’s actions as uncompromisingly bizarre, to mourn the lost chance to know an eccentric person better (Happy Boyle), and to reject an oddball (Fitzy) as being too strange to take as a lover. Ally McBeal weaves together the differing narrative capacities of guest stars, recurring secondary characters, and primary characters to create an incredibly nuanced consideration of the pros and cons of eccentricity. Not surprisingly, Ally herself delivers the summary argument for this episode in a conversation with her roommate Renee. Ally: The world is just made up of weird people. . . . Why don’t they tell us as kids in kindergarten? “People are odd.” At least we wouldn’t feel so bad about growing up strange ourselves, and maybe we would be more tolerant and open minded about the strange. You think that I was too quick to judge Fitzy? Renee: He couldn’t be any stranger than John Cage or Richard Fish or Happy Boyle. He [Happy] was really beloved by everybody who knew him. It hurts that he’s gone. Ally: We’re brainwashed into thinking that the best people are normal and attractive, and maybe they’re not. Maybe the John Cages and Happy Boyles are the nuggets, maybe we’re missing out skipping over the Fitzys. Look at us. Clearly we’re missing out on something.76 In the individual episode Ally considers the lesson to be learned based on her experiences with three different oddballs (guest, recurring, and primary) without ever changing her actions in the overall serial. Ally McBeal provides a case study of the intricate ways a primetime serial narrative can weave a complicated issue-oriented argument out of the strands provided by guest stars, recurring characters, and series regulars. Guest stars function partly as nonserial elements, encouraging lead characters to learn

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lessons from their situation without demonstrating significant impact on the lead characters’ overall progression, creating a Sisyphean narrative trek for the primary characters. The parade of odder characters has an effect on the serial narrative, however, by positioning Ally as comparatively normal. In addition, Ally deploys guest stars to change the politically loaded concept of difference into a potentially more acceptable notion of eccentricity. Guest stars are necessary to generate the conflicts required in a primetime serial; paying attention to the way the narrative uses those characters is necessary to understand the construction of the show’s larger argument.

fi v e

Victim of Love Ally McBeal and the Politics of Protection

Early in the first season of Ally McBeal the law firm of Cage and Fish

begins to gain a high profile in sexual harassment cases, and it maintains this specialty throughout the series. This narrow focus allows former lawyer and series creator David Kelley to explore fully the potential uses and misuses of the concept of sexual harassment, staging a public debate with himself between his liberal orientation and his fears about the expanding sphere of the law. The debate itself covers a remarkable range of positions from pro-sex feminism to pro-business laissez-faire policy, virtually assuring that everyone will be incensed by some portion of the argument. It thus demonstrates one way that narrative serial television can articulate a nuanced, elaborate, give-and-take discussion on a single issue. Again, my intent in the “argument” portion of this book is not to emphasize how Ally operates within the broader social discussion on political issues but to trace that debate across the serial, showing how it is made possible by the serial’s formal construction. The debate on Ally McBeal is carried out episode by episode through a series of legal cases. These provide the stimuli for characters to reevaluate their understandings of gender politics, which has a bearing on character growth, but I want to remain focused on the way this argument develops through the individual cases. Rather than use specific cases to reiterate and reinforce a basic stance on the issue of sexual harassment, Ally’s argument exceeds the debate depicted by individual episodes. Episodes present thesis and antithesis, contradictory arguments over the legal basis of sexual harassment laws and over the political consequences of applying them.1 The

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basic argument occurs not only within courtroom walls but also between conflicting episodes. Series Television and Serial Argument Several structural factors make it difficult for American primetime narrative television to address larger issues in an extended, deliberate manner. One of these is the relatively brief time allotted in standard programming to television series. A primetime hour slot of network television currently translates to 44 minutes of program and 16 minutes of commercials, while a half-hour television program has 22 minutes of programming. That is not a lot of time to raise an issue in the narrative, complicate it through debate, and resolve it by program’s end, and thus the pressure for closure significantly increases the difficulty of presenting a coherent debate. Admirably, many television shows have worked within the dual pressures of closure and time limitations to find narrational strategies for voicing political commentary: by returning to similarly themed situations (M*A*S*H ’s emphasis on the cost of war); by positioning characters as opposing mouthpieces for standard ideological positions (conservative Alex and his left-wing parents on Family Ties); by changing tone and address radically for a single special episode about an issue (the birth of Murphy Brown’s child);2 by excising establishing shots and increasing the number of scenes to speed the delivery of narrative information (the Law and Order strategy); and by creating hyperarticulate characters who tend to speechify (The West Wing).3 Because of the commercial restrictions of primetime programming, narrative television’s most resonant social commentaries are often its least overtly argued: the chaotic portrait of parenting on The Simpsons, or the recasting of high-school-as-horror on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Certain kinds of complex issues, however, are difficult to convey implicitly; they require extended, detail-oriented discussion and thus require more airtime. Longer television forms such as the made-for-television film4 and the miniseries are often the chosen mode for depicting the “problem of the week” or large historical actions. A central difficulty with these forms is that, unlike series television, they have to gain the audience’s sympathies for new characters before they make us care about their social or political dilemma. Series have the distinct advantage of calling on our previous experiences with beloved characters when they try to enlist our feelings for a character’s political plight, but these advantages must be weighed against the compunction to solve the problem in 22 (or 44) minutes.

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Serial television, while still bound by time slot restrictions, can explore issues in something approximating real time. Decisions about abortions or arguments about the treatment of gays can go on for days, weeks, or months on a daytime soap opera.5 As we have seen, the primetime serial tends to mix the pleasures of serial narrative with the episode-oriented payoffs of traditional series television. Admittedly, the primetime serial tends to use its episode-length payoffs in a narratively straightforward way within the overall serial arc. Single episodes in a serial usually reinforce its overall political stance. For instance, individual cases on The Practice tend to emphasize the ethical quandaries of criminal law practice, often putting the law and justice in direct opposition, forcing the primary characters to reevaluate their evolving moral stances. Thus the cases help us see character growth while reinforcing the show’s basic depiction of individual lawyers as wellintentioned crusaders in morally ambiguous times. Episodes of The Practice are structured as a dramatized moral lecture about the tensions between justice and the justice system, not as a debate presenting multiple perspectives and possible counterarguments.6 However, the form of the primetime serial opens up other possibilities for modes of discourse, as Ally McBeal demonstrates. Because Ally McBeal is focused so strongly on the titular character and her idiosyncratic understanding of gender relations, the firm concentrates on the portion of the law that raises more gender issues for its main character to examine, sexual harassment. Unlike the nonspecialized firms portrayed in other Kelley law series (L.A. Law, The Practice), Cage and Fish deals with a much narrower range of the law, thus violating earlier television norms of depicting professional practices. If a producer wants to create a show about doctors or lawyers, there is an economic and narrative pressure to make those professionals generalists, not specialists (emergency room doctors rather than cardiologists),7 thus allowing the professionals to examine a wide range of cases. However, Ally McBeal’s relatively narrow specialization allows it to make a more precise argument than those other series, in spite of the fact that the latter are more overtly “serious” in tone. In a time before CSI and the various Law and Order spinoffs clearly established the economic viability of series about professional subspecialties, Ally McBeal demonstrated the advantages of a restricted focus for articulating political debate. That the show is set in a law firm of course helps to construct these overt arguments. Since many of the show’s plotlines depict court cases, pros and cons about the cases’ issues are necessarily given articulate voice in witness testimony and legal summations. Since lawyers are paid to argue their cases

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to the best of their abilities, regardless of their personal feelings about the arguments they make, the characters on the show end up sometimes arguing for an issue, sometimes against.8 But each episode ends not only with the closure provided by the verdict but also with the closure that comes from the characters themselves reconciling their words with their political and personal stances. Kelley could use this structure in a straightforward process of linear character development over the serial. Instead he takes full advantage of the serial/series blend: he uses characters with long histories, focuses on a single political issue, provides narrative payoffs for viewers of an individual episode, and works the individual episode’s arguments into a more fully articulated political debate. Whose Harassment? A narrative advantage of depicting sexual harassment cases on legal shows is that the concept of sexual harassment initially seems morally clear-cut. One worker uses his power on the job to try to force another worker into sexually gratifying acts, an idea that is insupportable given the long-standing legal and moral tradition of protecting disadvantaged individuals from coercion. Ally McBeal explores what happens when a well-intentioned, obviously morally intuitive law must be implemented. By parading a series of improbable sexual harassment cases through its courtrooms, Ally McBeal asks us to question our intuitive understanding of sexual harassment. The show’s examination took place while the larger culture was discussing what constitutes “sex” and “harassment” (or, for that matter, what the definition of “is” is) in the Monica Lewinsky–Bill Clinton sex scandal. While Ally McBeal explored the changing boundary separating the public world of the workplace and the private realm of sexuality, the nation as a whole got a glimpse behind the closed doors of the White House as those very lines were blurred.9 Ally’s long narrative reconsideration of the nature of sexual harassment can therefore be read as both a discourse of its specific time and an argument concerning broader conceptions of the law. Ally’s narratives take advantage of certain basic schisms in our understandings of the legal system. If one considers the courts to be primarily concerned with punishment, then the emphasis is more on the perpetrator and his or her wrongful acts and less on the person to whom the offense happens. If one thinks of the legal system as protecting those who cannot protect themselves, however, then the emphasis shifts to the power differential between the perpetrator and the victim. The latter understanding creates a structure in which a person seeking the law’s assistance is necessarily

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placed in the role of victim (with all that that role connotes).10 If criminal laws are designed to protect victims, then individuals seek the law when they can no longer fend off a powerful external force themselves. Going to court can be seen as both an appeal to the powerful forces of the law for aid and an admission that a person is weaker than the antagonist. It is up to a judge and/or jury, then, to weigh the power dynamic of a situation, to determine if the law applies in this specific case. On Ally McBeal it is also up to us, the audience, to make the call about the applicability of sexual harassment law to an episode’s case. Ally asks us to interrogate our assumptions about who can be a victim of sexual harassment and what kinds of behaviors constitute harassment. Before I deal with specific instances of sexual harassment cases on the show, let me return to the issue of Ally McBeal and the real-world context. Anyone who tries to situate the Ally universe entirely in the real world will be stymied.11 As discussed in the previous chapter, in making a rhetorical case for accepting the eccentric, the show presents cases involving hyperbolic situations that stretch the most basic notions of plausibility (e.g., clients who believe they are Santa Claus or who think they can fly). Kelley uses these oddball cases much as instructors in an ethics class might—to test the margins of what we believe is acceptable. These cases function less as direct real-world comparisons and more as rhetorical positions in the overall argument the series makes about sexual harassment.12 By presenting ludicrous cases with the realistic trappings of representational television (even television as prone to the fantastic as Ally is), the show can be grouped with other programs that make legal action appear disreputable. The news, always searching for the unusual item, publicizes frivolous lawsuits, thus contributing to the belief that they are commonplace. Ally McBeal, under similar pressures to present novel situations (though its legal specialty is limited), presents wildly trumped-up situations in its cases.13 The danger of taking such cases at face value is that over time one’s understanding of sexual harassment as a viable legal recourse for the disempowered could erode.14 It is virtually impossible for Ally to prevent such conservative readings. I argue, however, that there is a subtler argument presented throughout the course of the show, one that investigates the limits of using the law as a mechanism for changing attitudes. What, then, is the foundation of the concept of sexual harassment? Ally McBeal suggests that there are several possible core issues, and its rhetorical task involves teasing out these different conceptions that are frequently collapsed together. The show entertains the notion that sexual harassment law is primarily about gender, that these laws are written to help women protect

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themselves as they enter the previously male world of work. Although that certainly was the intention of the original lawmakers, the laws themselves are not written as gender-specific, and Ally McBeal gives us a series of cases that ask us to unearth the assumptions about gender that lie buried beneath our understanding of sexual harassment. What happens when the case involves something other than a woman suing a man? In “Buried Pleasures” a sexually outspoken woman is sued by the other women in her company for creating a sexually charged workplace.15 The woman’s verbal innuendos, not her overt actions, bring about the lawsuit. This situation is reworked with a twist when Claire (played by transvestite Dame Edna Everage) is fired for making unwanted verbal passes at younger men at work.16 In another episode an attractive woman has consensual sex on the job with a young man she supervises. After he quits he sues her because of the sexual pressures he felt. In her closing, Georgia acknowledges that the issue here is gender itself: If this were a man pressuring a woman to have sex, you’d deliberate for 30 seconds. It’s sexual harassment; it’s textbook. Why is this different?17 John’s closing argument answers her: BECAUSE IT IS DIFFERENT! Women have been sexually victimized for hundreds of years; men haven’t. Men are physically dominant; women aren’t. Women battle daily the bigotry of being reduced to sexual objects; men don’t. It’s different. We may all want to be too politically correct to admit it, but when a woman like that sexually propositions a man . . . do we really think of him as harassed? Did you all think that: poor guy? . . . There sits a victim. Say it with me: please.18 The question raised in these gender-bending cases is whether sexual harassment is necessarily based on the assumption that women are the ones being harassed. According to the series, if this is true, then women are structurally positioned as being in need of protection as a group. To conceive of sexual harassment as purely a woman’s issue is to place women as necessarily weaker than men, as victims. If one follows this logic, Ally asserts that women therefore function as disabled persons in the eyes of the law, a distinctly unfeminist notion. Richard baldly articulates the “femininity as disability” argument:

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We’re saying by these laws that women qualify for the Federal Disability Act. They can’t cope with romance in the workplace. Having to do a job and have a man smile at them is too much. Women can’t take it. They bruise. The laws are set up to protect the weakest parts of society. She’s a woman; protect her.19 Ally McBeal here is not merely arguing that sexual harassment happens more frequently to women. Again, Ally makes no attempt to present realistically representative cases, which would clearly lean toward male-on-female harassment examples. Instead the show provides trumped-up situations to isolate real-world implementation of the law from its underlying assumptions about gender. It asserts the proposition that the law itself is based on the protection of women and asks us to consider the startling idea that the concept of sexual harassment institutionalizes women as weaker. Economic Power, Sexual Power An alternative argument asserts that sexual harassment is not about gender but instead is primarily concerned with power and its imbalances. If power is indeed the crucial factor, then men could potentially sue for harassment, as in the cases noted above. But just as Kelley used gender-switching to problematize women’s status under sexual harassment laws, he uses role switching to point out complications with a simple notion of power. In our basic understanding of sexual harassment, the employee is the one harassed and who can sue the employer, but Ally McBeal shows cases in which the employer sues the employee for harassment. In “You Can Never Tell”20 the usually aggressive Ling takes on the role of passive victim in the courtroom when a male warehouse employee of hers gives her lascivious looks. Since she cannot fire the unionized employee, she sues him for damages. Another episode casts Farrah Fawcett as a magazine editor who was discharged for being unable to handle her unruly staff. They refuse to work for a woman whom they believe used her sexuality to rise quickly to the editorship, so she sues them for harassment. In this instance the lawyers argue that collectively the staff had more power than the boss; if she were to fire them all, she would not be able to put out the magazine.21 Although the lines of power seem to be clear in most corporate structures, Ally McBeal asserts that power relations can be more slippery than organizational charts may indicate. Power can take multiple forms, pursue different ends, and operate in multiple arenas.

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Ally McBeal explores the possibility that power in one arena could compensate for lack of power in another. Although one line of argument on the show asserts that sexual harassment positions women as weaker and in need of protection from the economic power of men, another line of argument suggests that men are vulnerable to the sexual power of women. If sexual harassment law desexualizes the workplace, then this eliminates one possible means of asserting one’s own power, Ally postulates. Ally explicitly nominates sexual allure as a viable strategy in the modern workplace. “The Playing Field” acknowledges the potential effectiveness of sexual power in a case that strikingly reverses the normal rhetoric of sexual harassment. In this episode a relatively unattractive woman sues her boss because he did not make advances to her, charging that she was denied the opportunity afforded other women in the company who had translated their sensual charm into promotion.22 Sexual attractiveness may be used to gain advantage in business, and cases on Ally McBeal ask why women in particular should necessarily give up such a strategic advantage for advancement in the workplace. The series does not suggest that women should sleep their way to the top, nor does it suggest that women’s primary advantage is their attractiveness, not their professional skills. But Ally McBeal questions why professionals should not exploit their attractiveness (within bounds) as a means of gaining a competitive edge.23 Sexual harassment law, by appearing to level the economic playing field, can disadvantage women by discouraging them from using the full range of their power, according to this line of argument. At the heart of this portion of the argument is the figure of the attractive, unabashedly sexually aggressive woman. This figure is represented by series regulars Elaine and Renee. In addition, various guest stars portray women who overtly use their sensuality as a way to advance their careers. In the episode about a sexy female magazine editor and her rebellious publication staff, Ally’s producers could have chosen to make the case more clearcut by making the editor attractive without being aggressive. Instead the character heightens her profile by doing a sexy pictorial spread of herself, adding to her staff ’s ire. This case is made more complicated by the fact that the editor is played by seventies poster idol Farrah Fawcett, a woman who obviously turned her appearance into a commodity.24 Another high-profile guest star, Christine Lahti, portrays a woman who makes her sexual attractiveness the basis of her workplace, inspiring her dronelike all-male staff to work more intensely. Through these women the series explores a slightly sanitized-for-television version of the argument of pro-sex feminists such

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as Annie Sprinkle,25 asserting that overt sexual expression is a political assertion of individuality that should not be restricted. Ally McBeal gives this pro-sex argument an aggressive twist, suggesting that women can use sexual expression to gain advantage over men. According to this line of argument, many men are weaker than women because their decisions are often irrationally guided by their sexual desires. As I pointed out in chapter 3, Ling thinks that men who are ruled by “the dumb stick” become victims of their own sexual desires, and women can exploit this without compromising themselves. In presenting these cases, Ally McBeal is careful to make sure that these sexually aggressive women are not engaged in coercive sex (for instance, the relations in Christine Lahti’s firm are consensual), and frequently the woman’s sexual assertiveness is only verbal (Elaine’s flirting, or the defendant’s innuendos in “Buried Pleasures”)26 or by means of alluring clothing. But in Ally these tactics have a clear intent: they aim to gain an advantage in the aggressive modern business world. What might initially seem to be matters of personal style (Renee’s décolletage and Ally’s short skirts)27 instead have power ramifications in the workplace. What Is a Workplace? Sexual harassment is a workplace issue, but Ally McBeal demonstrates how the line between the public workplace and the private sphere easily blurs, especially when “image” is a function of the job. The series details cases about public relations firms28 and hip graphics design shops29 that determine that promoting a certain image is one of the employees’ job duties. When an individual’s personal characteristics no longer fit the image, the individual is fired. Jenny’s mother is fired from her investment firm when she chooses to marry a much younger man, a move that makes her customers doubt her judgment.30 When the definition of the job involves personal characteristics (appearance, sociability, an air of trustworthiness), when image provides important advantages in attracting business, when explicit job duties must be performed in social circles (e.g., “working” a party to attract new clients), then the seemingly separable worlds of private style and professional conduct become legally entangled on Ally.31 Courtroom appearances in particular combine the two as lawyers use their personal attractiveness as a way to influence juries and judges. When Jenny cross-examines Sarah, a lawyer filing a harassment suit against Raymond, she reveals how such intangibles can make the difference between winning and losing a case.

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Jenny: Have you ever found a case to turn on something other than the merits? Sarah: All the time. Jenny: In fact, I’ve sometimes flirted with male jurors. Nothing big, just a little smile here or there. You ever do that? Sarah: We all try to charm jurors. I’ll admit to that. Jenny: When you get dressed the morning of a trial, do you choose your clothes carefully, try to be attractive, maybe just a little sexy for the men, but not too much to put off the women? Sarah: Part of a lawyer’s case is presentation, I won’t deny that.32 If the law is about winning the case through any means possible within the legal and ethical restrictions of the court, then Ally proposes that lawyers should use whatever presentational strategies work best for them. Ally McBeal is careful to demonstrate that men use flirting in the practice of law, just as the women do. Jackson, for example, relies on his personal charm and good looks to resolve conflicts, win cases, and make settlements (describing his own style, Jackson says, “My specialty is smooth”).33 Certainly not all attorneys have Jackson’s suaveness or Nelle’s gorgeously long hair, but the characters use the advantages they possess. If it is all right for less conventionally attractive characters to use unusual strategies to rattle the opposing attorney (e.g., John Cage’s array of bizarre distractions), Ally McBeal asks why it is verboten to use sensuality in the legal workplace, especially when the boundaries between the personal and the professional are so porous. Responding by Anticipating The seemingly clear borders for conduct established by sexual harassment law become less distinct for yet another justifying reason on Ally: the expanding sphere of the law’s implementation. Ally never questions the wellintentioned impulse behind the law, the desire to protect victims from quid pro quo extortion of sex for economic advancement. However, law has a tendency to expand through its use in actual cases, and sexual harassment law has grown from its initial one-on-one basis to include the notion of a systematically repeated hostile work environment. From there, case law has broadened the understanding of sexual harassment to include single instances of hostile work environment conditions as legally actionable. As the law’s reach extends, so do the responses to those legal strictures, and these responses themselves become potential causes for further litigation, Ally points out. If sexual harassment suits can arise out of such a variety of situations on

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the show, then one possible set of responses would be for an employer to anticipate and prevent such occurrences from happening in the first place. Ally McBeal presents a range of proactive regulations by employers that themselves become problematic. Richard makes all his employees sign a waiver the size of a book manuscript before attending the office Christmas party.34 Another episode depicts a firm with a “date and tell” policy that specifies that employees must disclose the relationship if they date someone within the company, thus helping to protect the firm against potential lawsuits. When two lovers sue the firm, Nelle cross-examines the employer to tease out the distinction between the law and a proactive policy. Employer: It’s the law that’s perverse. Our policy is a byproduct. Nelle: Does the law preclude two employees hugging each other hello or good-bye? Employer: No. Nelle: But your policy does. Employer: Yes, because we have no way of knowing whether the hugs are welcome or not. Nelle: Does the law preclude two people talking about sexual activity? Employer: Not unless it’s harassing. Nelle: But your policy doesn’t wait till it’s harassment. Employer: As a prophylactic we cut off all sex talk period. The line can be so easily crossed we feel an absolute ban makes sense.35 Even when explicit dating policy has not been set, fear of harassment suits can dictate behavior, as a minister discovers in “Queen Bee.” When he begins to date one choir member, a former lover (and current choir leader) becomes antagonistic on the job. He understands that his previous romantic history with the wounded choir leader makes it impossible for him to fire her without being sued, but in consultation with the lawyers of Cage and Fish, he also realizes that his current dating situation could be seen as causing a hostile work environment.36 In the romance-centered world of Ally McBeal, a restriction on dating is unforgivable; at the same time, the episodes demonstrate the logic that leads to overzealous preemptive action. The logical conclusion of such anticipatory responses (albeit one that assumes heterosexual desire) is to create same-sex workplaces. In “Boys Town” a female senior partner in a law firm fires all the male associates in an attempt to create an all-female firm. She cites the same arguments that are used to create same-sex private schools: gender segregation prevents distractions, allowing people to focus on the tasks at hand.37 Instead of

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creating an all-female business, the advertising agency in “Queen Bee” is constructed as an all-male enclave with sexually magnetic executive Christine Lahti at its head. These cases set into opposition an employer’s desire to create a firm that he or she believes will be most productive (and least subject to lawsuits) and a worker’s desire to find gainful employment.38 As these fictional employer policies try to stay ahead of the expanding purview of the law, civil rights (as portrayed on the series) are threatened. These episodes argue that a climate of fear concerning potential lawsuits can restrict individual rights, even when laws governing the workplace were originally designed to protect individuals. Just as the personal encroaches on the professional as the boundaries of the “workplace” blur, the professional realm in Ally begins to bind personal conduct such as dating through the possibility of increasing preemptive restrictions. Here the serial uses a well-worn argumentative technique: it projects the future consequences of stepping onto a “slippery slope.” Legislative and political debates resort to such fictional predictions all the time, thus attempting to derail potential reforms (“If we adopt the Equal Rights Amendment, that would mean that separate bathrooms would be illegal, and we can’t have that!”).39 The point here is not that Ally’s argument is either more or less solidly grounded than other slippery slope predictions (which inevitably rely on fear). Instead, I simply wish to note how familiar and well accepted this mode of argument is and how it is given an additional force by embedding slippery slope viewpoints in the narratives of individual episodes. These multiple episodes eventually contribute to a larger argument about the nature of sexuality in the workplace. Thinking about Sex The series raises an alternate way of thinking about noncoercive sexual words and actions in the workplace: such behaviors could be inappropriate without constituting sexual harassment. Billy reproaches Renee for allowing her client to dress in a manner he considers “inappropriate,” and he then turns to make the same complaint against Renee’s décolletage: “This look is great . . . on cable, but in a courtroom?”40 Although the concept of appropriateness seems to have rather parental connotations, it does raise the issue of social norms. Sexual harassment cases on Ally McBeal frequently argue that what is at issue is the inflexibility of social attitudes rather than a legal concern. Cases involving sexually aggressive women eventually reveal that the central difficulty involves the assumptions characters make about gender.

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John’s closing argument in the case of a younger man suing his female boss after they have sex summarizes the differences in the way sexual assertiveness is perceived: Was he harassed? He knows you know he wasn’t, but he knows that sexually forward women are scorned by society. The man is Don Juan, the woman’s a slut; the guy’s prolific, the woman’s a tramp. We do not approve of women who want sex. If Hillary Clinton had had a little session with an intern, she wouldn’t be running next month. The Democrats would have yanked her out and put in Warren Beatty instead. This country puts the scarlet letter on women who lead with their libidos, and that’s what he’s betting on.41 The problem here, according to the series, is the way characters (and by extension, we the audience) interpret sensual expression by both genders, thus making it hard for juries and jurists to apply the law fairly. Ally places us in the position of ultimate jury, making certain that it activates our standard reading practices and then exposes our assumptions about gender or power as we make judgments in these specific circumstances. Eventually, through a long process of debate about the basis of sexual harassment law, about the difficulty of applying the law given the fluid boundaries of the modern workplace and the expanding definition of harassment, and about the threats preemptive policies pose to the freedoms that laws should protect, the series slowly paints a portrait of current sexual harassment laws as providing too much protection. In so doing, the show asserts that the law creates victims where none exist (though certainly the series never questions the validity of applying sexual harassment law to quid pro quo cases). It would not be surprising to find sexual harassment laws being questioned in a right-wing television series, but given the overtly left politics of Ally McBeal (hiring a transvestite actor in a woman’s role, having two leading female characters explore the idea of a sexual relationship, etc.), this outcome is striking. But this slowly developing critique is intended to convince left-wingers like me to examine one of our primary political strategies—using the law to bring about changes in social attitudes. Certainly much progress has been made in civil rights through the intervention of the courts. It is impossible to imagine the institutional changes in equal opportunity for education or in legalized abortion, for instance, without a bold, activist legal system. And so the left is tempted to continue to use

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the courts as the primary means to bring about change. But Ally McBeal’s argument points out the difficulties of creating even a well-intentioned law to change people’s attitudes. Laws can be implemented in ways that their drafters never envisioned.42 Ally McBeal is not making a radical libertarian argument, suggesting that since laws are slippery we should have as few as possible. Instead the series argues that the kinds of situations in noncoercive harassment cases are often best handled by trying to change attitudes and behaviors, not by bringing in the forces of the law. The series suggests, therefore, that to bring an action to court is necessarily to place oneself in the structured legal roles of “victim” and “aggressor.” If a person has no choice but to call on the court, then he or she should do so. But taking on the role of the victim has costs too; victims necessarily are people with less power, people who can become objects of pity. When it is applied, the law creates victims because the victim role is built into the basic understanding of sexual harassment, according to Ally. When Georgia says that she was a victim of sexual harassment, Richard corrects her: You weren’t a real victim. It was wrong what your boss did. You sued, you won, but that doesn’t make you a victim. The only victim I saw in you was seeking coverage in sexual harassment law that makes victims out of people who shouldn’t be victims.43 “Victim,” according to this line of argument, is a structural position created by the law to label behavior.44 The assertion here is more nuanced than blaming the victim or telling him or her to get over it. The point is that people who are considering using the rhetoric of victimhood should understand the advantages and disadvantages it entails. If a woman (in particular) positions herself as victim, she risks reinforcing the social attitudes that treat women as the weaker sex. Ally McBeal argues that to do so may seem financially or politically expedient at the moment, but over the long run it may be detrimental to one’s self-image and to the image of women. Instead the show advocates that if women want to be treated as equals, they should stand up for themselves when dealing with inappropriate (noncoercive) sexual conduct. In “Fear of Flirting” Jenny defends Raymond when a female lawyer sues him for his sexist treatment of her during a previous trial. In her closing, Jenny models how women can combat such behavior as equals: I can take it. I have a lot of women litigator friends. Guess what: they can take it too. We can dish it out. We push buttons just like ours get

Victim of Love  191

pushed, and we win sometimes. Sometimes we lose, but the good ones . . . we don’t go running to our rooms crying sexual harassment every time we lose. We pick ourselves up. Next time we fight harder. As a woman I’m repulsed by his conduct, but I’m outraged by her suggestion that we can’t handle ourselves against the likes of him. I don’t need special protection. I don’t want it. [to plaintiff ] You’re a woman; for God’s sake, be a man!45 The appropriate action Ally advocates is not to use the quick fix of the legal decision to implement change in subtle gender relations, as the left is wont to do, given its history. Instead the series argues that change must happen slowly, through individuals confronting sexist attitudes in the workplace. Cultural studies has developed an approach to gender and power that would be able to tease out many of the same strands of the debate on sexual harassment that I present here. However, I follow the argument to a conclusion that has less to do with gender and more to do with a somewhat technical reinterpretation of the boundaries of law itself. The sexual harassment cases provide a narrative focus and clear payoff for the single episodes, but over time the characters’ rhetoric inflects the cases toward consideration of the basic function of law. Ally marshals different viewpoints about sexual harassment in order to construct an argument about the relative effectivity of the law and of personal action. Legal action is an absolutely crucial mechanism for redressing broad inequities, but Ally argues that the law can be a blunt, unpredictable instrument when it is asked to alter mindsets. Attitudes such as tolerance and respect cannot be legislated, Ally McBeal asserts; they must be changed through the gradual process of debate. Ally activates our culturally shared assumptions about gender and power as a means, using them to trigger predictable attitudes toward characters that the narrative can shape and manipulate to achieve its larger ends. This larger argument dovetails with the series’ rhetoric that eccentricity should not only be tolerated but valued as well. Just as John Cage and Ally McBeal have found quirky but effective ways to negotiate in the world, overtly sexual characters such as Renee, Elaine, and the litigants mentioned here should be able to express their own sexualities. The series advocates a change in social acceptance, which it argues is a more effective way to bring about change than using the blunt instrument of the law.46 The overall argument of Ally McBeal, therefore, is consistent across its primary fronts: romance, law, politics. All three pursuits attempt to apply broad global principles (one true love, sexual harassment, equality) to specific local situations (dates, cases, personal interactions). In all three arenas,

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the series suggests, characters should not cling too rigidly to the outward forms of their principles. To react with a knee jerk is to miss the possibility of love or advancement or power. Local situations bring opportunities for local victories, and broader debates are more solidly won in this piece-bypiece strategy. Modeling such a debate on sexual harassment, Ally McBeal suggests that the left can best make progress in the modern era by concentrating on attitude changes, not legal ones. I am not trying to make a case for the political efficacy of this position as much as I am articulating the argument to show that it is reasonable and well constructed. In fact, I am rather taken aback by the conclusion that Ally leads me to consider, as if the show has dressed a conservative argument in liberal clothing. Isolating sexual harassment from its real-world context seems dangerous to me. The danger, Bonnie Dow notes, is that in watching fictional depictions of politics on television, we are tempted into “mistaking them for something more than the selective, partial images that they are . . . [and into] believing that image is equal to politics and material change.”47 But I also do not want to fall into the habit of distrusting what audiences do with emotionally persuasive and subtle pop culture, fearing it may confuse lesser minds into believing that fiction is real (therefore requiring trained academics to come to the rescue and handle the dangerous and slippery material). My inclination is, like Kelley’s, to trust that audiences can work through the argument, which perhaps is not rooted in material reality because the case Ally makes here is necessarily conceptual (the abstracting rhetoric is crucial to enable us to see the technical point about the limitations of the legal process). What is remarkable to me is that Ally does what television is often considered least capable of: it stages a rhetorically focused argument about abstract concepts. So baldly stated, the argument loses some of its force. But herein lies a significant advantage of presenting an argument through serial narrative. As discussed in this book, the primetime serial marshals several powerful forces: long-term affiliation with characters, short-term payoffs of individual episodes, the desire to know what happens next, and the ability to pursue a line of reasoning over time. Using these devices can open up an audience to consider arguments that we would normally be inoculated against by our political stances, a valuable thing in an era in which both the left and the right seem entrenched in their own self-enclosed dialogues.48 Ally McBeal demonstrates the power of serial narrative to encourage us to break out of our habits of the heart and the head.

Afterword

Throughout this book I have pointed out the difficulty of performing

the balancing act that Ally McBeal attempts—telling a continuing story using an ensemble cast so that primetime audiences find both individual episodes and the overall narrative involving. As I finish writing this book, it appears that changes in the economics of the American television industry are making this task increasingly challenging. Given the continued rise of cable networks and the concomitant smaller share of broadcast networks’ overall television audience, there is even more pressure for a television series to capture an audience quickly. This has resulted in the extraordinarily speedy cancellations of some rather high-profile primetime serials created by big-name producers (for instance, Jerry Bruckheimer’s Skin left the air after only three episodes). Even David Kelley’s series have made early exits: The Brotherhood of Poland, N.H. was on the air for five episodes, and girls club was yanked after only two. The difficulty of establishing an ensemble cast under these conditions is considerable. When one envisions a work as a broad canvas, it is challenging to provide a compelling brief preview that establishes numerous characters, creates a cohesive universe, and finds an audience. Kelley and Bruckheimer understood that their shows needed to produce an audience or they would be canceled, as has always happened in American television. What they could not have predicted was how quickly they needed to find an audience in the new economic climate. Insiders at David E. Kelley Productions maintain that if five episodes of girls club had been aired, the complexity of the series would have been apparent, giving the show a better chance of

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luring an audience. It was difficult to imagine at the time that a Kelley series would have to establish itself in fewer than five episodes, but the producers discovered that the rules of television viability have changed.1 There is another economically driven factor: serial shows tend to fare poorly in rerun. The “gold ring” of television producing is syndication. Networks keep a tight rein on sharing profits for shows during their primetime runs, so producers stand to make their biggest profits by selling their shows as fare for cable networks or nonprimetime affiliate slots. The difficulty with serial television is that it tends to lose audience numbers on repeated viewing (even primetime reruns of serials during the regular season fare considerably less well than in their original airings).2 The sitcom performs much better in syndicated rerun, in part because it does not depend so heavily on the viewer having seen previous episodes. Not surprisingly, the two leading current franchises on primetime network television are non­ serial dramas. CSI and Law and Order, both popular shows that close their cases within an hour, have spawned an impressive group of similarly structured spinoffs: CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Both franchises have begun successful syndication runs, allowing viewers to watch individual episodes without worrying about their place within the overall history of the show.3 In spite of these disadvantageous economic factors, seriality continues on the primetime programming grid. In fact, serial narrative has blossomed when mixed with the game show to create what is loosely labeled “reality television.” Reality television at its best gives us many of the pleasures we have come to expect from scripted ensemble shows: a broad range of complicated characters (imagine a scripted drama featuring a Machiavellian gay nudist corporate trainer like Survivor’s Richard Hatch) in well-sculpted episodes with narrative deception and beautiful cinematography (consider the savvy editing to create tension about who will be voted off of Survivor, along with the gorgeous camera setups of its exotic location). The most successful reality television shows build serial interest in their character network to a climactic resolution of their contests. At a moment when some predicted that cheaply produced “reality” serials4 would crowd out more expensive, scripted serial primetime shows,5 serials then found a new environment that operates under different economic rules: pay channels such as HBO and Showtime. These channels determined that they could gain subscribers by offering fare that was not available elsewhere, beginning with made-for-television movies (a genre that pay networks now dominate). Following a BBC-oriented model of

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scheduling,6 HBO and Showtime explicitly position their serials (The Sopranos, Oz, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, Deadwood, Queer as Folk) as “quality television” to gain audiences (similarly, the pay networks have grown to dominate the quality made-for-television movie). Roger Hagedorn has traced the history of the serial form from newspapers to television, asserting that “when a medium needs an audience, it turns to serials.”7 Such a broad rule needs to be nuanced by historical, economically grounded specificity, of course. Ally McBeal arose at a time when Fox needed successful quality programming to establish itself as a truly viable fourth network; Survivor was created when broadcast networks needed a compelling, lower-cost alternative to relying on scripted television; and The Sopranos emerged when HBO needed a lure other than recent movies. The dependable economic strategy of counterprogramming ensured that reality television could not entirely dominate primetime. The broadcast networks thus continue to experiment with the highly produced, scripted serial form, with new serials finding ways to lure audiences quickly while establishing their character networks. 24’s initial packaging foregrounded its serial high concept: twenty-four continuous hours (albeit interrupted by commercials) in a frantic counterterrorism agent’s life. Lost’s first season balanced its serial narrative with individual episodes devoted primarily to revealing the backstory of one character. Desperate Housewives started with an obvious narrative enigma to draw in viewers immediately: why did a seemingly normal suburban housewife (now the voiceover narrator) kill herself ? The show enhanced its appeal by gradually showing that virtually every character (even the teenage characters) has a secret that the show revealed one at a time (to the audience and to the other characters) while it kept its central question open. Boomtown, especially in its first season, set for itself the challenging task of showing the action from multiple characters’ perspectives while resolving the action in individual episodes and simultaneously showing character growth across the serial. Arrested Development contained many of its plot twists within individual episodes, although it poked fun at the serial form by showing fake preview scenes from upcoming “episodes.” The desire for well-wrought primetime serial narrative continues to encourage producers to find distinctive ways to allocate narrative elements to individual episodes and to the overarching story. Television studies needs to pay attention to these experiments in aesthetics and narrative structure; they are reworking and enlivening the storytelling capabilities of television. As we learn better how to articulate and elaborate the narrative construction

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of television shows as they unfold over time, we will gain an appreciation for just how rich and rewarding televisual argument can be. So why do I use the polemical word “beautiful” to describe Ally in this book? One danger of using the word is a byproduct of its linguistic form, which makes it appear that beauty is a property of the object itself (a beautiful table, a beautiful shot) and not a social relation linking objects, aesthetes/ fans, and a historical moment. If objects are beautiful, then it does not matter who is looking at them, what purposes they serve, or what assumptions people make about them. The political danger of calling something “beautiful” lies in not acknowledging and taking responsibility for your own prejudices and judgments, as if you are merely discovering what already exists in the thing itself instead of actively constructing it as “beautiful.” The other danger with the B-word lies in the history of exclusivity and exclusion that it carries with it. To talk about beauty is seemingly to situate it within the eternal verities, to assert that complexity, unity, and elegance exist outside of time and that we should pursue these Platonic forms. Leaning too closely on such “transcendent values”8 can seem to close down possibilities for nontraditional forms of beauty, and some have argued that television offers a particular opportunity to challenge those classical norms. By its very interrupted nature, its tendency to mix and match styles indiscriminately, by the blatant crassness of its appeal to large popular audiences, “trash television” represents an alternative aesthetic9 that may perhaps be both anticlassical and distinctively televisual. But as Jeffrey Sconce has noted, a trash aesthetic does not necessarily have cultural values totally opposite to the high culture it seems to counter. Fans asserting the importance of Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda often do so by appropriating the terms of official aesthetic discourse. The cultural violence is done by pairing the language of aesthetics with devalued objects, by talking about “complexity” or “unity” in Larry Buchanan’s Zontar.10 Formal and popular education has widely communicated these old-fashioned aesthetic values, which no longer necessarily serve an elitist purpose when used by a broader range of people to describe popular culture.11 Simon Frith has argued: What I’m suggesting here is that people bring similar questions to high and low art. . . . The differences between high and low emerge because these questions are embedded in different historical and material circumstances, and are therefore framed differently, and because

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the answers are related to different social situations, different patterns of sociability, different social needs.12 As a sociologist, Frith is ultimately interested in the way people’s pop tastes help them to constitute these different discourses into personal identity. Although sympathetic with Frith, I want to resist the temptation to transform aesthetics into identity politics. Aesthetics is not always a way station on the road to more important topics. I want to encourage us to pause longer at the beauties of popular culture because I believe that we will see more the longer we contemplate its intricate construction. The concept of beauty that emerges from this book is a fairly oldfashioned one: a cohesive system in which elegant, innovative formal technique serves to convey a unified, complex argument suitable for moral and ethical insight. In using the loaded word “beauty,” I take a page from Ally’s book: politics is always local, so “beauty” has different political import depending on the specific historical moment. By calling this show “beautiful,” I am not saying that elegance and complexity are the only qualities that can constitute beauty, world without end, amen. I am saying that at a moment when television is widely frowned on as a denigrated object, using these old-fashioned words can help us to see television more clearly. Television producers and popular critics participate in this game of cultural politics when they latch on to these officially acknowledged formal qualities to position individual “quality” television shows as different from the rest. Within the politics of the academy, I am performing a similar move. In arguing for the art and argument of a quite silly (and often annoying) television series, I want to reclaim our ability to talk openly, unashamedly, unironically, and rigorously about television as a beautiful object. What are the specific lessons of Ally McBeal? It appears that the art of Ally McBeal may be its more immediately apparent legacy. The show’s innovative use of special effects to convey subjective states, for instance, has already enriched the possibilities of mainstream television. This is not surprising, considering the long history of popular media’s tendency to borrow stylistic excess from innovative sources, integrating these formal devices briefly into mainstream practice without fundamentally reworking them.13 Style is perhaps the quickest, most obvious way to distinguish “quality television” from the norm, but stylistic devices change as artistic and industrial practices change. For instance, Ally used a great deal of popular music for the multiple purposes outlined in chapter 1, but it did so at a moment when no one

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thought that network series could be resold to audiences on DVD. Now the economic ground has shifted, and the stylistic choice that helped to distinguish Ally is now a major roadblock to its widespread DVD rerelease (clearing legal rights for the three to five songs that each Ally episode includes is a nightmare). We will probably never see anyone use music in the way that Ally did so long as the legal hurdles for subsidiary rights remain. We are also less likely to see again so strong a coordination of so many subjective devices to warp the narrative world to match one not-so-likable character’s sensibilities on broadcast television. By making the show so deeply imbued with its protagonist’s idiosyncratic perspective, Ally innovatively reshapes the tools of the ensemble serial. In doing so, it takes an enormous chance that the viewer will not embrace the show if he or she reacts negatively to Ally, since viewer sympathies are necessarily constrained in the Allycentered universe. While finishing this book, I also happened to be reading Husain Haddawy’s superb English translation of The Arabian Nights,14 and I was struck by the many similarities to Ally. Brother kings Shahrayar and Shahzaman discover that their wives have been unfaithful, and Shahrayar begins a series of vengeful killings, marrying a series of women for only one night and executing them the next day. Shahrazad marries the king and manages to keep the executioner at bay by telling nightly installments in a continuing serial narrative. Characters in these stories frequently interrupt the narrative for brief recitations of poetry inspired by their current situations, much like the musical interludes in Ally. These stories introduce us to a series of paired brothers, unfaithful spouses, and vengeful acts, each more outlandishly impossible than the other. The overall narrative keeps circling around the same moral issues (the relative value of forgiveness and vengeance), asking us to make rhetorical comparisons between these trumped-up case studies and King Shahrayar’s bloody actions. Eventually this narrative tutelage wins the king over in a way that no other method of persuasion could. The connections between Ally and this other fantastic narrative that features talking animals are clear: both use a serial narrative of episodic case studies to encourage us to make paired comparisons that further the rhetorical argument. But in reading that folktale while writing this book of criticism, I also became aware of one specific ramification of the different forms of these two serials. The lack of particularity of the characters in The Arabian Nights sets up a different dynamic from the handling of characters in a television ensemble show. Most of the characters in the Arabian tales are types: a vizier, a fisherman, an old man, and so forth. Even the longestrunning characters have few details; Shahrazad is little more than a conduit

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for the many stories she tells. Such unspecified types are part of the folktale, allowing it to make broad moral points without getting bogged down in the details of a specific character in a specific time and place. On television, however, it becomes more difficult to reduce even a guest star to his or her rhetorical function, an unjustly fired employee or a defiant employer. We expect that these characters on television will have specific backstories that motivate their individual actions and that these actions will be depicted by real actors in a realistic-looking space as captured by the detailed eye of the camera. The “naturalist habit” (to use Raymond Williams’s term) of depicting drama in a seemingly everyday real world using “invisible” conventions gives us a basis for comparing the real and the reel.15 Unless the show resorts to a non-naturalistic space (e.g., Pee-Wee’s Playhouse), television characters have a particularity unlike that of the types often found in folktales. This has its advantages; it creates the possibility for strong identification and makes possible the numerous expressive devices of the cinema. The disadvantages are also made clear by comparing Ally to The Arabian Nights. No one berates The Arabian Nights for its unrealistic depiction of the world, and no one would consider the violent and immoral characters of the folktale to be role models. Moreover, the sketchiness of the characters makes it easier for the serial to present its abstract moral case rather than get mired in specific lessons to be drawn from the ramifications of a certain character’s choices. By boldly choosing to limit its debate to a defined set of issues, taking on cases that give insight into the relationship among law, gender, and the workplace, Ally McBeal enlarges the medium’s possibilities for presenting a specific but abstract argument (about the advantages and disadvantages of using law to try to change social beliefs). In attempting to stage this focused debate, Ally marshals expressive forces that are beyond the purely verbal stylings of The Arabian Nights. Ally takes place in a physical world that resembles our own, but its innovative fantasies, special effects, and music keep it from staging its debate in a straightforwardly naturalistic world. In addition, the narrative universe it constructs has clear limitations, since eventually it must run out of possible sexual harassment cases to examine. The combination of thematic focus, serial narrative, and occasional fantasy flourishes has an undeniable rhetorical power, but it also invites problems in the larger public discourse. Both the left and the right police popular imagery, taking different stances on issues concerning role models and censorship of expression, but both tend to proceed as if the connection between representation and reality were straightforward. Ally McBeal daringly asks us to circumvent this direct, literal comparison for a consideration of more

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abstract issues. To do so in a popular representational medium is to gain a broader audience, but the trade-off is that the public discussion of television remains rooted in realism and suspicious of fantasy. Over and over in this book I have returned to variations on the concept of the trade-off. By choosing one narrative or stylistic device, a work of art necessarily gains certain advantages and loses others, and this too is a primary lesson of Ally McBeal. Beauty is not without cost. Sometimes the price paid is a purely aesthetic one (e.g., concentrating subjective devices on the protagonist limits the range and depth of character perspectives). Sometimes it is political (choosing to examine “eccentricity” keeps the show from examining real-world differences). Sometimes the price is economic (an Ally-centered universe encourages many audience members to turn off the show). Sometimes the price is social (overhearing Ally’s self-doubt activates our broadly held contempt for waffling). I hope that Beautiful TV not only demonstrates how complex the art and argument of television can be but also illuminates the trade-offs involved in choosing beauty.

Episode List

The following is a list of episode titles with the original air dates. For plot descriptions and cast credits for individual episodes, see Tony Ci­anfaglione’s excellent episode list at http://www.tv.com. First Season (Fall 1997–Spring 1998)

1. “Pilot” (September 8, 1997) 2. “Compromising Positions” (September 15, 1997) 3. “The Kiss” (September 22, 1997) 4. “The Affair” (September 29, 1997) 5. “One Hundred Tears Away” (October 20, 1997) 6. “The Promise” (October 27, 1997) 7. “The Attitude” (November 3, 1997) 8. “Drawing the Lines” (November 10, 1997) 9. “The Dirty Joke” (November 17, 1997) 10. “Boy to the World” (December 1, 1997)



11. “Silver Bells” (December 15, 1997) 12. “Cro-Magnon” (January 5, 1998) 13. “The Blame Game” (January 19, 1998) 14. “Body Language” (February 2, 1998) 15. “Once in a Lifetime” (February 23, 1998) 16. “Forbidden Fruits” (March 2, 1998) 17. “Theme of Life” (March 9, 1998) 18. “The Playing Field” (March 16, 1998) 19. “Happy Birthday, Baby” (April 6, 1998) 20. The Inmates” (April 27, 1998) 21. “Being There” (May 4, 1998) 22. “Alone Again” (May 11, 1998) 23. “These Are the Days” (May 18, 1998)

Second Season (Fall 1998–Spring 1999) 24. “The Real World” (September 14, 1998) 25. “They Eat Horses, Don’t They” (September 21, 1998)

26. “Fools’ Night Out” (September 28, 1998) 27. “It’s My Party” (October 19, 1998) 28. “Story of Love” (October 28, 1998)

202 Episode List

29. “Worlds without Love” (November 2, 1998) 30. “Happy Trails” (November 9, 1998) 31. “Just Looking” (November 16, 1998) 32. “You Never Can Tell” (November 23, 1998) 33. “Making Spirits Bright” (December 14, 1998) 34. “In Dreams” (January 11, 1999) 35. “Love Unlimited” (January 18, 1999) 36. “Angels and Blimps” (February 8, 1999) 37. “Pyramids on the Nile” (February 15, 1999)

38. “Sideshow” (February 22, 1999) 39. “Sex, Lies, and Politics” (March 1, 1999) 40. “Civil War” (April 5, 1999) 41. “Those Lips, That Hand” (April 19, 1999) 42. “Let’s Dance” (April 26, 1999) 43. “Only the Lonely” (May 3, 1999) 44. “The Green Monster” (May 10, 1999) 45. “Love Illusions” (May 17, 1999) 46. “I Know Him by Heart” (May 24, 1999)

Third Season (Fall 1999–Spring 2000) 47. “Car Wash” (October 25, 1999) 48. “Buried Pleasures” (November 1, 1999) 49. “Seeing Green” (November 8, 1999) 50. “Heat Wave” (November 15, 1999) 51. “Troubled Water” (November 22, 1999) 52. “Changes” (November 29, 1999) 53. “Saving Santa” (December 13, 1999) 54. “Blue Christmas” (December 20, 1999) 55. “Out in the Cold” (January 10, 2000) 56. “Just Friends” (January 17, 2000) 57. “Over the Rainbow” (February 7, 2000)

58. “In Search of Pygmies” (February 14, 2000) 59. “Pursuit of Loneliness” (February 21, 2000) 60. “The Oddball Parade” (February 28, 2000) 61. “Prime Suspect” (March 20, 2000) 62. “Boy Next Door” (March 27, 2000) 63. “I Will Survive” (April 17, 2000) 64. “Turning Thirty” (May 1, 2000) 65. “Do You Wanna Dance” (May 8, 2000) 66. “Hope and Glory” (May 15, 2000) 67. “Ally McBeal: The Musical, Almost” (May 22, 2000)

Fourth Season (Fall 2000–Spring 2001) 68. “Sex, Lies, and Second Thoughts” (October 23, 2000) 69. “Girls’ Night Out” (October 30, 2000) 70. “Two’s a Crowd” (November 6, 2000) 71. “Without a Net” (November 13, 2000) 72. “The Last Virgin” (November 20, 2000)

73. “Tis the Season” (November 27, 2000) 74. “Love on Holiday” (December 4, 2000) 75. “The Man with the Bag” (December 11, 2000) 76. “Reasons to Believe” (January 8, 2001) 77. “The Ex-Files” (January 15, 2001) 78. “Mr. Bo” (January 22, 2001)

Episode List  203

79. “Hats Off to Larry” (February 5, 2001) 80. “Reach out and Touch” (February 12, 2001) 81. “Boys Town” (February 19, 2001) 82. “Falling Up” (February 26, 2001) 83. “The Getaway” (March 19, 2001) 84. “The Pursuit of Unhappiness” (March 26, 2001)

85. “The Obstacle Course” (April 16, 2001) 86. “In Search of Barry White” (April 23, 2001) 87. “Cloudy Skies, Chance of Parade” (April 30, 2001) 88. “Queen Bee” (May 7, 2001) 89. “Home Again” (May 14, 2001) 90. “The Wedding” (May 21, 2001)

Fifth Season (Fall 2001–Spring 2002) 91. “Friends and Lovers” (October 29, 2001) 92. “Judge Ling” (November 5, 2001) 93. “Neutral Corners” (November 12, 2001) 94. “Fear of Flirting” (November 19, 2001) 95. “I Want Love” (November 26, 2001) 96. “Lost and Found” (December 3, 2001) 97. “Nine One One” (December 10, 2001) 98. “Playing with Matches” (January 7, 2002) 99. “Blowin’ in the Wind” (January 14, 2002) 100. “One Hundred Tears” (January 21, 2002)

101. “A Kick in the Head” (February 4, 2002) 102. “Brand New Day” (February 11, 2002) 103. “Woman” (February 18, 2002) 104. “Homecoming” (February 25, 2002) 105. “Heart and Soul” (March 4, 2002) 106. “Love Is All Around” (April 15, 2002) 107. “Tom Dooley” (April 22, 2002) 108. “Another One Bites the Dust” (April 29, 2002) 109. “What I’ll Never Do for Love” (May 6, 2002) 110. “All of Me” (May 13, 2002) 111. “Bygones” (May 20, 2002)

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Notes

Introduction 1. Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (New York: Routledge, 2005); Derek Kompare, “‘Greyish Rectangles’: Creating the Television Heritage,” Media History 9.2 (August 2003): 153–169; Vera Dika, Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 2. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). There is some fan fiction devoted to Ally, although such work is not the focus of this book. See the Ally McBeal Literature Society at http://allymcbeallitsociety.hypermart.net. 3. “Bonnie Dow’s publication advice,” which circulated on the NCAcritcult mailing list, among other places. 4. John Caughie argues that “the absence of an archive which would have allowed an examination of various transformations of television as a discourse, coupled with television’s own insistence on being immediate and up-tothe-minute, has tended to place television and television criticism in a perpetual present” (“Television Criticism: ‘A

Discourse in Search of an Object,’” Screen 25.4–5 [1984]: 116). 5. Caughie notes that “academic television criticism and theory moved almost invariably to the social, whether it was talking about audiences, institutions, or generic forms” (115). The classic statements on television as cultural indicator are John Fiske and John Hartley, “Bardic Television,” in Reading Television (London: Routledge, 1978), 85–100; and Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch, “Television as a Cultural Forum,” in Television: The Critical View, 4th ed., ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 455–470. 6. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Methuen, 1984); Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985; Jeremy Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1994); E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987). 7. In part this academic emphasis has

206  Notes to Pages 3–4

to do with the fact that television (for economic, institutional, and technological reasons) operated in a pared-down version of the invisible Hollywood style for most of its history. This medium did not seem to call for much close aesthetic attention, and the most salient differences between television and film form could be adequately described in general terms: the interruptibility of story by commercials, the importance of editing in music videos, the construction of soap opera narrative. If one examined a particular soap or music video, it was to use it as an exemplar for the basic workings of the genre, not to highlight deft strategies for handling particular narrative quandries. 8. The controversy sprang from Flockhart’s appearance at the Emmy Awards in 1998. For examples of the press coverage about Flockhart’s body, see Lynn Snowden, “Calista Bites Back,” George 4.5 (May 1999): 68–75; Barry Koltnow, “Now for the Skinny on Ally McBeal,” Orange County Register (26 April 1999); Mark Reynolds, “Pride of Our Ally but Is That New Figure Really Her?” Daily Mail (London) (7 February 2002); Karen S. Schneider, “Arguing Her Case,” People (9 November 1998): 92–98. Courtney Thorne-Smith, who plays Georgia, entered into this controversy when she wrote an article about body image after leaving the show (“I Was Beating up My Own Body” Self [October 2000]: 240). 9. David Cogan, “Downey Visited Reputed Drug Dealer,” New York Daily News (26 April 2001). 10. Some of this work has already been done. See Tracey Owens Patton, “Ally McBeal and Her Homies: The Reification of White Stereotypes of the Other,” Journal of Black Studies 32.2 (November 2001): 229–260; Rachel Moseley and Jacinda Read, “Having It Ally: Popular Television (Post-)Feminism,” Feminist Media Studies 2.2 (2002): 231–249; Rachel

Dubrofsky, “Ally McBeal as Postfeminist Icon: The Aestheticizing and Fetishizing of the Independent Working Woman,” Communication Review 5 (2002): 265–284; Susan E. McKenna, “The Queer Insistence of Ally McBeal: Lesbian Chic, Postfeminism, and Lesbian Reception,” Communication Review 5 (2002): 285–314; Laurie Ouellette, “Victims No More: Postfeminism, Television, and Ally McBeal,” Communication Review 5 (2002): 315–337; Mary Douglas Vavrus, “Putting Ally on Trial: Contesting Postfeminism in Popular Culture,” Women’s Studies in Communication 23.3 (Fall 2000): 413–428; L. S. Kim, “‘Sex and the Single Girl’ in Postfeminism: The F Word on Television,” Television and New Media 2.4 (November 2001): 319–334; Kristyn Gorton, “(Un)Fashionable Feminists: The Media and Ally McBeal,” in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, ed. Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 154–163. 11. Alan McKee says, “It is still possible—indeed, I would even argue, normal—to study television without even thinking about programming [i.e., the text itself ]” (“What Is Television For?” in Quality Popular Television, ed. Mark Jancovich and James Lyons [London: BFI Publishing, 2003], 182). 12. Kristin Thompson makes a forceful argument that television studies’ embrace of Raymond Williams’s concept of flow has kept it from giving close consideration to individual texts. See Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 5–18. Thompson’s book makes some similar justifications for the need for textual television criticism, though overall it is more interested in screenplay structure and in establishing continuities with the classical Hollywood narrative than mine is. 13. “The term ‘culture’ used in the phrase ‘cultural studies’ is neither

Notes to Pages 4–5  207

aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but political. . . . Culture is not, then, the aesthetic product . . . but rather a way of living in an industrial society” (John Fiske, “British Cultural Studies,” in Channels of Discourse, ed. Robert C. Allen [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987], 254). For a spirited attempt to resituate aesthetics as a more central issue for cultural studies, see Michael Bérubé, ed., The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). 14. John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 352. Caughie says, “Television theory at least seeks (if it doesn’t always find) a material understanding of audiences and institutions, but it is hopelessly general about forms” (117). Caldwell also argues for the importance of aesthetic criticism of television (353). 15. The best of these works is a history of television aesthetics in Caldwell, chapter 2. See also Bernard Timberg, “The Rhetoric of the Camera in Television Soap Opera,” in Television: The Critical View, 3d ed., ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 132–147; Gary A. Copeland, “A History of Television Style,” in Television: Critical Methods and Applications, 2d ed., ed. Jeremy Butler (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), 191–215; and Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values, and Cultural Change (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). For a consideration of television aesthetics rooted in cognitive studies of perception, see Nikos Matallinos, Television Aesthetics: Perceptual, Cognitive, and Compositional Bases (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996). 16. Janet Staiger, Blockbuster TV: MustSee Sitcoms in the Network Era (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

17. David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Maria Cartwright, eds., “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X-Files (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996); John Alberti, ed., Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003); Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery, ed., Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); David Lavery, ed., This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, eds., Reading Sex and the City (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004). 18. Toby Miller, The Avengers (London: BFI Publishing, 1997); Tise Vahimagi, The Untouchables (London: BFI Publishing, 1998); Marcia Landy, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005). For an interesting extended discourse analysis of a single British television serial, see John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado, Doctor Who: The Extended Text (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). 19. For example, John Kenneth Muir, An Analytical Guide to Television’s Battlestar Galactica (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998). Jon Delasara’s PopLit, PopCult, and The X-Files: A Critical Exploration (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000) is an exception, but his approach differs significantly from mine in its concentration on genre, myth, and theme. He deals with seriality by tracing repeated motifs and with televisual style by tracing the show’s visual inheritance from German Expressionism. 20. Julie D’Acci, Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney & Lacey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 21. As Charlotte Brunsdon argues, we cannot return to textual criticism

208  Notes to Pages 5–6

as it occurred before audience study transformed media studies. Instead, new textual criticism should make its assertions in light of what we now know about the complexities of how real people handle popular culture texts. “Without the guarantees of common sense, or the authority of a political teleology, and with the recognition of the potentially infinite proliferation of textual sites, and the agency of the always already social reader, in a range of contexts, it is still necessary— and possible—to construct a televisual object of study” (“Television: Aesthetics and Audiences,” in Logics of Television: Essays on Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990], 68; emphasis in original). 22. Henry Jenkins, “Historical Poetics,” in Approaches to Popular Film, ed. Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 111. 23. John R. Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 24. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6.5 (1939): 34–49; Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Against the American Grain (New York: Random House, 1962), 3–78. 25. Lynn Spigel argues that television studies should devote more attention to the nexus of high and low culture in “High Culture in Low Places: Television and Modern Art, 1950–1970,” in Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 300–301. See also Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 26. Mark Jancovich has argued that fans tend to argue for the quality of hip, cult TV texts by distancing them from the despised category of the middlebrow. See “Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural

Capital, and the Production of Cultural Distinctions,” Cultural Studies 16.2 (March 2001): 306–322. Pierre Bourdieu discusses a similar dynamic in his discussion of taste cultures in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984), 60–62. 27. Brunsdon notes that the other ways television positions itself as highbrow is by its validation from other sources, either by adapting other established art forms (such as literature) or by presenting us with the real (and gaining documentary value) (“Television,” 59). 28. Josh Levine, David E. Kelley: The Man behind Ally McBeal (Toronto: ECW Press, 1999). Kelley’s feat of winning the Emmy for both Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Comedy Series in the same year (1999) is unlikely to be repeated. 29. Then-president of Fox Entertainment Peter Roth said of Kelley, “‘This is a guy who has such a vision of the characters he’s created that he’s afraid to let them go for fear they might be misrepresented’” (Bill Carter, “The Unintended Career of TV’s Prolific Writer,” New York Times [2 March 1998]: E6). Members of Kelley’s writing staff have allegedly quit because Kelley took on so much of the writing labor (Stuart Miller, “Kelley Wins Astral at TV Festival,” Variety [14 June 1999]). At points David E. Kelley Productions had three primetime series on the air at the same time (Boston Public, The Practice, and either Ally or girls club). Unlike, say, Dick Wolf of Law and Order fame, Kelley was known for writing many of these simultaneous series episodes, not just coordinating and producing the series. Of the sixty-six hours of programming produced by David E. Kelley productions in the 2000–2001 season, Kelley wrote thirty-nine of them alone and cowrote twenty-four (Aaron Barnhart, “David E. Kelley Keeps His Hand and Pen in His

Notes to Pages 6–7  209

Trio of Network Hits,” Kansas City Star [22 November 2001]). The press argued that this remarkable juggling act resulted in a decrease in quality in Kelley series (see Joanna Coles, “Nine Lives of the Ally Cat,” Times (London) [1 December 2000]). 30. The closest contender would be Babylon 5 (92 out of 110 episodes were written by J. Michael Straczynski). See Petra Kuppers, “Quality Science Fiction: Babylon 5’s Metatextual Universe,” in Cult Television, ed. Sara Gwenllian-Jones and Roberta E. Pearson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 45–59. Charles McGrath has argued that television is a writer’s medium, offering more opportunities to portray social issues and the work world while simultaneously emphasizing small character moments. He asserts, “A few of the more inventive TV series, for example, have become for our era the equivalent of the serial novel, unfolding epic stories installment by installment, and sweeping all of us up in shared anxiety and in a lot of group sighing and head shaking over what fate or (it’s the same thing) the author has in store” (“The Triumph of the PrimeTime Novel,” New York Times Magazine [22 October 1995]: 53). See also Graham Murdock, “Authorship and Organization,” in The Screen Education Reader: Cinema, Television, Culture, ed. Manuel Alvarado, Edward Buscombe, and Richard Collins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 123–143. 31. Fox approached Kelley to create a show that would hold the strong eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old female audience from Monday night’s Melrose Place. Ally succeeded beautifully as counterprogramming to the male-oriented Monday Night Football. By its second season, Ally was Fox’s number one show, charging $265,000 for a thirty-second advertisement, the tenth highest price

in primetime for that season. See James Collins, “Ally McBeal,” Time (10 November 1997): 117; Tom Bierbaum, “NFL No Monday Demo Lock,” Variety (5–11 October 1998): 26; Ed Bark, “Ad Rates, Not Ratings Are Key in TV Numbers,” Seattle Times (29 September 1998): E3. 32. The very plot elements that made Ally McBeal racy continue in later Kelley series, but they are interpreted differently as broadcast practices change. The sexual lasciviousness of girls club and The Brotherhood of Poland, New Hampshire, instead of pushing boundaries as Ally did, were interpreted by many critics as frivolously salacious. 33. One of the less successful innovations attempted in programming Ally McBeal was the short-lived run in 1999 of a half-hour edited version titled Ally, which simplified the show to one story line. “In musical terms, you could call it a singles remix, or even a B-side,” said an anonymous Fox executive (Gail Shister, “A Second, Shorter Version of Ally McBeal Is in the Works,” Philadelphia Inquirer [17 May 1999]). See Ray Richmond, “Ally,” Variety (27 September 1999). Christine Scodari argues that Ally McBeal and Sex in the City should be considered forerunners of an “emergent subgenre” called the “sexcom” (“Sex and the Sitcom: Gender and Genre in Millennial Television,” in The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed, ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 241–252. 34. The industrial context is always important for the rise of “quality television.” See, for example, Paul Kerr, “The Making of (the) MTM (Show),” in MTM: “Quality Television,” ed. Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi (London: BFI Publishing, 1984), 61–98; Michele Hilmes, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name: Cheers and the Mediation of

210  Notes to Pages 7–8

Cultures,” Wide Angle 12.2 (April 1990): 64–73; William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). 35. The primary argument for the importance of authorship in television series is Horace Newcomb and Robert S. Alley, The Producer’s Medium: Conversations with Creators of American TV (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Roberta Pearson uses the term “hyphenate-auteurs” to describe recent television writer/producers such as Joss Whedon and David Kelley (“The Writer/ Producer in American Television,” in Contemporary Television Series, ed. Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005], 11–26). John Caldwell suggests that strongly authored programming (“signature” or “boutique” television) is closely linked to a strong sense of visual style: “The degree of excessive intentionality in these shows was directly proportional to the amount of formal and visual excess that each series needed to restrain. Expressive intent, then, both exploits and channels the flooded televisual image. The boutique signature is used to discipline excessive style” (110; emphasis in original). 36. For a discussion of Fox’s economic strategies immediately preceding Ally, see Alisa Perren, “Deregulation, Integration, and a New Era of Media Conglomerates: The Case of Fox, 1985–1995” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas–Austin, 2004). 37. As Jeffrey Sconce has noted, “Television itself is often more nuanced and sophisticated than the writing that seeks to theorize it” (“What If ? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson [Durham: Duke University Press, 2004], 94). Peter Kramer asserts that the regularity of series television production creates an

environment that resembles the classical Hollywood studio system and provides a similarly rich output. See “The Lure of the Big Picture: Film, Television, and Hollywood,” in Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations between Film and Television, ed. John Hill and Martin McLoone (Luton: John Libbey, 1996), 9–46. For an intriguing argument about why complex television narrative is cognitively beneficial (including charts but without a firm grounding in research), see Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 62–115. 38. John Corner, Television Form and Public Address (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), 168. 39. Classic examples of the wholesale condemnation of television include Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: Morrow, 1978); and Marie Winn, The Plug-In Drug (New York: Grossman, 1977). For more recent efforts, see Karl Zinsmeister, “Wasteland: How Today’s Trash Television Harms America,” American Enterprise (March–April 1999): 4–6; or the TV Turn-Off Week campaign at http://www.tvturnoff.org. For a critical examination of this discourse, see Jason Mittell, “The Cultural Power of an AntiTelevision Metaphor: Questioning the ‘Plug-In Drug,’” Television and New Media 1.2 (May 2000): 215–238. 40. Scott Heller quotes Emory Elliott as expressing a similar sentiment, calling aesthetics a “forbidden subject” (“Wearying of Cultural Studies, Some Scholars Rediscover Beauty,” Chronicle of Higher Education [4 December 1998]: A15). 41. Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, Quality Popular Television (London: BFI Publishing, 2003). 42. For a useful summary of the quality debate in Great Britain, see Corner,

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162–177. See John Ellis, “Art, Culture, and Quality: Terms for a Cinema in the Forties and Seventies,” Screen 19.3 (Autumn 1978): 9–49, for an enumeration of the assumptions behind the cinematic version of this debate. Also see Charlotte Brunsdon, “Problems with Quality,” Screen 31.1 (Spring 1990): 67–90; Geoff Mulgan, The Question of Quality (London: BFI Publishing, 1990); Laurence A. Jarvik, Masterpiece Theater and the Politics of Quality (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999); and Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons, and Lucette Bronk, eds., Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 43. Jane Feuer, “MTM Enterprises: An Overview,” in Feuer, Kerr, and Vahimagi, eds., MTM: “Quality Television,” 27–28. 44. Jane Feuer, “The MTM Style,” in Feuer, Kerr, and Vahimagi, eds., MTM: “Quality Television,” 56. 45. Such forces have resulted in an activist group (Viewers for Quality Television) being formed to advocate for more quality programming. Viewers for Quality Television operated from 1984 to 2001. For more, see Dorothy Collins Swanson, The Story of Viewers for Quality Television: Grassroots to Prime Time (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000); and D’Acci, 88–89. 46. Feuer, “The MTM Style,” 56. 47. Jeff MacGregor, “The Importance of Being Quirky (At All Costs),” New York Times (19 February 1995): 34. 48. Feuer, “The MTM Style,” 44. See also J. P. Williams’s discussion of the importance of intertextuality in creating a sense of quality for Moonlighting (“The Mystique of Moonlighting: When You Care Enough to Watch the Very Best,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 16.3 [Fall 1988]: 90–99). 49. Caldwell, 191 (original quotation is italicized). 50. Ally won seven Emmys (including

Outstanding Comedy Series in 1999) and was nominated for twenty-seven more. Other awards include a Peabody and a Screen Actors Guild award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series (both in 1999) and 4 Golden Globes, including the 1998 and 1999 awards for Best Comedy/Musical TV Series. 51. Steven D. Stark argues that Ally’s silliness gives it the necessary distance to handle serious social questions, similar to the way M*A*S*H’s decision to deal with Vietnam era issues was made “safe” by setting its stories in the past (“Lady’s Night,” New Republic [29 December 1997]: 13–14. 52. See Herbert Eagle, ed. and trans., Russian Formalist Film Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), for key writings and a useful overview. In contemporary media circles, these Formalist ideas have been applied primarily to film texts, not television. The most elaborate updating of Formalist principles for modern film criticism is Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 53. For more on seriality, primetime soaps, and melodramatic form, see two of Jane Feuer’s writings: “Melodrama, Serial Form, and Television Today,” Screen 25.1 (1984): 4–16; and “The Lack of Influence of thirtysomething,” in Hammond and Mazdon, 27–36. 54. Angela Ndalianis has articulated several “prototypes” of television narrative forms ranging from the traditional episode-oriented series to the multiple plot line serial (“Television and the NeoBaroque,” in Hammond and Mazdon, 83–101). 55. For a discussion of limited serials on television, see Glen Creeber, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen

212  Notes to Pages 11–16

(London: BFI Publishing, 2004). Robin Nelson has proposed the term “flexinarrative” to describe how much current television drama is composed of brief story units edited together quickly in a multiple narrative structure (24–49). There is a sizable body of work on soap opera, which shares some narrative characteristics with the primetime serials. See, in particular, Allen; Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London: Methuen, 1985); Dorothy Hobson, Soap Opera (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). 56. For instance, Martha P. Nochimson attempts to trace Ally’s narrative arc but ends with the early portions of the third season (“Ally McBeal: Brightness Falls from the Air,” Film Quarterly 53.3 [Spring 2000]: 25–32). Amanda Dyanne Lotz’s dissertation is a welcome change to this trend, dealing with Ally McBeal’s entire run. She notes, “One of the primary limitations of much [critical] writing on this show is a tendency toward generalization, and a belief that an episode or two, or season or two speak of the series as a whole” (“Televising Feminist Discourses: Postfeminist Discourse in the Post-Network Era” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas–Austin, 2000). 57. Greg M. Smith, “The Left Takes Back the Flag: The Steadicam, the Snippet, and the Song in The West Wing’s ‘In Excelsis Deo,’” in The West Wing: The American Presidency as Television Drama, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (Syracuse University Press, 2003); Greg M. Smith, “Plotting a Show about Nothing: Patterns of Narration in Seinfeld,” Creative Screenwriting 2.1 (Fall 1995): 82–90. 58. For example, Judith Mayne’s “L.A. Law and Prime-Time Feminism” spends most of its time discussing only the series pilot (Discourse 10.2 [Spring–Summer 1988]: 30–48). 59. Robert Bianco said that Ally

eventually degenerated into “repetitive plotting, wavering characterizations, and ridiculous and often grotesque excess” (“Ally Exit Is More Proof of Kelley’s Excesses,” USA Today [20 May 2002]). 60. A phrase made popular by the website www.jumptheshark.com, which takes its name from the moment the website’s founders argue was the beginning of the decline of Happy Days (when Fonzie jumped his motorcycle across a pool with a shark inside). The website encourages fans to speculate and argue over the point at which series’ declines begins. 61. Nochimson (31–32) argues that by the second season the show has slipped away from its early promise. 62. Very early on, Kelley used dramatic form to articulate political arguments. In his senior undergraduate thesis at Princeton, he wrote a play about the Bill of Rights in which each character was an amendment (Carter, E6). 63. Susie O’Brien said that the “promotion of Ally as the girl that Feminists Love to Hate has been a key platform of the advertising of the series both [in Australia] and abroad” (“Watch Out! Women and the Media,” Social Alternatives 17.4 [October 1998]: 62). For spirited Ally-hating examples, see Lisa Friedman, “Don’t Call Me Ally,” Picturing Justice, http://www.usfca.edu/pj; Jacqueline Marino, “Ally McBeal,” Memphis Flyer (18 May 1998). 64. Interestingly, a quantitative study of Israeli undergraduates found that those who liked Ally most were not those who chose a “dominant reading” (viewing Ally’s character as positive, strong, and intelligent) but those who took a negotiated reading (emphasizing the dilemmas presented). See Jonathan Cohen, “Deconstructing Ally: Explaining Viewers’ Interpretations of Popular Television,” Media Psychology 4 (2002):

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253–277. Like me, many people who enjoy Ally seem to feel the need to voice the limits of their fandom. For example, see Yvonne Walus, “Bygones and Face Bras— Or Why We Love Ally McBeal,” Dawn 29 (31 March 1999): 11; Joe Queenan, “Average Joe,” TV Guide (28 March 1998). 65. For a fuller justification of a more

approachable academic style in examining popular culture, see Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, “The Culture that Sticks to Your Skin: A Manifesto for a New Cultural Studies,” in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 3–26.

Chapter 1 1. “Diegetic” means “from the story world.” Diegetic music, therefore, is music that seems to emanate from the world being depicted, and nondiegetic music seems to be added in the background by film- and television makers, not by characters. Of course, almost all music in film and television is added by personnel in postproduction, but the term “diegetic” refers to where the music source seems to be. If a character walks into a redneck bar, pushes buttons on a jukebox, and a country song begins to play, we assume that the music is diegetic, that it exists in the world of the story, that the characters in the bar can hear it. If two characters are in bed together, and we hear a full orchestral score, we assume that the music is nondiegetic, that it is added afterward, that the characters themselves cannot hear it. Film and television have played with this distinction for years. A favorite example comes from Blazing Saddles where the new sheriff, played by Cleavon Little, rides through the desert with his brand-new Gucci threads, big band jazz score blaring in the background. We obviously assume that the sprightly music is diegetic until we see Little riding up to the Count Basie orchestra, playing alone out in the desert, and Little “gives five” to the bandleader. Ally McBeal takes such simple, playful individual jokes and makes them into an overall strategy. 2. Andrew L. Yarrow, “Where to Glide

across Ballrooms to Big-Band Hits,” New York Times (9 September 1988): C23. See also Thomas K. Arnold, “The Big Band Sounds out of Past Are Finding New Generation of Fans,” Los Angeles Times (21 August 1982): SD A4; Mary Louise Oates, “Another Big Swing on the Dance Floor,” Los Angeles Times (27 August 1982): OC C1; Larry Fox, “The Swing Shift,” Washington Post (13 March 1987): A1; Elizabeth Ginsburg, “Ballroom Dancing Is Back in the Swing Again,” New York Times (6 December 1992): NJ1, 15; Florence Fabricant, “For a Thirsty City, It’s a Cocktail Summer,” New York Times (21 July 1999): F1, 6. 3. E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987). In chapter 3 Kaplan deals more explicitly with the aesthetics of music video, linking the genre’s strategies to avant-garde practices such as reflexivity. For a more extended discussion of the aesthetics of music videos, see Carol Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 4. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Noël Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 213–225.

214  Notes to Pages 21–23

5. Margaret Morse extended Emile Benveniste’s work to demonstrate how television could be considered discourse (“Sport on Television: Replay and Display,” in Regarding Television: Critical Approaches, an Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1983), 44–66. 6. “I Want Love,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 26 November 2001. 7. Claire also uses music unsuccessfully as a pickup line (“Do that to me one more time, I can never get enough of a man like you,” from the Captain and Tenille) in “Woman,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 18 February 2002. 8. “Tis the Season,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 27 November 2000. 9. “Fear of Flirting,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 19 November 2001. 10. “Lost and Found,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 3 December 2001. 11. Alan McKee points out that in the “alternative forms of argument in which the program specializes, words often become separated from meaning in performances of sound and rhythm” (“Views on Happiness in the Television Series Ally McBeal: The Philosophy of David E. Kelley,” Journal of Happiness Studies 5 [2004]: 402). 12. This tendency toward fast-paced dialogue characterizes a “dame,” in Maria DiBattista’s usage: “One of the things that makes a dame like nothing else, certainly nothing else you can name, is that nothing talks like a dame—talks fast and talks on and talks in a singularly American way” (Fast-Talking Dames [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003], 6). Such a woman in a screwball comedy poses a challenge to the man: “they must try to do what women apparently do so effortlessly—talk a lot” (15). DiBattista emphasizes that this verbal challenge is a form of serious play intended to help the woman search for possible mates, an Adam to her Eve:

For the game to conclude in happy as well as holy matrimony, the guileless Adam must be exposed to the questionable pleasures of play and imposture, to the delights in acting, however temporarily, a person other than oneself. . . . The business of woman is, then, first to create herself; second to bring the male of her choosing and delight into her sphere of life by making him a fit—which foremost means an articulate— companion for her. (19, 23) Martha P. Nochimson emphasizes the notion of onscreen chemistry in the classic screwball couple. She says that the couple’s “energy” exceeded the gender strictures of the filmmaking of the times, especially given what could be said openly in the Production Code era, so that a couple with chemistry pushes the gender boundaries established in the films. Therefore, chemistry both relies on gender formulas in narration and exceeds them (Screen Couple Chemistry: The Power of 2 [Austin: University of Texas, 2002]). Not surprisingly, the press likened Ally’s most high profile romantic pairing (with Larry Paul, played by Robert Downey Jr.) to classic screwball couples (Bill D’Elia is quoted as saying, “I was fortunate enough to direct the first scenes with those two . . . and it felt like I was back in the 40s making an old romantic comedy” [Dan Snierson, “The Ups and Downey of Ally McBeal,” Entertainment Weekly (3 November 2000): 30–36]). Much of the acclaim for their chemistry had to do with their verbal repartee: what we pay attention to are Mr. Downey’s wit and vocal style: the weird, accelerated vocal rhythms; the way he reconfigures punctuation, ramming together sentences and

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throwing in odd, unexpected breaks, as if he were trying to invent a whole new vocabulary for male-female communication. He’s telling us that something new is needed to get across the hurdle of the gender gap; that’s what you read in his face, which offers ironic commentary—sometimes comically befuddled, sometimes compassionate—on his own lines or on Ms. Flockhart’s. The deep gaze he offers whenever she speaks, broken up only by rabbity thrusts of his head as if he were working hard to follow her thoughts, is a turn-on. You can see where these two have to end up: what woman wouldn’t respond to a man who listens to her with such absolute concentration? (Steve Vineberg, “Delivering Something Real to Ally McBeal,” New York Times [18 March 2001]: 29) For more on movement as an expression of sexuality in the musical, see Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 155–177. 13. In “Hat’s off to Larry,” salsa dancer Sam Adams makes an argument about the relationship of dance to sex that could also apply to the use of language: “Music uses standardized notes; that doesn’t mean that it can’t be original. The art of dance, the art of song, the art of making love, it’s about weaving together new forms of expression from your heart, your soul” (Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 5 February 2001). 14. Ally McBeal does witty variations on this repeated ritual. When John gets out of the habit of channeling Barry White, he loses some of his sexual edge, and he decides that the way to regain it is to reevoke White regularly. To save time, he does so quickly, and we see and hear him singing into the mirror with his actions and voice both speeded up in “Home Again,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 14 May 2001.

15. Like it or not, we are malleable creatures susceptible to the basest selfdeceptions. B. F. Skinner was right; we can condition ourselves to perform using the most illogical means. (I have friends who play Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” in their heads when they prepare to run, and they assure me they run better because of this internal sound track.) Music can embolden us to exceed our own capacities. For a more academic take on the everyday uses of music, see Tia Denora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 16. Other therapeutic figures besides Tracey use music. For a case, Nelle, Elaine, and Ling attend a seminar on how to keep a man (run by a facilitator played by former Brady Bunch mom Florence Henderson). At the climax of the seminar, Henderson leads the group in song: “Make him your reason for living; Give him all the love you can give him.” (“Two’s a Crowd,” Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 6 November 2000). Ally’s fifth season therapist, Stephen Milter (who has a speech impediment), invites her to dance with him in the office as a way to soothe her pain (“Fear of Flirting”). 17. “Let’s Dance,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 26 April 1999; “Mr. Bo,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 22 January 2001; “The Oddball Parade,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 28 February 2000. 18. “The Green Monster,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 10 May 1999. 19. “Fool’s Night Out,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 28 September 1998. 20. “One Hundred Tears,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 21 January 2002. 21. “Forbidden Fruits,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 2 March 1998. 22. “Playing with Matches,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 7 January 2002. 23. “I Want Love,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 26 November 2001. 24. “Sex, Lies, and Politics,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 1 March 1999.

216  Notes to Pages 27–32

25. “Boy to the World,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 1 December 1997. 26. “Love Is All Around,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 15 April 2002. 27. “The Wedding,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 21 May 2001; “Nine One One,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 10 December 2001. Although the candlelight parade is meant to mourn the victims of an enormous fire in a small town in the episode’s story, it is clearly intended to be Ally McBeal’s tribute to terrorist victims. The tribute feels forced, indicating just how hermetically sealed the Ally McBeal universe is. This overt attempt to deal with a specific national tragedy seems to be an admirable but misguided violation of the norms of the series. Ally McBeal establishes its ability to comment on love and sex in the modern world but not its authority to deal with such dire concerns as terrorism. 28. “The Man with the Bag,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 11 December 2000. 29. Robert Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 170. 30. Altman, 350–359. 31. “Love’s Illusions,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 17 May 1999. 32. For an interesting treatment of the culture of karaoke, see Robert Drew, “‘Anyone Can Do It’: Forging a Participatory Culture in Karaoke Bars,” in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, ed. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 254–269. 33. “Woman.” 34. “Blue Christmas,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 20 December 1999; “Making Spirits Bright,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 14 December 1998. 35. “The Green Monster.” 36. Chris Jackson points out that the bar and the church in Ally McBeal are both “‘big tents’ of democracy, cathedrals

of expansive acceptance” (“The Music of Inner Justice in Ally McBeal,” Picturing Justice, http://www.usfca.edu/pj). 37. “Two’s a Crowd”; “Without a Net,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 13 November 2000. 38. “A Kick in the Head,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 4 February 2002. In an interesting piece of intertextuality, the singer sings “Love Is All Around,” the theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, to Ally, explicitly linking her with television’s seminal career woman (much to Ally’s chagrin). 39. “Woman.” 40. “The Man with the Bag.” 41. “Tis the Season.” 42. For more on the politics of authenticity and lip synching, see Philip Auslander, “Trying To Make It Real: Live Performance, Simulation, and the Discourse of Authenticity in Rock Culture,” in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 61–111. 43. Unlike singers in the more nonnarrative form of music video, who tend to make less of an attempt to match the energy of the recorded performance with the energy of onscreen lip synching. 44. For a discussion of the use of a black musical figure to bolster a white character’s masculinity in film, see Krin Gabbard, “Borrowing Black Masculinity: The Role of Johnny Hartman in The Bridges of Madison County,” in Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 295–316. 45. “Love’s Illusions.” 46. “Seeing Green,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 8 November 1999. 47. “Reach out and Touch,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 12 February 2001. 48. It is not coincidence that these values are situated in a black and a white man, respectively. When the principal

Notes to Pages 32–36  217

characters on Ally McBeal want to get more in touch with their passion, they reach for ethnic icons. Sexuality is dark; romanticism is light. When characters want to dig past their own surfaces and access their souls, they use “soul” music or rhythm and blues, music categories that encode race as a way to distinguish themselves from rock. John is the central figure here. In addition to his evocation of the two Barrys, John turns to the Scottish bagpipes when he is sad, so that the entire office can hear his blaring sorrow. In the last season John reaches a crisis in which he questions his fundamental choices in life, even leaving the law firm as an active partner; he moves to Mexico and later returns to Boston to become a singer in a Mexican restaurant mariachi band. John admits that the ethnicity he desired to adopt is an ethnicity of style, not the ethnicity embodied in actual people’s lives. “I did go to Mexico,” he says. “I lasted one day. The dysentery hit at hour twelve. Plus it wasn’t there, my Mexico, the one I went to find. No mariachis, no sequined clothing. The simplicity and charm I found here [in the commercial Americanized Mexican restaurant]” (“Love Is All Around”). John wants not the real Mexico but the version of ethnicity that exists in repackaged pop culture. Music offers John and Ally the chance to put on the Other and so to uncover the qualities within themselves that have become stereotypically associated with blackness or Hispanicness: flamboyance, expression of emotion, passion. (See also chapter 2, note 38.) As John Caldwell notes, “Race persists as television’s avant-garde” (Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995], 70). 49. The fantasy version of Gloria Gaynor appears in Ally’s shower and chases her down the street. This episode

features an outlandish musical fantasy number in which Gaynor bursts into song from the witness stand, the jury becomes a horn band, the judge sings into his gavel, and Ally is carted out of court on a gurney. (“I Will Survive,” Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 17 April 2000). 50. “Mr. Bo.” 51. “Girls’ Night Out,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 30 October 2000. 52. “Two’s a Crowd.” 53. “Without a Net.” 54. “Fools’ Night Out,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 28 September 1998. 55. For a discussion of the use of musical jokes in film, see Jeff Smith, “Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema,” in Wojcik and Knight, eds., Soundtrack Available, 407–430. 56. “Sex, Lies, and Politics.” 57. Ian Garwood similarly discusses how pop music in Sleepless in Seattle can provide commentary on the action and at other times function more like voiceover in revealing characters’ inner states (“Must You Remember This? Orchestrating the ‘Standard’ Pop Song in Sleepless in Seattle,” Screen 41.3 [Autumn 2000]: 282–298). 58. “Story of Love,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 28 October 1998. 59. “Pyramids on the Nile,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 15 February 1999. 60. “Love Unlimited,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 18 January 1999. 61. “Alone Again,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 11 May 1998. 62. Steve Neale notes how contemporary romantic comedies frequently use such pop and jazz standards to convey an old-fashioned sense of romance (“The Big Romance or Something Wild? Romantic Comedy Today,” Screen 33.3 [Autumn 1992]: 295–296). 63. “Once in a Lifetime,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 23 February 1998.

218  Notes to Pages 36–42

64. To date there have been four Allyrelated albums released: Songs from Ally McBeal (1998), Heart and Soul: New Songs from Ally McBeal (1999), Ally McBeal: A Very Ally Christmas (2000), Ally McBeal: For Once in My Life (2001). For a guide to the music in individual Ally episodes, see http://allymcbeal.tktv.net/music.html. 65. For a neurological explanation of how our brain continues to play familiar melodies on its own, see David J. M. Kraemer, C. Neil Macrae, Adam E. Green, and William M. Kelley, “Sound of Silence Activates Auditory Cortex,” Nature 434 (10 March 2005): 158. 66. Such tunes seem to attach themselves to certain periods of one’s life, constantly repeating themselves as if one is trying to work out their relevance to one’s life at that point, becoming the theme song, the sound track for that era. Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind” and the Captain and Tenille’s “Muskrat Love” can take me back instantly to specific moments and relationships in my life. These are not markers of a particular point in shared musical history (the summer we all danced to Rick James’s “Superfreak”) but instead are personal remembrances, moments at which the song seemed to choose me as much as I chose the song. 67. Here I use Michel de Certeau’s term (The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984]) for how people borrow from the established realm of popular imagery and reshape the imagery for their own purposes. The term has been extended to fan cultures by Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). 68. Michel Chion cites an example from Taxi Driver in which music crosses back and forth between diegetic and nondiegetic sources. According to Chion, “Music enjoys the status of being a little

freer of barriers of time and space than the other sound and visual elements” (AudioVision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman [New York: Columbia University Press, 1990], 81). 69. “Theme of Life,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 9 March 1998. 70. The producer Steve Robin explains why Kelley likes to use Shepard’s covers instead of the original recordings: “He doesn’t want to attach the viewers’ previous feelings about a song to his story. People sometimes associate a song with a certain time and place, and I think Vonda’s voice helps to keep the viewer in the story and in Ally’s world” (quoted in Tim Appelo, Ally McBeal: The Official Guide [New York: Harper, 1999], 67–68). 71. Jon Matsumoto calls Shepard “the series’s musical conscience” (“Success Is up Shepard’s Ally,” Los Angeles Times [9 July 1999]: F2). Ian Garwood notes that there is a distance inherent in using nondiegetic music as a narrative element (297). 72. “Fools’ Night Out.” 73. “Queen Bee,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 7 May 2001. 74. “Falling Up,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 26 February 2001. 75. “Lost and Found.” 76. “Let’s Dance.” 77. “The Oddball Parade.” 78. Krakowski garnered a Tony nomination in 1990 for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical for Grand Hotel. 79. “Tis the Season.” 80. “Tis the Season.” 81. At least it is the main problem in the diegesis that brings about the breakup. Obviously Robert Downey Jr.’s highly publicized problem with drug addiction and his arrest during the fourth season of Ally McBeal prompted the need for Larry’s character to be written out of the show. 82. For an overview of the origins of melodrama’s specific use of music and the spoken word, see Christine Gledhill, “The

Notes to Pages 42–48  219

Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), 5–39. Peter Brooks refers to melodrama as the “text of muteness” because characters are placed in positions in which (for whatever reasons) they may not speak their hearts. In such cases music and gesture often do the work of conveying emotion (The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess [New York: Columbia University Press, 1985]). 83. “The Wedding,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 21 May 2001. 84. “Bygones,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 20 May 2002. 85. “Tis the Season.” 86. “Playing with Matches.” Chris Jackson makes an interesting connection between Ally’s frantic dancing and Nora’s wild gesturing while imprisoned in Ibsen’s A Doll House. 87. “Love’s Illusions.” 88. “Ally McBeal: The Musical, Almost,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), May 22, 2000. 89. The Music Man is also David

Kelley’s favorite musical; Ally is peppered with references to it. 90. Altman, 62–80. 91. Gina Bellafante, “Feminism: It’s All About Me!” Time (29 June 1998): 54–62. Kristyn Gorton examines critically the media controversy arising from this cover story in “(Un)Fashionable Feminists: The Media and Ally McBeal,” in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, ed. Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 154–163. Amanda Dyanne Lotz presents a useful alternative framing and typology for such discourse in “Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and Identifying Postfeminist Attributes,” Feminist Media Studies 1.1 (2001): 105–121. 92. Amanda Dyanne Lotz points out that “Ally’s generation was raised with both Disney fairy tales and second-wave feminism without much mainstream emphasis on their incompatibility” (“Televising Feminist Discourses: Postfeminist Discourse in the PostNetwork Era” [Ph.D. diss., University of Texas–Austin, 2000]). 93. “Once in a Lifetime.”

Chapter 2 1. In a sense, everything in fictional cinema and television can be considered a “special effect,” because action is staged for and captured with the specialized technology of the camera. But a more helpful definition of special effects is hard to pin down. Is makeup or editing or set design or background music a “special effect”? In addition, a task that might be considered a “special effect” in one historical era might be considered normal practice in another. The notion of what a special effect is, therefore, changes as filmmaking practice changes. I define “special effects” as any visual device that

is not captured by the profilmic camera (the camera on the set) shooting objects from a naturalistic world using standard filmmaking practices of the day. Rear projection would be considered a special effect because it is a departure from the norms of dominant filmmaking. Most special effects are added to the image in postproduction, but not all are. Making a character look small by placing him or her on a set with supersized furniture would be a special effect, though there is no tinkering with the image in postproduction, because the effect relies on the special construction

220  Notes to Pages 48–50

of non-naturalistic objects. Original Louis XIV furniture, although hard to find, would not be “special” because it existed in a naturalistically occurring past world. The animatronic figure of E.T., although captured by a regular camera, would be a special effect because such figure manipulations are not part of the Hollywood norm. One could imagine a future in which blue-screen technology might become the dominant mode of filmmaking, at which time it would no longer be a special effect. My task is made simpler because I am dealing with digital visual effects that are added in postproduction. 2. Michael Stern argues that when films present spectacular images of technology, they do so by masking the effort required to construct the effect, making it appear magical and unrooted in any social context. Therefore, such special effects underwrite a faith in technology by naturalizing it (“Making Culture into Nature,” in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn [London: Verso, 1990], 66–72). See also Albert J. La Valley, “Traditions of Trickery: The Role of Special Effects in the Science Fiction Film,” in Shadows of the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Film, ed. George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 141–145; and Steve Neale, “‘You’ve Got to Be Fucking Kidding!’ Knowledge, Belief, and Judgement in Science Fiction,” in Kuhn, ed., 160–168. 3. Stephen Neale, Genre (London: BFI, 1980). 4. For more on metaphor and mainstream media, see Trevor Whitlock, Metaphor and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Noël Carroll, “A Note on Film Metaphor,” in Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 212–223. David Kelley explicitly

links the choice to use special effects to his rhetorical impetus: “All my series have really been about words—all those closing arguments on L.A. Law and The Practice—so a part of me just wanted to do something purely visual [the digital effects on Ally]” (Benjamin Svetkey, “Everything You Love or Hate about Ally McBeal,” Entertainment Weekly 416 [30 January 1998]: 24). 5. “Pilot,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 8 September 1997. 6. “Once in a Lifetime,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 23 February 1998. 7. “Once in a Lifetime.” 8. Other famous examples of metaphors or puns from film are Sergei Eisenstein’s visual comparison of Kerensky and a strutting chicken in October or The Band Wagon’s literal depiction of “laying an egg.” 9. The film melodrama offers the spectacle of raw emotion as a central pleasure. See Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Movies and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 165–189; Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). See also Christine Gledhill, “Speculations on the Relationship between Soap Opera and Melodrama,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14.1–2 (1992): 103–124; and Lynne Joyrich, “All that Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture,” in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, ed. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 227–251. 10. Note, however, that Scott Bukatman argues that special effects in science fiction have a trend toward the irrational: “If science fiction too often seems anchored (or mired) in rationalist

Notes to Pages 50–52  221

cant, then the ‘performative knowledge’ provided by inventive special effects moves the spectator beyond the rational, and to a space beyond the infinite” (“The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime,” in Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science-Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn [London: Verso, 1999], 249–276. Bukatman points to the depiction of an abstract hallucination when Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in the film version of The Right Stuff, a rare moment when special effects in a science fiction film shows the personal experience of the irrational. This hallucinatory moment uncovers the utopian space that special effects usually try to contain with their rationalist depictions. This suggests a way to consider Ally’s hallucinatory special effects as opening up a space outside of the boundaries of social roles and decorum. See Bukatman’s “The Ultimate Trip: Special Effects and Kaleidoscopic Perception,” Iris 25 (1998): 89–91. 11. Pamela Wilson, “Upscale Feminine Angst: Molly Dodd, the Lifetime Cable Network, and Gender Marketing,” Camera Obscura 33–34 (1994): 102–131. Kinney Littlefield calls Ally “the long-lost love child of Molly Dodd” (“Ally McBeal Walks Fine Line between Gutsy and Grating, Clever and Crass,” Orange County Register [14 November 1997]). When Herman’s Head (Fox TV, 1991–1994) wanted to depict one of the protagonist’s internal states, an atticlike space would interrupt the real-world actions, presenting exchanges between literal embodiments of Herman’s lust, fear, rationality, and compassion. 12. “The Affair,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 29 September 1997. 13. “In Dreams,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 11 January 1999. 14. “World without Love,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 2 November 1998. 15. “Happy Trails,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 9 November 1998.

16. “The Blame Game,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 19 January 1998. 17. “The Inmates,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 27 April 1998. This crossover was another Kelley innovation; a case that began on Ally McBeal (on the Fox network) was completed in the same night on ABC’s The Practice (an episode titled “Ax Murderer”), forcing viewers who wanted to follow the case to change channels. This angered some network affiliates. See Michael Stroud, “Fox Affils Balk at ‘Practice’ of Cross-Promotion,” Broadcasting and Cable (6 April 1998): 104. Kelley had worked on a crossover between CBS’s Picket Fences and Fox’s The X-Files, but the idea fell through (“Ally-Practice Stunt Has Fox Feeling Cross,” San Jose Mercury News [30 March 1998]). 18. “The Green Monster,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 10 May 1999. 19. “Drawing the Lines,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 10 November 1997. 20. “These Are the Days,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 18 May 1998. 21. “In Dreams.” 22. “Boy Next Door,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 27 March 2000. 23. “Being There,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 4 May 1998. 24. “Pilot.” 25. “The Blame Game.” 26. “Civil War,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 5 April 1999. 27. “Making Spirits Bright,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 14 December 1998. 28. “Love Unlimited,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 18 January 1999. 29. Murray Smith (Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], 153–173) usefully distinguishes between “melodramatic narration” and “detective narration,” two separate ways of aligning us with characters by giving us different levels of access to the characters. Melodramatic narration follows the “Expressive Truth Schema,”

222  Notes to Pages 53–55

which promises us unproblematic access to the characters’ emotions. Detective narration operates according to the “Repressive Truth Schema,” meaning that the truth is ferreted out through investigation. And so melodrama and the woman’s film not only differ in genre from detective/action cinema, but these genres have different approaches to structuring their narrative information. See also Ien Ang’s discussion of identification in soap opera in “Melodramatic Identifications: Television Fiction and Women’s Fantasy,” in Television and Women’s Culture: The Politics of the Popular, ed. Mary Ellen Brown (London: Sage, 1990), 75–88. 30. The effects coordinators for Ally had eight or nine days to prepare for an episode, as opposed to months for a feature film (Tim Appelo, Ally McBeal: The Official Guide [New York: Harper, 1999], 73). For more on jokes as structural interruptions of narrative flow, see Donald Crafton, “Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle, and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy,” in Classical Hollywood Comedy, ed. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1995), 106–119. 31. Michele L. Hammers links Ally’s shrinking to discourses of feminity, infantilization, and the body. See “Cautionary Tales of Liberation and Female Professionalism: The Case against Ally McBeal,” Western Journal of Communication 69.2 (April 2005): 172–173. 32. In an interview Mike Listo confirms that reusing effects is more efficient: “‘Once you make a tongue, you save it’” (Jennifer Weiner, “Making McBeal Surreal,” Philadelphia Inquirer [11 January 2001]). 33. “Just Friends,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 17 January 2000. 34. “Civil War.” Vivian Sobchack has argued such morphing special effects call into question crucial social categories:

“It [morphing] threatens to dissolve the dominant fixations of ‘American’ identity while also appealing to their very mythos and grounding in the American ideal of social mobility and the ‘be all that you can be’ mutability of the ‘self-made man’” (Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000], xii). For her discussion of the interrelationships among special effects, plastic surgery, and female aging, see Vivian Sobchack, “Scary Women: Cinema, Surgery, and Special Effects,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 36–52. 35. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), 27–52. 36. Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in Nichols, ed., 195–220. 37. Murray Smith separates the vague notion of “identification” with a character into more specific subprocesses. “Alignment” occurs when the narration gives us information from a character’s perspective (through point-of-view, reaction shots, flashbacks, etc.), which is not the same as “allegiance,” a moral evaluation of the character that encourages our emotional attachment (83–85). 38. One group of visual effects I have not discussed is relevant here: Ally McBeal sometimes presents humanoid figures. In one episode, an elderly man causes havoc in a nursing home when he organizes pygmy hunts, and we discover his mental instability when he actually sees the pygmies in the courtroom (“In Search of Pygmies,” Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 14 February 2000). Other digital humanoids in the Ally McBeal universe include “the Pips,” Ally’s personal version of Gladys Knight’s backup singers who appear behind her as wobbly figures in

Notes to Pages 55–57  223

order to bolster her romantic confidence. Notice that both of these sets of digital figures embody blackness. In the racial politics of Ally McBeal, blackness is often the thing deep within, the thing that cannot be expressed. It is not coincidental that blackness and animalism are the interior qualities that special effects express, for blackness is animalism in this universe: more sexual, more bestial, more violent. Sometimes the characters want to summon these very qualities from within, as in John’s invocation of Barry White to boost his sexual prowess, but it is not easy to have these dark qualities at your beck and call, even when they are desired forces that counteract overly civil whiteness. They emerge unbidden at moments of personal stress, as the dark, monstrous, repressed content is given physical form with digital technology. 39. “Cro-Magnon,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 5 January 1998. 40. “The Blame Game”; “Forbidden Fruits,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 2 March 1998; “Theme of Life,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 9 March 1998. The baby briefly reappears in season 2 as a Cupid shooting arrows into Ally’s heart (“Pyramids on the Nile,” Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 15 February 1999) but then only begins to make regular appearances again during the fourth season. 41. The dancing baby’s popularity spawned several websites, including http://madnessinc.com/dancingbaby and http://members.xoom.com/dancing_ baby. For more on the dancing baby’s genesis, see Matthew Mirapaul, “Oh, Baby! The Story of a Toddler Who Traveled the Web,” New York Times (24 July 1997). 42. Manuel Mendoza calls Ally’s use of fantasy “one of the most influential visual motifs on TV and in the movies” (“Ally, X-Files May Be Going, but They Leave Lasting Imprints on TV,” Dallas Morning News [17 May 2002]).

43. Caryn James cites Ally’s frequent fantasies as the central “gimmick” of the show. In her review of the new series, she said, “It’s too soon to tell whether Ally McBeal will become the thinking woman’s favorite show or the victim of its heroine’s fantasies” (“A Young Lawyer and Her Fantasies,” New York Times [8 September 1997]: C18). Jane Feuer has noted that art cinema techniques such as fantasy sequences are one of the hallmarks of quality television, as in thirtysomething (Seeing through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism [London: BFI Publishing, 1995]; “The Lack of Influence of thirtysomething,” in The Contemporary Television Series, ed. Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005], 27–36). 44. “It’s My Party,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 19 October 1998. 45. “Heart and Soul,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 4 March 2002. 46. In fact, it has been argued that fantasy as a general mechanism (as opposed to the more limited instances of visual fantasy sequences) is at the core of the pleasure of motion pictures. See Elizabeth Cowie, “Fantasia,” in The Woman in Question: m/f, ed. Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 149–196; and Janet Bergstrom, “Enunciation and Sexual Difference,” Camera Obscura 3–4 (1979): 32–69. For a discussion of the importance of fantasy to televisual identification, see Ien Ang, “Melodramatic Identifications: Television Fiction and Women’s Fantasy,” in Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World (London: Routledge, 1996), 85–97. Glen Creeber refers to several recent television shows from The Singing Detective to Six Feet Under that explore fantasy and subjective narrative devices as “social surrealism” (Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small

224  Notes to Pages 57–60

Screen [London: BFI Publishing, 2004], 14–15). For an interesting discussion of how young Slovenian women remake the fantasy materials provided by Ally McBeal, see Ksneija Vidmar-Horvat, “The Globalization of Gender: Ally McBeal in Post-Socialist Slovenia,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (May 2005): 239–255. 47. “Queen Bee,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 7 May 2001; “Love Is All Around,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 15 April 2002; “The Wedding,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 21 May 2001. One notable exception is when the “Neutral Corners” episode begins with the final round of a boxing match between Glenn and Raymond, who are both interested in Jenny romantically. After Raymond knocks Glenn out, we see Jenny wake up in her bed, following the usual conventions for a dream sequence. Then we see Ally waking up with a start, indicating that Ally was dreaming about Jenny dreaming about the boxing match, creating a double level dream (Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 12 November 2001). 48. Laura Kipnis says that fantasies allow us to pose “questions about the social compact and the price of repression, questions about what men are (and aren’t), what women are (and aren’t), questions about how sexuality and gender roles are performed, about class, aesthetics, utopia, rebellion, power, desire, and commodification” (Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America [New York: Grove Press, 1996], viii). 49. “Pursuit of Loneliness,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 21 February 2000. 50. “It’s My Party.” 51. “Heat Wave,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 15 November 1999. 52. “Falling Up,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 26 February 2001. 53. “Car Wash,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 25 October 1999. 54. “The Playing Field,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 16 March 1998.

55. “A Kick in the Head,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 4 February 2002. Maddie explains that Ally donated her eggs to a fertility clinic years ago. Those eggs were fertilized, producing Maddie. Through a clinical mixup, Maddie is able to trace the eggs back to their donor, and after her father dies, she seeks out her biological mother. 56. “The Blame Game.” 57. “Sex, Lies, and Politics,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 1 March 1999. 58. Rachel Moseley and Jacinda Read say, “The world of Ally McBeal is in a way presented as profoundly utopian through the refusal to distinguish between fantasy and reality. At the same time, however, both narrative struggle and utopian resolution have the same status, and the show thereby highlights its inability to offer satisfactory solutions to the problems it poses: this is as good as it gets” (“Having It Ally”: Popular Television (Post-)Feminism, “Feminist Media Studies 2.2 [2002]: 246). Patricia Leavy says that the blurring of real and imaginary in Ally also characterizes the blurring of private and public in the media discussion of the show itself (“Ally McBeal as a Site of Postmodern Bodily Boundaries and Struggles over Cultural Interpretation: The Hysteric as a Site of Feminist Resistance,” in Searching the Soul of Ally McBeal: Critical Essays, ed. Elwood Watson [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006], 19–35). 59. “Woman,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 18 February 2002. 60. “The Wedding.” 61. One might argue that shows such as The Garry Shandling Show or The Bernie Mac Show similarly filter all plot events through a single person’s viewpoint, but they do so primarily by having the star step outside of the diegetic world and address the camera directly. 62. Margo Jefferson positions Ally as a modern update of the screwball, “which means that the woman in question is

Notes to Pages 60–64  225

having an ongoing, intense romance with herself ” (“You Want to Slap Ally McBeal, But Do You Like Her?” New York Times [18 March 1998]: E2). 63. “I Know Him by Heart,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 24 May 1999; “Blue Christmas,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 20 December 1999. 64. “Happy Birthday, Baby,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 6 April 1998. 65. “The Blame Game.” 66. “All of Me,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 13 May 2002. 67. “Turning Thirty,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 1 May 2000. By making a spectacle out of herself, Ally becomes an example of what Kathleen Rowe refers to as the “unruly woman” (The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995]). 68. “Mr. Bo,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 22 January 2001. 69. Amanda Dyanne Lotz points out that “Unlike most ensemble dramas, the plot action primarily revolves around Ally rather than allowing other characters to drive their own plots” (“Televising Feminist Discourses: Postfeminist Discourse in the Post-Network Era” [Ph.D. diss., University of Texas–Austin, 2000], 112). Doogie Howser, M.D. makes an interesting comparison with Ally because it is a Kelley-related show (he cocreated the series with L.A. Law founder Steven Bochco) that more traditionally emphasizes its protagonist’s sensibility with no attempt to use an ensemble cast. John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado discuss the way a serial “can play on its own history in order to seal it off as an ever denser mythic reality, [to] enclose its longevity within its continuity—a tendency to in-group hermeticism and closure which gives obvious pleasure to fans” (Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983], 89). 70. As an alternative, consider

Designing Women, which eschews a single central female protagonist, providing instead a range of identificatory positions, as Bonnie Dow argues (Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996]). 71. Gerard Genette examines how narrative uses what he calls tense, voice, and mood to construct its particular discourse. See Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). 72. Maureen Turim emphasizes the importance of flashback to film melodrama: “in the psychological melodrama, the flashback is part of, or at least provides the promise of a cure or a resolution of problems” (Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History [New York: Routledge, 1989], 143). 73. “The Affair,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 29 September 1997. 74. “Love’s Illusions,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 17 May 1999. 75. “The Real World,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 14 September 1998. 76. “Prime Suspect,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 20 March 2000. 77. “Saving Santa,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 13 December 1999. 78. “Over the Rainbow,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 7 February 2000. 79. David Kelley discusses the relationship between Ally’s use of voiceover and fantasies in Appelo, 12. 80. “The Dirty Joke,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 17 November 1997. 81. “The Kiss,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 22 September 1997. 82. “Cro-Magnon.” 83. “The Dirty Joke.” 84. “Without a Net,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 13 November 2000. 85. “The Dirty Joke.” 86. “The Affair.” 87. “The Kiss.”

226  Notes to Pages 64–66

88. “Pilot.” 89. “Bygones,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 20 May 2002. 90. “Sex, Lies, and Second Thoughts,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 23 October 2000. 91. “One Hundred Tears Away,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 20 October 1997. This comment brings to mind Flaubert’s description of Madame Bovary: “She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.” 92. “Pilot.” 93. David Kelley says, “The genesis of Ally was someone not afraid to be weak” (quoted in Bill Carter, “The Unintended Career of TV’s Prolific Writer,” New York Times [2 March 1998]: E6). 94. Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, said, “My feeling about Ally McBeal was she was weak, she was petty, she was simpering, she was a reaction against strength” (“Maids, Babies, and Mothers,” TV Revolution [Bravo Network], 25 May 2004). Popular at the same moment, Ally and Buffy were frequently positioned in critical literature as opposing depictions of femininity. As Adam Rogers stated, “Buffy has also become television’s outstanding emblem of anti-Ally feminism—confident, powerful, and focused” (“Hey, Ally, Ever Slain a Vampire?” Newsweek 131.9 [2 March 1998]: 60). Such comparisons often ignore how frequently Buffy whined about her unfair lot in life in later seasons of the show. Both Ally and Buffy are prone to bemoaning their fate in private, but when they step into their “professional” arenas, they are both capable. For similar criticisms of Ally, see Jennifer L. Pozner, “And the Category Is . . . ‘Simpering Wimps for $1,000,’” Sojourner 24.1 (September 1998). 95. Kelley asserts that he always intends Ally to be capable in the courtroom. See Carla Hall, “This Woman Is: 1. A 90s Heroine; 2. A Retro Ditz;

Choose One (If You Can),” Los Angeles Times [8 March 1998]: C3. 96. I also have to point out Calista Flockhart’s consistently aggressive performance. Flockhart goes toe to toe with some of the most acclaimed actors in television and film (Dylan McDermott, Robert Downey Jr.), and in every instance she does so without backing down. Whether doing slapstick or abject mourning, Flockhart makes bold performance choices. 97. Several journalists report that for Ally fans, part of the series’s appeal is that it voices these doubts and insecurities, unlike many other shows on television. See Veronica Chambers, “How Would Ally Do It?” Newsweek 131.9 (2 March 1998): 58–61; “Feminist Role Model or Ditsy Broad?” Ottawa Citizen (29 June 1998): E5. 98. Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 61–95. Robert J. Thompson points out, “As the Golden Age of television was rooted in the legitimate stage, quality dramas were rooted in the soap opera” (Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER [Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996], 35). 99. Anita Gates argues that David Kelley’s shows are united by a focus on embarrassment, emotional neediness, and extreme vulnerability (“David E. Kelley, from Arnie to Ally, Capturing the Insecure Human Condition,” New York Times [20 December 1998]: AR39, 46). 100. There are numerous comparisons in the popular press between Ally and her predecessors on television, especially Mary Richards (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and Murphy Brown. Gina Bellafante, for example, positioned Ally as “the essence of flightiness” and Mary Richards as “the essence of level-headedness” (“Feminism: It’s All about Me!” Time [29 June 1998]: 56). See also Rick Marin and Veronica Chambers, “High Heels, Low Esteem,”

Notes to Pages 67–73  227

Newsweek 130.15 (13 October 1997): 71; Ruth Shalit, “Canny and Lacy,” New Republic 218.14 (6 April 1998): 27–33; Elayne Rapping, “You’ve Come Which Way, Baby?” Women’s Review of Books 17.10–11 (July 2000): 20–22. Ally has even been likened to the “logo girl” in Coppertone advertising and to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (Bailey Doogan, “Ally McBeal Meets the Coppertone Girl,” Utne Reader (September–October 2001): 42–43; Kathleen E. Baum, “Courting Desire: The (Al)Lure of David E. Kelley’s Ally McBeal,” in her “Textual Desire: Soliciting the Gaze in ‘Popular’ Culture” (M.A. thesis, California State University–Long Beach, 2000), 101–103. 101. Jon Katz is in similar territory when he asserts, “We see too much of McBeal’s human side. . . . McBeal can be as weird as she wants at home or with her pals. All of that can be laughed at, forgiven, or overlooked, providing she pulls herself together when she goes into court and earns our respect as the lawyer she’s trained and paid to be” (“Deconstructing Ally,” http://hotwired. lycos.com/synapse/katz/90/11/katzla_ text.html, accessed 17 March 1999). For an instructive comparison, see John Ellis’s comments on Absolutely

Fabulous, which “allows us to experience, within a situation comedy format, what women feel like in a public role; women aggressively uncertain about the nature of their identities” (Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty [London: J. B. Tauris, 2000], 88). 102. In another comparison across gender, Littlefield likens Ally to the character of Jerry on Seinfeld in that both tend to be driven by their whims (“Calista Flockhart Is a Bravura Basket-Case on High-Buzz Ally McBeal”). 103. Ann Swidler argues that when people come to a problem that they cannot handle in their dominant scheme, they frequently jump from one cultural “frame” to another (from mythic love to pragmatic love, for instance) (Talk of Love: How Culture Matters [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 31–34). Instead of compromising between mature realism and mythic romance, “people seem instead to alternate between different frames for grasping reality, suddenly slipping into a mythic vocabulary at variance with the ways they normally think” (117). Ally’s argument (about love and other issues) proceeds in this way, shifting from one set of cultural assumptions to another, asking us to provide the synthesis of the contradictory positions.

Chapter 3 1. Todd Gitlin spells out a series of circumstances that he believes must occur in order to create “quality” television: If a producer gets on the inside track; if he or she has strong ideas and fights for them intelligently; if they appear somewhat compatible with the networks’ conventional wisdom about what a show ought to be at a particular moment; if the producer

is willing to give ground here and there; if he or she is protected by a powerhouse production company that the network is loath to kick around; if the network has the right niche for the show; if the product catches the eye of the right executive at the right time, and doesn’t get lost in the shuffle when the guardian executive changes jobs. (Inside Prime Time [New York: Pantheon, 1983], 273)

228  Notes to Pages 73–78

2. For an examination of the dynamic of memory in soap opera, see Mimi White, “Women, Memory and Serial Melodrama,” Screen 35.4 (Winter 1994): 336–353. 3. Kristin Thompson has emphasized the continuities between television and classic Hollywood narrational practices. See Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 4. Amanda Dyanne Lotz notes that Ally similarly depends less on new plot occurrences and much more on character reactions to knowledge of those events (“Televising Feminist Discourses: Postfeminist Discourse in the PostNetwork Era” [Ph.D. diss., University of Texas–Austin, 2000], 113). 5. Thomas Schatz, “St. Elsewhere and the Evolution of the Ensemble Series,” in Television: The Critical View, 4th ed., ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press), 85–100. 6. James Collins suggests that the viewer of “precious and manipulative” shows such as Ally, My So-Called Life, and thirtysomething may go through serial stages, as follows: “disgust, annoyance, grudging tolerance, enjoyment accompanied by self-loathing, actual enjoyment” (“Woman of the Year,” Time 150.20 [10 November 1997]: 117). 7. Glen Creeber suggests that the serial structures of television are especially well equipped for depicting psychoanalysis’s lengthy process of blockage and breakthrough. See Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (London: BFI Publishing, 2004), 6. 8. David Kelley says, “Writing a show like Ally McBeal . . . is rather like producing a novel in weekly installments” (Bill Carter, “The Unintended Career of TV’s Prolific Writer,” New York Times [2 March 1998]: E6). 9. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), esp. chap. 2; Charles F.

Altman, “The Medieval Marquee: Church Portal Sculpture as Publicity,” Journal of Popular Culture 14.1 (1980): 37–46; Charles Altman, “Medieval Narrative vs. Modern Assumptions: Revising Inadequate Typology,” Diacritics 4.2 (Summer 1974): 12–19; Charles F. Altman, “Two Types of Opposition and the Structure of Latin Saints’ Lives,” Medievalia et Humanistica 6 (1975): 1–11. 10. Rick Altman, “Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88.2 (Spring 1989): 321–359; Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 11. Theme and binary opposition may seem like fairly static tools to apply to the serial form, but if a serial exists for a long time, it probably doubles back again and again, making a thematic approach more applicable. Some serials emphasize this steady supply of narrative events more than others, but most have a strong thematic core. For an interesting approach to parsing television serial narrative using semiotic oppositions, see John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), chap. 2. 12. Judith Mayne asserts that such “juxtapositions and combinations” are crucial to providing both an “overarching narrative perspective” and a “quality of open-endedness” on L.A. Law, on which Kelley worked previously. Counter to Mayne’s argument about L.A. Law, Ally uses these juxtapositions to make its protagonist more central. See “L.A. Law and Prime-Time Feminism,” Discourse 10.2 (Spring–Summer 1988): 37. 13. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). 14. When the makers of Seinfeld

Notes to Pages 78–79  229

decided that there would be “no learning” on their sitcom, they rebelled against the seeming falseness of characters growing in one episode and remaining unchanged in later episodes. Although Seinfeld is a series and not a serial, it recognized the tension posed by the narrative arc of individual episodes and the lack of overall progression in the traditional series, and it resolved that tension by refusing to advance the characters’ moral understandings in single episodes. This is not an option for the serial. 15. The Simpsons makes fun of this forgetfulness when ancient Montgomery Burns has to be told who employee Homer Simpson is whenever Mr. Burns encounters Homer, in spite of the fact that Homer and his family have caused numerous crises on previous episodes. 16. In their book on Doctor Who, Tulloch and Alvarado coin terms for the different possible configurations of serial and series elements over time. They call a traditional soap opera (with the possibility of an infinite run) a “continuous serial,” as opposed to a serial that extends for a specific number of episodes, which they call an “episodic serial.” In a “sequential series,” individual episodes present a complete narrative but pose an enigma at the episode’s end (such as Dallas). Television typically presents “episodic series,” in which all narrative plotlines are resolved in each episode, with the series continuity provided by characters and settings. In this terminology Ally McBeal comes closest to being a continuous serial, although it tends to conclude its legal cases in a single episode. The assumptions of Tulloch and Alvarado’s book fit better in the context of British television than they do in that of American television. Most primetime television serials contract to deliver a certain number of episodes in a given season, and while they may continue indefinitely as long as the series remains financially successful, there is no guarantee

of their continuation, so American primetime serials tend to present a series of season-long episodic serials. 17. The daytime soap functions on a principle of reaction more than action. Nonsoap fans may complain that “nothing ever happens on soap operas,” but in fact horrible things do happen to soap characters. The difference is that daytime soaps maximize the impact of a single event by splintering it into many different character reactions. A soap community is a tightly knit group of characters who have complicated involvement in each other’s lives. When an event occurs, the soap extends the drama of that event by playing a game of concealment and revelation within this network. The narrative question that sustains a soap tends not to be, What happened? but, How will the characters each react when they find out what happened? On a soap opera a single narrative event is a stone thrown in the pool, and the daytime soap progresses by watching the ripples from that single occurrence move through the network of characters. 18. For more details on the narrative construction of the daytime soap opera, see Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 61–95. Laura Stempel Mumford discusses the various kinds of closure possible in a daytime soap opera in “How Things End: The Problem of Closure on Daytime Soap Operas,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 15.2 (1994): 57–74. See also Jane Feuer, “Discovering the Art of Television’s Endings,” Flow 2.7 (24 June 2005), http:// jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/ ?issue=2005/06/24. For an interesting linkage between soap opera and daytime law shows such as The People’s Court, see Patrice Petro, “Criminality or Hysteria: Television and the Law,” Discourse 10.2 (Spring–Summer 1988): 48–61. 19. The progress of a single character

230  Notes to Pages 79–80

can be tracked best vis-à-vis the stationary positions held by other characters, as the classical Hollywood film narrative demonstrates over and over again. The lone film protagonist grows from her experiences (or the romantic couple soften their rough edges, compromising and meeting somewhere in between their initial opposing stances), but filmmakers do not have to incorporate those final-act transformations into the ongoing story of the character’s life. See David Bordwell, “Classical Narration,” in Narration and the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 156–166. Feuer notes that in television’s serial structure of multiple plotlines, “characters shift in relation to other characters” (“Narrative Form in American Network Television,” in High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film, ed. Colin McCabe [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986], 113). 20. Although television shows are often described as being either “serial” or “series,” much recent television intermingles narrative structures that complete in one episode and those that extend across multiple episodes, thus blurring the once-distinct line between the two. Creeber (11–12) presents a definition of “serial” and “series” that attempts to incorporate these developments in the form, but it is perhaps more useful to conceive of television shows as having serial and series elements. 21. For a season-by-season discussion of the evolution of M*A*S*H’s characters, see James H. Wittebols, Watching M*A*S*H, Watching America: A Social History of the 1972–1983 Television Series (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998). 22. Jane Krakowski says (of her character Elaine), “I love the part. . . . I come in and have the last line of a scene, where I either drop a bomb or throw a flame. That’s a great character to play”

(quoted in Jefferson Graham, “Elaine Role Is Right up Her Ally,” USA Today [19 October 1998]: D3). 23. Jeffrey Sconce (“Dickens, Selznick, and Southpark,” in Dickens on Screen, ed. John Glavin [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 171–187) has compared the serial nature of contemporary television with Dickens’s work: Dickens’s (and the nineteenth-century novel’s) emphasis on serial narrative and episodic emplotment . . . has proven a more lasting influence on . . . television. . . . Hollywood sacrificed the narrative pleasures of serialised delay, diegetic expansion and heteroglossic play. . . . Long-running television series . . . face the problem of filling time (or even killing time)—often hours, days, and even months of diegetic time and space. . . . All popular series in any medium . . . must balance repetition of successful (i.e., commercial) story elements with a search for forms of difference that will provide novel variation and interest. . . . [T]elevision’s episodic seriality and textual density allows for a narrative elasticity unavailable to Hollywood cinema. (183–184) 24. David A. Black notes that serial television tends to avoid irreversible, singular events and that when such events occur, they are usually caused by external circumstances, either biological or contractual (“Charactor; or, The Strange Case of Uma Peel,” in Cult Television, ed. Sara Gwenllian-Jones and Roberta E. Pearson [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004], 103). 25. As another example, Hill Street Blues tended to segregate its dramatic and comic plotlines into serial and episodeonly narratives, respectively. As Marc Dolan notes, comic plotlines on Hill Street

Notes to Pages 80–83  231

Blues tended to be resolved in a single episode, providing an obvious payoff to viewers while encouraging them to tune in the next week to see the continuation of the more dramatic plotlines (“The Peaks and Valleys of Serial Creativity: What Happened to/on Twin Peaks,” in Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, ed. David Lavery [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995], 35–36). 26. Mumford points out that daytime soap operas keep returning to and reworking the same elements over and over (60). 27. Serial television inherited this ability to move supporting characters in and out of the spotlight and to focus attention on the idiosyncratic qualities they embody, as Charles McGrath argues: “The other trick NYPD Blue may have learned from the serial novel, and from Dickens in particular, is that lesser characters can sometimes claim center stage without necessarily taking on new attributes. They can do so, in fact, by simply becoming truer to their limited natures. . . . NYPD Blue has erased some of the traditional boundaries between subplot and main plot—the show is all one big plot that takes weeks and weeks to resolve—but it has also learned how to play characters who change against those who cannot. It has learned, in fact, a great Dickensian lesson: it is in the nature of adversity to turn most of us into caricatures” (“The Triumph of the PrimeTime Novel,” New York Times Magazine [22 October 1995]: 76). 28. As Sasha Torres notes, liberal television typically gives at least lip service to both sides of an issue (“War and Remembrance: Televisual Narrative, National Memory, and China Beach,” Camera Obscura 33–34 [1994]: 147–166). I argue that Ally’s serial narrative over time asks the audience to weigh a wide range of opposing views.

29. Jane Krakowski says, “Part of what makes Ally McBeal Ally McBeal is that all the characters say shocking things as a matter of everyday occurrence” (“Can Ally McBeal Punt?” San Francisco Examiner [29 September 1998]: B1). Anita Gates says that on David Kelley’s shows, “if a speech or conversation is really important, [the characters] say the wrong thing” (“David E. Kelley, from Arnie to Ally, Capturing the Insecure Human Condition,” New York Times [20 December 1998]: AR39, 46). 30. “The Promise,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 27 October 1997. 31. “Seeing Green,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 8 November 1999. 32. “Neutral Corners,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 12 November 2001. Simon Heffer calls Richard “a veritable antichrist of political correctness” (“Absurd, Tiresome and Far Too Thin,” Daily Mail (London) [19 April 2002]: 13). Brenda Cooper emphasizes the importance of exaggerated masculine attitudes to Ally’s comedy (“Unapologetic Women, ‘Comic Men,’ and Feminine Spectatorship in David E. Kelley’s Ally McBeal,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18.4 [2001]: 416–435). 33. “Body Language,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 2 February 1998. 34. “In Dreams,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 11 January 1999. 35. “The Oddball Parade,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 28 February 2000. 36. Michael Precker suggests that the “bygones” strategy may be one of Ally’s most useful concepts, along with the notion of personal theme songs (“Odds Are Good That Much about Ally McBeal Will Be Forgotten,” Dallas Morning News [17 May 2002]). 37. “Reasons to Believe,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 8 January 2001. 38. “Changes,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 29 November 1999. 39. “The Attitude,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 3 November 1997. Richard’s Fishisms

232  Notes to Pages 83–87

are cataloged at http://homepages. paradise.net.nz/milhous/fishisms.htm. 40. “Two’s a Crowd,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 6 November 2000. 41. “Friends and Lovers,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 29 October 2001. 42. “Troubled Water,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 22 November 1999. 43. “Being There,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 4 May 1998. 44. Richard’s rants are so insincere that sometimes he pretapes them and simply mouths the words as the audiotape plays. See “Theme of Life,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 9 March 1998; and “Lost and Found,” Ally McBeal, 3 December 2001. 45. “The Inmates,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 27 April 1998. 46. “The Pursuit of Unhappiness,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 26 March 2001. 47. “Theme of Life.” 48. “Turning Thirty,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 1 May 2000. 49. “Love on Holiday,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 4 December 2000. 50. “Hat’s Off to Larry,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 5 February 2001. 51. “Hat’s Off to Larry.” 52. “Lost and Found.” One such bit of shorthand communication (“Problem, need you, now, major client, daughter, mystery”) prompts Ally to say, “Can we talk in whole sentences? It just helps me to follow” (“Car Wash,” Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 25 October 1999). 53. “Home Again,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 14 May 2001. In several other episodes the series moves Richard’s voice outside the courtroom, leaving him to rely on technology to fill in his communicative inadequacies. Another Cyrano-derived episode shows that Richard is not any better at communicating his feelings to a woman than he is at making legal arguments. To make suave romantic maneuvers toward Liza in the bar, he relies on Claire feeding him material

via another microphone-earpiece connection (“Another One Bites the Dust,” Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 29 April 2002). As noted in chapter 1, when Richard and Ling do a musical number in the bar, they lipsynch to try (unsuccessfully) to impress their audience (“The Man with the Bag,” Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 11 December 2000). Richard uses technology to sabotage other people’s attempts to communicate with him. He installs an alarm that goes off when Ling asks, “Can we talk?” and an air raid siren that is triggered by Ling mentioning the word “marriage” (“Heat Wave,” Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 15 November 1999). Communication is an awkward means that Richard would rather skip whenever possible on his way to an overtly selfish goal. 54. “Drawing the Lines,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 10 November 1997; “Two’s a Crowd.” 55. “Over the Rainbow,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 7 February 2000. 56. John Cassidy, Dot-Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold (New York: Harper Collins, 2002). 57. “Pursuit of Loneliness,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 21 February 2000. 58. “The Last Virgin,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 20 November 2000. 59. John Denvir notes that Ally “seems resigned to the fact that she has entered a profession dedicated to greed” (“Girl Lawyers and Boy Lawyers,” Picturing Justice [October 1997], http://www.usfca. edu/pj). According to Denvir, Kelley is suggesting that Fish’s success as a lawyer is not in spite of “his limitations, moral and imaginative, but because of them” (“Legal Tender: Reconsidering Ally McBeal, Picturing Justice, http://www. usfca.edu/pj). 60. “One Hundred Tears,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 21 January 2002. 61. “Hope and Glory,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 15 May 2000.

Notes to Pages 87–94  233

62. “Queen Bee,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 7 May 2001. 63. “What I’ll Never Do for Love,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 6 May 2002. 64. “It’s My Party,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 19 October 1998; “I Want Love,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 26 November 2001; “Those Lips, That Hand,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 19 April 1999. 65. “What I’ll Never Do for Love.” 66. “Silver Bells,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 15 December 1997. 67. “I Will Survive,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 17 April 2000. 68. “Over the Rainbow.” 69. “What I’ll Never Do for Love.” In another episode, we discover that Richard’s father could not tell his son that he loved him but could only communicate his feelings through baseball code (“Boys Town,” Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 19 February 2001). 70. “Silver Bells.” 71. The series also hints that despite Ally’s best intentions to be a good parent, perhaps the same dynamic is being repeated in the next generation. After a fight with Ally, Maddie goes up to her room and begins blaring music, using the same method of escape that her mother did (“Homecoming,” Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 25 February 2002). 72. “A Kick in the Head,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 4 February 2002. 73. Rachel Moseley and Jacinda Read point out that both Richard and John increasingly share Ally’s worldview as the series progresses (“Having It Ally”: Popular Television [Post-]Feminism,” Feminist Media Studies 2.2 [2002]: 244). 74. Kelley has been quoted as saying, “I cringe when people ask me how I write women characters. The truth is, I just write them the same way I write men. I don’t distinguish” (Benjamin Svetkey, “Everything You Love or Hate about Ally McBeal,” Entertainment Weekly [30 January

1998]: 24). This statement clearly cannot be taken at face value, since Ally is deeply concerned with gender relations. However, it can be read as supporting Kelley’s strategy of assigning similar personal characteristics to male and female characters. (On a related note, Svetkey calls Ally “a guy show dressed up in chickshow clothing,” arguing that it filters traditionally male preoccupations through a female protagonist’s perspective [22]). 75. Lotz also points out that the women on Ally frequently react differently to the same issue, portraying a diverse range of opinions along gender lines: “By featuring so many women in primary roles, the series can regularly depict women as a group composed of various outlooks unavailable in series with just one or two female characters whose primary narrative function is as contrast to the perspective of male characters” (117–118). 76. “Angels and Blimps,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 8 February 1999. 77. “Judge Ling,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 5 November 2001. 78. “Angels and Blimps.” 79. “The Ex-Files,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 15 January 2001. 80. “Angels and Blimps.” 81. “Sex, Lies, and Politics,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 1 March 1999. In this instance, John and Ling are conspiring to use Ling’s in-court behavior to their legal advantage, but the example relies on Ling’s wellestablished reputation for having a short attention span. 82. “Just Looking,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 16 November 1998; “In Dreams.” 83. “Boy Next Door,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 27 March 2000. 84. “Fools’ Night Out,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 28 September 1998. 85. “Just Looking.” 86. “They Eat Horses, Don’t They,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 21 September 1998; “You Can Never Tell,” Ally McBeal (Fox

234  Notes to Pages 94–101

TV), 23 November 1998; “Just Looking”; “The Green Monster,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 10 May 1999; “Out in the Cold,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 10 January 2000; “Car Wash”; “Mr. Bo,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 22 January 2001. 87. “Love on Holiday”; “Let’s Dance,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 26 April 1999. 88. “Let’s Dance.” 89. “Lost and Found.” 90. “You Can Never Tell.” 91. “In Dreams.” 92. “Those Lips, That Hand.” 93. “Love’s Illusions,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 17 May 1999. 94. “Love Unlimited,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 18 January 1999. 95. “Just Looking.” 96. Renee Tajima, “Lotus Blossoms Don’t Bleed: Images of Asian Women,” in Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women, ed. Asian Women United of California (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 308–318; Jessica Hagedorn, “Asian Women in Film: No Joy, No Luck,” Ms. 4.4 (January–February 1994): 74–79. Darrell Hamamoto called Ling “a neoOrientalist masturbatory fantasy figure” (quoted in Chisun Lee, “The Ling Thing,” Village Voice [7 December 1999]: 65). For an overview of Asian stereotyping in mainstream film, see Jun Xing, “Cinematic Asian Representation,” in Asian America through the Lens: History, Representations, and Identity (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1998), 53–86; Gina Marchetti, Romance and the Yellow Peril: Race, Sex, and Discursive Hollywood Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 97. “Sex, Lies, and Politics.” 98. “In Dreams.”

99. “Fools’ Night Out”; “Angels and Blimps.” 100. “The Obstacle Course,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 16 April 2001. 101. “Lost and Found.” 102. “Those Lips, That Hand.” 103. “In Search of Pygmies,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 14 February 2000; “Reach out and Touch,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 12 February 2001. 104. “The Ex-Files.” 105. “Lost and Found.” 106. “The Real World,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 14 September 1998. 107. “Love on Holiday.” 108. “You Can Never Tell.” 109. “Happy Trails,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 9 November 1998; “Making Spirits Bright,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 14 December 1998. 110. “Love Unlimited.” 111. “Troubled Water.” 112. “I Know Him by Heart,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 24 May 1999. 113. “Tom Dooley,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 22 April 2002. And yet the series undercuts Nelle’s viciousness by making her the follower in her conspirings with Wilson. Although she is senior to him, she bends to accommodate his strategies. Nelle cannot even be wholeheartedly underhanded, although that is obviously her proclivity. 114. “Another One Bites the Dust.” 115. “Ally McBeal: The Musical, Almost,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 22 May 2000. According to Tim Appelo, Nelle “was originally conceived of as a kind of young, 90s version of the [fiercely careerist] Rosalind Shays character David E. Kelley invented on L.A. Law” (Ally McBeal: The Official Guide [New York: Harper, 1999], 53). 116. DeRossi says, “I really don’t see Nelle as a bitch. . . . She’s just very ambitious and direct with people” (Michael A. Lipton and Ken Baker,

Notes to Pages 101–109  235

“Law and Ardor,” People 50.20 [30 November 1998]: 81–82). 117. “Heat Wave.” 118. “In Dreams.” 119. “In Dreams.” 120. “Hope and Glory,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 15 May 2000. 121. “Judge Ling.” 122. “Falling Up,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 26 February 2001. 123. “Let’s Dance.” 124. Bonnie J. Dow notes the subtle reframing of feminism’s goals in Ally from politics to personal fulfillment: “Feminism never promised women happiness—only justice” (“Ally McBeal, Lifestyle Feminism, and the Politics of Personal Happiness,” Communication Review 5 [2002]: 263). 125. “Let’s Dance.” 126. “Ally McBeal: The Musical, Almost”; “The Man with the Bag.” 127. “The Man with the Bag.” 128. “I Know Him by Heart.” 129. “Buried Pleasures,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 1 November 1999. 130. “I Know Him by Heart.” 131. “Pursuit of Loneliness.” For a discussion of the way class assumptions underlie romantic choices, see Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), chap. 7. 132. “I Know Him by Heart.” 133. “Story of Love,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 28 October 1998. 134. “What I’ll Never Do for Love.” 135. In the series finale, Ally says, “Nelle, you are the biggest fraud I’ve ever met. You have a huge heart, and you don’t fool anybody” (“Bygones,” Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 20 May 2002). 136. “Love on Holiday.” 137. “Hats Off to Larry.” 138. “Reasons to Believe.” For more on queer readings of Ally, see Susan E. McKenna, “The Queer Insistence of Ally

McBeal: Lesbian Chic, Postfeminism, and Lesbian Reception,” Communication Review 5 (2002): 285–314. 139. “Let’s Dance.” 140. “You Never Can Tell,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 23 November 1998. 141. “Only the Lonely,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 3 May 1999; “The Playing Field,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 16 March 1998; “Just Friends,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 17 January 2000; “Love on Holiday.” 142. “The Inmates”; “It’s My Party.” 143. “Just Looking.” 144. “Being There.” 145. “The Oddball Parade.” 146. For instance, Ally sets Elaine up with Ling as a partner for a swing dance contest (“Let’s Dance”). 147. “Mr. Bo.” 148. “Turning Thirty”; “Falling Up.” 149. “Those Lips, That Hand”; “Tis the Season,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 27 November 2000. 150. “Drawing the Lines.” 151. “Mr. Bo.” 152. “Forbidden Fruits,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 2 March 1998. Martha P. Nochimson links Elaine’s tendency to cross physical boundaries by eavesdropping with her tendency to violate sexual mores (“Ally McBeal: Brightness Falls from the Air,” Film Quarterly 53.3 [Spring 2000]: 29). 153. “Over the Rainbow.” 154. “The Blame Game,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 19 January 1998; “Civil War,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 5 April 1999. 155. Dyan Cannon, who plays Judge Whipper Cone, says, “There’s no place safe at that office. There’s no privacy anywhere. You can get in a lot of trouble in that bathroom” (quoted in Svetkey, 23). The unisex bathroom was one of the most frequently remarked features of the show in its first season. Kathy Mitchell situates the unisex bathroom in television history, noting that TV shows have tended to

236  Notes to Pages 110–117

avoid depicting the inside of a bathroom (although characters occasionally are shown washing their hands). The sound of Archie Bunker’s unseen “terlet” was enough to provoke laughter in the 1970s (Ally McBeal: The Totally Unauthorized Guide [New York: Warner Books, 1998], 18). The unisex bathroom is another way Ally blurs the private and public spheres. 156. “These Are the Days,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 18 May 1998. 157. “Theme of Life.” 158. “Buried Pleasures.” 159. “Forbidden Fruits.” 160. “Those Lips, That Hand.” 161. Viewed in this way, Elaine’s character voices a more mainstream version of the pro-sex feminism of sex workers such as Annie Sprinkle, who see their choice of career as having active agency and power. Alternatively, Tad Friend has discussed the “do-me feminism” of such sexualized images in “Yes,” Esquire 121.2 (February 1994): 48–57. 162. “Only the Lonely.” 163. “Happy Birthday, Baby,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 6 April 1998. 164. “Blue Christmas,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 20 December 1999. 165. “Just Friends.” 166. “Just Friends.” 167. “Car Wash”; “What I’ll Never Do for Love.” 168. “Blue Christmas.” 169. “Tis the Season.” 170. “Tis the Season.” 171. “Just Friends.” 172. Tom Carson refers to Renee as “Ally’s earthy, unpaid shrink” and voices a tongue-in-cheek wish that “all the black porch psychiatrists would start giving white people really good advice, like to throw themselves under runaway trucks” (“Show Me the Bunny!” Village Voice 41.41 [14 October 1997]: 65–70). Michael M. Epstein points out that having Ally share an apartment with

a legal antagonist is yet another way the show blurs the professional and the personal: “Ally McBeal is the epitome of the post-modern lawyer who exists in a world where there is little distinction, if any, between private conduct and public image” (“Breaking the Celluloid Ceiling,” Television Quarterly 30.1 [1999]: 38). 173. “Car Wash.” 174. “Story of Love.” 175. “Sideshow,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 22 February 1999. 176. “Two’s a Crowd.” The irony of this quote is accentuated because Renee speaks it to Cindy, a transvestite. 177. “Making Spirits Bright.” 178. “Being There.” Renee’s voice is heard here as the camera cuts back and forth between a flashback of Renee being groped on the playground long ago and a more recent flashback of being groped by her date in her apartment, thus collapsing the time between those two events. For a close reading of Renee’s kickboxing/daterape incident, see Loolwa Khazzoom, “Can You Kick It? Ally McBeal’s Renee Boxes Herself into Controversial Territory,” Bitch 3.3 (31 October 1998): 48. 179. Of course, there can be many explanations for phasing Renee out of the plot. One might have to do with the actress portraying her. There have been rumors aired publicly about Lisa Nicole Carson’s erratic behavior, which might have contributed to her character’s marginalization. Although Ally McBeal clearly intends to present a fantasy in which sexuality and gender are the focus and race does not matter, it is striking that the only major black character in the cast essentially vanishes from the series’ action. 180. “These Are the Days.” 181. Dolan (35–36) notes how the classic detective question of who killed Laura Palmer served to get Twin Peaks viewers “into the tent” initially, in the hope that the viewers would become

Notes to Pages 117–126  237

interested in less straightforward questions about the fictional community. The risk here, of course, is that viewers who are most drawn by a central narrative question may be less likely to continue once that question is answered. 182. “Troubled Water.” 183. “Let’s Dance.” 184. “These Are the Days”; “Love’s Illusions.” 185. “Cro-Magnon,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 5 January 1998. 186. “Just Looking.” 187. “These Are the Days.” 188. “The Green Monster.” 189. These physical expressions of feeling become the narrative device that drives the characters into the most probing psychoanalytic explorations. These overt actions must be explained, which sends the characters to the therapist’s office. 190. “Saving Santa,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 13 December 1999. 191. It is hardly surprising that Courtney Thorne-Smith was the first actress to leave the show. After the central dynamic of the love triangle is settled, her character is left without a function. 192. “Buried Pleasures.” 193. “The Inmates.” 194. “Making Spirits Bright.” 195. “In Dreams.” 196. “The Promise.” 197. “Buried Pleasures.” 198. “Seeing Green.” 199. “Over the Rainbow.” 200. “Boy Next Door.” Billy begins to have visual hallucinations caused by the tumor, and this above all else indicates to him that there is something wrong with him. At this point, uptight Billy shares some of Ally’s notion of a universe intertwining reality with fantasy, but this frightens him, unlike Ally, who embraces the combination. 201. “Ally McBeal: The Musical, Almost.”

202. Ally acknowledges that she sees him as a “kind of soulmate” of a different sort than Billy, as a “fellow weirdo” (“Changes”). 203. “The Real World.” 204. “Boy to the World,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 1 December 1997. 205. “Alone Again,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 11 May 1998. 206. “Silver Bells.” 207. Even in Ally and John’s first case together (“The Promise”), they demonstrate their mental connection. Witness the following conversational snippet: Ally: Have I bored you? John: Let’s continue. Ally: With the trial. John: Yes. Ally: Today. John: Yes. Ally (voiceover): Because you’re insane. John: Yes. Startlingly, John replies to her voiceover, as if he could hear it just as well as her spoken dialogue. 208. “Drawing the Lines.” 209. “Alone Again.” 210. People who cannot control their imitations of gestures have long been associated in popular imagery with a weakened mental condition. See Rae Beth Gordon, “Imitation and Contagion: Magnetism as Popular Entertainment,” in Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 211. “The Pursuit of Unhappiness.” 212. “Changes.” 213. Veronica Chambers calls the unisex bathroom in Ally “the new water cooler, where both men and women meet to gossip” (“How Would Ally Do It?” Newsweek 131.9 [2 March 1998]: 61). 214. “They Eat Horses, Don’t They?”; “Civil War.”

238  Notes to Pages 126–132

215. “Worlds without Love,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 2 November 1998. 216. “Cro-Magnon.” 217. “Happy Trails”; “Changes.” Alan McKee points out that the smile therapy, dancing, and theme songs consistently make the argument that happiness is not a purely mental attitude but a bodily one: “Happiness is material, corporeal [on Ally McBeal]: it is caused by chemicals, by hormones, by movement and energy” (“Views on Happiness in the Television Series Ally McBeal: The Philosophy of David E. Kelley,” Journal of Happiness Studies 5 [2004]: 405). 218. “The Ex-Files.” 219. “Being There”; “Changes.” 220. “Let’s Dance”; “The Blame Game”; “They Eat Horses, Don’t They?”; “Sex, Lies, and Politics”; “Sex, Lies, and Second Thoughts,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 23 October 2000. 221. John even practices this gesture, pouring glass after glass, as we see in “Over the Rainbow.” 222. “Let’s Dance.” 223. As Ally says about a particular client, “They have no defense, and who better to go in with nothing than John Cage?” (“Alone Again”). 224. It is significant that Ally foregrounds the workings of irrationality in a hallowed hall of rationality, the courtroom. Epstein says that “the show essentially mocks the law as a facade of emotional detachment and reason” (37). 225. In many ways John resembles the protagonist of what Frank Krutnik calls the “nervous romance” films (“Love Lies: Romantic Fabrication in Contemporary Romantic Comedy,” in Evans and Deleyto, eds., 15–36). Steve Neale notes that the eccentricity that historically was more “securely” and “permanently” located in peripheral romantic comedy characters (such as sidekicks) becomes foregrounded in these films’ overly neurotic male

characters (such as those played by Woody Allen and Albert Brooks) (“The Big Romance Or Something Wild? Romantic Comedy Today,” Screen 33.3 [Autumn 1992]: 291–292). John would fit comfortably in this mold. 226. “In Dreams.” 227. In the above-mentioned episode, John explicitly acknowledges his desire to remain in a fantasy life. Discussing a case of a woman who wants to live her life with a dream lover, John asks Ally, “You’ve been arguing for your client’s right to live in her dream world. Why can’t I live in mine?” 228. “Changes.” 229. Given the tendency for the character network to work as an enclosed system, there is a built-in pressure for characters to serve as romantic options for each other. For instance, The X-Files kept Scully and Mulder in a businessonly relationship for a long time before relenting to the pressure for them to become romantically involved. 230. “Neutral Corners.” 231. “Tom Dooley”; “Lost and Found.” 232. “Neutral Corners.” 233. Geraldine Bedell situates Ally’s singleness and her attitudes toward marriage in relation to historical and literary personages in “So the Wedding’s Off, Then?” Times (London) (27 July 2001): 2. David Aram Kaiser and Jo Ellen Green Kaiser note, “As often happens in Kelley’s oeuvre, for example, Ally’s own search for meaning is frequently turned into a search for sex, as though a successful personal relationship could compensate for a materialistic work world” (“The Bearable Lightness of Ally McBeal,” Tikkun [January–February 1998]: 72). 234. Lotz describes Ally’s final destination this way: “Importantly, Ally McBeal did not end with Ally’s wedding, but with a character who had grown comfortable inside her own skin, no longer pining for her life to match a culturally

Notes to Pages 132–136  239

imposed social script, but with the recognition that the journey is as important as the destination and that hindsight revealed the times that challenged her as highly satisfying” (22). On the narrative importance of the wedding in serial narrative, see Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “All’s Well That Doesn’t End—Soap Opera and the Marriage Motif,” in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, ed. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 217–225. 235. Ann Swidler provides a useful summary of the history of the bourgeois myth of romantic love in Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 112–114. According to Swidler, the defining characteristics of this myth involve “(1) a clear, all-or-nothing choice; (2) of a unique other; (3) made in defiance of social forces; and (4) permanently resolving the individuals destiny” (113–114). Werner Sollars points out how the concept of America became associated with romantic love: “American allegiance, the very concept of citizenship developed in the revolutionary period was—like love—based on consent, not on descent, which further blended the rhetoric of America with the language of love and the concept of romantic love with American identity” (Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], 112). Virginia Wright Wexman argues that popular moving images were crucial in advocating this concept of love: “Over the years the movies’ depictions of heterosexual romance moved from an acceptance of the Victorian notion of separate spheres to the companionate ideal to the validation of romance as a key to individual identity” (Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993], 13). See also Illouz, esp. chaps. 1, 2.

236. “Love’s Illusions.” 237. For a similar take on Ally as being incomplete without a man, see Pia Guerrero, “Loveless in the Media,” Hues (January 1999): 24–25. 238. “I Know Him by Heart.” 239. “Love’s Illusions.” 240. “Those Lips, That Hand.” 241. “Reasons to Believe.” 242. “Lost and Found.” 243. Illouz, 198. Anthony Giddens argues that the romantic notion of a love that lasts forever with a person’s one and only true love has been supplanted by what he calls “confluent love,” which is more contingent. Confluent love brings couples closer to what he terms a “pure relationship,” meaning that it is “entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only in so far as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to stay within it” (The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992], 63, 58). 244. “Falling Up”; “Let’s Dance”; “Boys Town”; “Seeing Green.” 245. “Theme of Life.” 246. “Theme of Life.” 247. “Sideshow.” 248. “Sideshow”; “The Real World.” 249. Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 16 March 1998. Susie O’Brien situates Ally as one of what she terms the “New Neurotics” (“Neurosis,” Social Alternatives 18.2 [April 1999]: 58). 250. Chris Jackson notes that on Ally “what began as a parody of self-esteem exercises has evolved into a poignant search for understanding” (“The Music of Inner Justice in Ally McBeal,” Picturing Justice, http://www.usfca.edu/pj). Illouz points out the connection between therapy and a conception of romance as irrational:

240  Notes to Pages 137–142

“As therapy, its aim has always been to ‘cure,’ and there is a long tradition viewing romantic passion as a sickness” (293). For an interesting consideration of the shared reliance on confession in the law and in therapy, see Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. chap. 5. 251. “Sideshow.” 252. “Love’s Illusions.” 253. “Troubled Water.” 254. “Troubled Water.” 255. Frank Krutnik asserts that modern Hollywood romantic comedies on film manage a more comfortable rapprochement with old-fashioned heterosexual love by evoking and endorsing its signs and values with full awareness of their fantastical nature. . . . [E]ven though the old certainties have been tarnished, these films propose that it is better to believe in a myth, a fabrication, than have nothing. (29–30) 256. “Girls’ Night Out,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 30 October 2000. 257. “Reach out and Touch.” 258. Ally donated her eggs anonymously to an infertility study and was never told that those eggs were used. Maddie tracked her down after Maddie’s father died. 259. “A Kick in the Head.” 260. In the final episode, “Bygones,” dancing babies reappear in the form of New York–related celebrities. 261. In “Playing with Matches,” Ally hallucinates a boy who she later realizes is a facet of herself (Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 7 January 2002). Neale notes that films such as Big similarly acknowledge the fundamental infantilism and regression that is inherent in the fun and the eccentricity of romantic comedy (299). 262. “Tis the Season.”

263. “Falling Up.” 264. Stephanie Coontz examines the romantic construction of a motherhood ideal in The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Suzanne Juhasz discusses the ties between romance novels and mother-daughter relations in Reading from the Heart: Women, Literature, and the Search for True Love (New York: Viking, 1994). McKee notes that Ally’s open serial narrative does eventually have to end, closing off the multiple possibilities it raises for happiness, but he finds that the answer the show proposes is “disappointingly—and predictably—family; and more precisely, having a child” (407). Lotz suggests that “Ally McBeal’s main contribution to a cultural negotiation of career and family is its ambivalence: it recognizes the career gains the character achieves as an advance, but simultaneously depicts uncertainty about how to evaluate this success compared with other desires” (131). 265. “Brand New Day,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 11 February 2002. 266. Ally (and unmarried Calista Flockhart, who adopted a son) figure in the discussion of the politics of single women adopting children. See Fiona Stewart, “What Are the Costs of Adoption Today,” Australian (18 January 2001): 11. 267. Bonnie Dow points out that Murphy Brown’s highly publicized baby also makes little impact in its ongoing narrative (Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996], 157). For me to take Ally McBeal to task on this point is slightly unfair, since the series was abruptly canceled soon after Maddie’s introduction. It is quite likely, given the series’ orientation toward children and its tendency to problematize the characters’ dreams, that Ally would address the tensions of child rearing and professional life in a sixth season.

Notes to Pages 142–148  241

268. Kathleen E. Baum provides a Lacanian reading of the link between Law and Desire as portrayed on Ally McBeal in “Courting Desire: The (Al)Lure of David E. Kelley’s Ally McBeal,” a chapter in her “Textual Desire: Soliciting the Gaze in ‘Popular’ Culture” (M.A. thesis, California State University–Long Beach, 2000), 90–109. Cynthia Lucia examines how portrayals of women lawyers in feature films necessarily engage social discourses about the ties between women’s public power and their private fulfillment (Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005]). 269. “Brand New Day”; “Woman.” 270. Sarah Blustain argues that Ally’s growth into a mature woman who balances professional and personal issues was responsible for its downturn in popularity

in the last seasons, that the women’s “movement had a pretty good ally when Ally was going out of her mind on a regular basis; it lost her when she reached the end of the self-fulfillment rainbow” (“Split End,” New Republic [6 May 2002]: 58). 271. Kelley said, “I always thought the series would end after six years” (Associated Press Online, “Fox Cancels Ally McBeal” [18 April 2002]). 272. Caitlin Moran connects the series’ emphasis on the child with the waifish body of its protagonist: “What really vexed, however, was the central conceit that a woman couldn’t be childlike— believing in true love, dancing in puddles, getting excited about a sandwich—unless she looked like a child” (“Ding Dong the Ditzy Stick Is Dead,” Times (London) [19 April 2002]).

Chapter 4 1. Horace Newcomb notes that Bonanza’s drama depended primarily on the conflicts provided by those who entered the Cartwrights’ lives (“Toward a Television Aesthetic,” in Television: The Critical View, 4th ed., ed. Horace Newcomb [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], 617). Fred E. H. Schroeder argues that the guest villain is the key to serial television in “Video Aesthetics and Serial Art,” in Television: The Critical View, 1st ed., ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 270–271. 2. Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Opera (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 61–95. 3. Buffy The Vampire Slayer (WB TV), 8 December 1998, 21 September 1999. 4. Ally McBeal explicitly acknowledges the awkwardness of adopting new primary characters. The principal characters on Ally are suspicious of newcomers, thus allowing them to voice the audience’s

skepticism. When Nelle joins the firm, the women of Cage and Fish instantly dislike her and join forces against her. When Mark is hired as an overt replacement for Billy, the characters refuse to accept him, and his initial episodes address the difficulties of fitting in as the “new guy.” 5. The exceptions are the crossover episodes between Ally and The Practice on 27 April 1998 and the case in which Jenny makes a nuisance suit against the phone companies at the beginning of season 5. Thus season 5 begins with two narrative tasks that Ally has not tried before: a lengthy case and the introduction of four entirely new recurring characters (Jenny, Glenn, Raymond, and Coretta). 6. “Boy to the World,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 1 December 1997. Citing this episode in particular, Gail Caldwell positions transvestitism as a central metaphor for the show as a whole: “That’s part of Kelley’s quick-change charm: having

242  Notes to Pages 150–154

created for that episode a gorgeous young guy who dresses as a woman, he’s built an entire show around a gorgeous young woman who’s the invention of a man. Kelley himself is the real camouflage artist, pleasing and offending simultaneously, delivering reactionary sitcom one week and moving commentary the next” (“The Incredible Lightness of Being Ally,” Boston Globe [18 January 1998]: K1). 7. For a reading of this episode that emphasizes its challenge to heterosexual norms, see Brenda Cooper and Edward C. Pease, “‘Don’t Want No Short People ’Round Here’: Confronting Heterosexism’s Intolerance through Comic and Disruptive Narratives in Ally McBeal,” Western Journal of Communication 66.3 (Summer 2002): 300–318. 8. “Two’s a Crowd,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 6 November 2000. 9. “Without a Net,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 13 November 2000. 10. “Judge Ling,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 5 November 2001; “Bygones,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 20 May 2002. 11. “Woman,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 18 February 2002. 12. “Neutral Corners,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 12 November 2001. 13. “Tom Dooley,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 22 April 2002. 14. As Yvonne Tasker notes, comedy creates an arena in which “taboos can be addressed, made visible, and also contained, negotiated” (Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema [New York: Routledge, 1998], 163). 15. Ann Swidler suggests that the perceived strength of social institutions inflects the need for the myth of romantic love: When marriage was a firmer institution, the mythic culture of romantic love helped bridge the gap between the voluntary

choices of individuals to marry (the uninstitutionalized part of the institution of marriage) and the institution of marriage itself. In the current period, when divorce has radically altered marriage, a new culture of prosaic love attempts to bridge the gap between the persisting expectation that marriages should last and the increasingly insecure character of the marriage bond. Where institutions have begun to unravel, men and women do active cultural work to patch together rents in the institutional fabric. (Talk of Love: How Culture Matters [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 158) 16. Elayne Rapping, Law and Justice as Seen on TV (New York: New York University Press, 2003). 17. “One Hundred Tears,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 21 January 2002. 18. John Edward Campbell, “Alien(ating) Ideology and the American Media: Apprehending the Alien Image in Television through The X-Files,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4.3 (2001): 327–347. 19. Series creator David E. Kelley said, “We are a consciously colorblind show. In the history of the show, we have never addressed race. The reason is simple. In my naive dream, I wish that the world could be like this. Since Ally lives in a fanciful and whimsical world, there are not going to be any racial differences or tensions. All people are one under the sun” (quoted in Greg Braxton, “Colorblind or Just Plain Blind?” Los Angeles Times [9 February 1999]: F1). Also see newspaper reader responses in “Readers Discuss What Ally Leaves Unspoken,” Los Angeles Times (13 February 1999): F4. 20. Martin says it is refreshing for race not to be a factor in the depiction of a romance: “It’s nice to work in a way

Notes to Pages 154–157  243

that we don’t have to hold that weight where I’m trying to get hip to her culture and she’s trying to get hip to mine” (“Ally McBeal Tackles TV’s Biggest Taboo: Interracial Love,” Jet [1 March 1999]: 62). 21. Tracey Owens Patton, “Ally McBeal and Her Homies: The Reification of White Stereotypes of the Other,” Journal of Black Studies 32.2 (November 2001): 229–260. 22. Of course, third-wave feminism argues that we should investigate the intersection of gender with other structural categories such as race and sexual orientation, thus grounding feminist claims in more specific circumstances, not speaking for “women” in general but for working-class women or black women (for instance). Discussing portrayals of women lawyers in film, Cynthia Lucia asserts, “Posed as the real threat to white male authority, the white female lawyer in film, then, subsumes issues of race, class, and ethnicity, papering over a multitude of cracks in the system by posing gender as the singular ‘problem’” (Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005], 22). In several episodes, Ally examines class, but this distinction serves largely as a barrier to romantic relationships, as would be expected in this series. Ally’s difficulties with Victor (Jon Bon Jovi) have much to do with the difference in their jobs (lawyer vs. plumber), and John and Nelle’s relationship ends largely because he discovers her unapologetic class snobbery. Jon Katz suggests that class inflects the different ways viewers interpret Ally: “The better-educated and more professional the viewer, the greater the wariness, even resentment. The lower down the socio-economic ladder, the greater the identification” (“Deconstructing Ally,” http://hotwired.lycos.com/synapse/ katz/98/11/katzla_text.html. Accessed 17 March 1999).

23. Bonnie Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement Since 1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women (London: Vintage, 1992); Andrea Press, Women Watching Television: Gender, Class, and Generation in the American Television Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Amanda D. Lotz, “Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and Identifying Postfeminist Attributes,” Feminist Media Studies 1.1 (2001): 105–121. Anthony Giddens asserts that in late modernity the concept of lifestyle has become a primary component of identity formation, emphasizing the political ramifications of personal and consumer choices. See Modernity and SelfIdentity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1999). 24. Eccentricity has a long tradition in the romantic comedy, and Steve Neale argues that it is fundamental to the entire genre, letting film couples explore how to overcome the barriers posed by Othering qualities that can be voluntarily altered in the name of love (unlike less changeable traits such as race). Neale notes that eccentricity in the romantic comedy helps to convey a sense of “uniqueness” and “specialness” to the couple. An oddball like Ally clearly needs an unusual romantic partner, so the eccentricity of the main characters in Ally helps to underwrite her belief in her “one true love.” See “The Big Romance or Something Wild? Romantic Comedy Today,” Screen 33.3 (Autumn 1992): 290–291. 25. “Happy Trails,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 9 November 1998. 26. “The Oddball Parade,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 28 February 2000. 27. “Those Lips, That Hand,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 19 April 1999.

244  Notes to Pages 158–164

28. Christopher Insole asserts that Ally depicts a mythic “romantic monad” (an individual caught up in the depth of one’s own feelings) in the colder public world: “The public domain is made to look foolish, and ironically pompous, just because of its necessary failure to contain or express Ally’s super-abundant, unfathomable, and inexpressible innerworld” (“Anthropomorphism and the Apophatic God,” Modern Theology 17.4 [October 2001]: 482). 29. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 30. “The Obstacle Course,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 16 April 2001. 31. “The Promise,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 27 October 1999. 32. John Denvir says that Ally points out how difficult it is to practice the message of tolerance that many of us preach (“What Ails Ally?” Picturing Justice, http://www.usfca.edu/pj). 33. “Those Lips, That Hand.” 34. “Happy Trails.” 35. “The Oddball Parade.” 36. “These Are the Days,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 18 May 1998. 37. “The Pursuit of Unhappiness,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 26 March 2001. 38. See also a related plotline in “Sex, Lies, and Second Thoughts,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 23 October 2000. 39. For an interesting take on the cultural meanings of fat, see Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New York: Grove Press, 1996). See also Mary Beth Haralovich, “Averting the Male Gaze: Visual Pleasure and Images of Fat Women,” in Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays, ed. Mary Beth Haralovich and Lauren Rabinovitz (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 181–200; and Karen Ross

and Sujata Moorti, “Is Fat Still a Feminist Issue? Gender and the Plus Size Body,” Feminist Media Studies 5.1 (March 2005): 83–104. 40. “Out in the Cold,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 10 January 2000. 41. “Mr. Bo,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 22 January 2001. 42. For a case study of how class pretensions in quality television elevate the show’s status without alienating audiences, see Michele Hilmes, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name: Cheers and the Mediation of Cultures,” Wide Angle 12.2 (April 1990): 64–73. 43. For example, the intentionally outrageous Ally line, “Sometimes I’m tempted to become a street person, cut off from society, but then I wouldn’t get to wear my outfits” (“One Hundred Tears Away,” Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 20 October 1997). 44. “The Playing Field,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 16 March 1998; “The Story of Love,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 28 October 1998. 45. Faludi, Backlash. 46. “Civil War,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 5 April 1999; “The Pursuit of Unhappiness”; “Happy Birthday, Baby,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 6 April 1998. 47. In the case in which graphic artists sue for being fired because of their unusual appearances, one (a linebacker-sized crossdresser) is black (“The Oddball Parade”). We briefly see a black bride appear before Judge Ling to complain that her “perfect” wedding was ruined by an ex-boyfriend who objected during the ceremony, leaving her “damaged” (“The Obstacle Course”). 48. For a fuller discussion of Picket Fences, see Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 167–177. For more on Northern Exposure, see Betsy Williams, “‘North to the Future’: Northern Exposure

Notes to Pages 165–169  245

and Quality Television,” in Television: The Critical View, 5th ed., ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 141–154. 49. David Lavery, ed., Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995). 50. Jane Feuer notes this pattern on another television show: “When comic stereotyping occurred on The Mary Tyler Moore Show it was reserved for the secondary characters such as Ted and Sue Ann. Mary herself functioned as what Richard Corliss has called a ‘benign identification figure,’ not herself the object of much comic attention or ridicule” (“The MTM Style,” in MTM: “Quality Television,” ed. Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi [London: BFI Publishing, 1984], 36). 51. Mark Winokur has argued that American film comedy tends to put idiosyncratic characters beside idealized characters, thus not severing the two entirely but encouraging a split identification and encouraging us to consider ourselves possibly eccentric while flattering us with a link to the more central ideal figures. See “Improbably Ethnic Hero: William Powell and the Transformation of Ethnic Hollywood,” Cinema Journal 27.1 (Fall 1987): 20. 52. Lynn Elber suggests that the series cancellation resulted from viewers’ frustration with Ally’s mental idiosyncrasies (“Ally McBeal Ends Her Neuroses,” Charlotte Observer [20 May 2002]: 7E). Compare Ally’s attitude toward eccentricity with the norm depicted in what Neale calls “new romance” films of the Nineties. In films ranging from Splash! to Moonstruck, “the neurosis and nervousness [of the couple] are either cured or marginalized, while the eccentricities of members of the couple are either ‘mild’ in form, or markedly

whimsical, or, as it were, ‘artificially’ induced (and hence temporary)” (295). Although Ally visits a number of therapists who seek to “cure” her of her idiosyncracies, she refuses to alter her central beliefs. 53. “Those Lips, That Hand.” 54. “One Hundred Tears Away.” 55. “Seeing Green,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 8 November 1999. 56. The primary articulation of this romantic view of mental illness is in R. D. Laing’s work, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967). 57. As Christian Metz has argued, film (and by extension, television) lacks the ability of language to convey abstraction. Film has no equivalent for the concept “a gun.” A shot depicting a firearm always presents a particular example, not a generalized one: “this gun” or “that gun.” See “On the Notion of Cinematographic Language,” in Movies and Methods, vol. 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 582–589. 58. “In Search of Pygmies,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 14 February 2000. 59. “All of Me,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 13 May 2002. 60. “One Hundred Tears.” 61. The notable exception is the protracted attention given the aftermath of Billy’s death, as I argued in chapter 3. Such grief is only possible because a wellknown series regular dies. 62. “In Dreams,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 11 January 1999. 63. “Out in the Cold,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 10 January 2000. 64. “One Hundred Tears.” 65. “Making Spirits Bright,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 14 December 1998. The flashback depicting Ally’s encounter with the unicorn elegantly connects the adult Ally to the child. In the present, we see blue light shimmering on Ally’s adult face before we go to the flashback of

246  Notes to Pages 170–179

Ally’s childhood unicorn sighting. In the flashback, young Ally is similarly bathed in blue, and the adult Ally’s eyes are superimposed over the child’s face. Young Ally pets the unicorn while we hear the adult describing the experience. We the audience do not see the unicorn; we only see a horn entering the frame, thus forcing us to picture the mythical beast and so engage in a bit of fantasy ourselves. 66. “Making Spirits Bright.” 67. “In Dreams.” 68. “The Man with the Bag,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 11 December 2000. 69. “Happy Trails.” 70. “Happy Trails.” 71. “These Are the Days.” 72. “Once in a Lifetime,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 23 February 1998. 73. “Happy Trails.” 74. As noted, Ally sometimes ventures into same-sex kissing. The women of the show (Georgia, Elaine, Ling) kiss Ally, although the men never get closer to

a kiss than in the episode described here, reflecting the more widespread prurient interest in (and mainstream acceptance of ) beautiful women in sexual situations (as opposed to depictions of physical passion between men). The most notable same-sex kiss is in “Buried Pleasures,” when Ally and Ling appear to consider seriously having an intimate relationship, reacting with obvious arousal to a long onscreen kiss but finally deciding to pursue heterosexual relations thereafter (Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 1 November 1999). 75. Karen Durbin cites this plotline as especially absurd (“Ally McBeal: Razor Thin, but Larger than Life,” New York Times [20 December 1998]: AR39, 46). Maureen Dowd, in an unusual op-ed piece, discusses the connections that come to her mind when she switches channels between the frog plotline on Ally and C-SPAN coverage of Newt Gingrich (“Of Frogs and Newts,” New York Times [11 November 1998]: A27). 76. “Happy Trails.”

Chapter 5 1. Television writer Ann Donahue says that David Kelley “always goes down the middle, and he’s able to show each side. So the first act you root for one side. The second act of the episode you root for the other side because you finally understand them” (quoted in Manny Mendoza, “Picket Fences Plots and Cast Stand Up,” Dallas Morning News [28 April 1994]: 1C). 2. Bonnie Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 150–161. 3. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds., The West Wing: The American Presidency as Television Drama (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003). 4. For a discussion of the legal

melodrama in made-for-television films, see Elayne Rapping, Law and Justice as Seen on TV (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 138–168. See also Helle Porsdam, “Law as Soap Opera and Game Show: The Case of The People’s Court,” Journal of Popular Culture 28.1 (Summer 1994): 1–15. 5. Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 6. Ysiah Ross asserts that ethics is the central concern of The Practice (“Legal Ethics on TV through Australian Eyes,” Picturing Justice, http://www.usfca. edu/pj). For more on the politics and melodramatic structures of The Practice, see Rapping, 35–46. On connections between the worlds of Ally McBeal and

Notes to Pages 179–181  247

The Practice, see Ellen Gray, “Ally McBeal and The Practice” Are Looking More and More Alike,” Philadelphia Inquirer (15 December 1998); and Joan Gershen Marek, “The Practice and Ally McBeal: A New Image for Women Lawyers on Television?” Journal of American Culture 22.1 (Spring 1999): 77–84. 7. I recall seeing a stand-up comedian who analyzed what he considered the fatal flaw in Ben Casey, an early attempt to present a specialist on television. Because Casey was a neurologist and because audiences did not know about many neurological disorders except for brain tumors, the comedian used to make bets about how many minutes would pass in the episode before someone mentioned the words “brain tumor.” 8. Michael M. Epstein situates Ally in the historical context of other law shows on television in “Breaking the Celluloid Ceiling,” Television Quarterly 30.1 (1999): 28–39. See also Robert M. Jarvis and Paul R. Joseph, Prime Time Law: Fictional Television as Legal Narrative (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1998). 9. Richard A. Posner, An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Peter Baker, The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton (New York: Scribner, 2000); Marvin Kalb, One Scandalous Story: Clinton, Lewinsky, and Thirteen Days That Tarnished American Journalism (New York: Free Press, 2001). 10. Thus the need to distinguish the exceptional case of the “victimless crime” from the norm. 11. Rapping, however, notes that students in her classroom tend to treat television courtroom representations (even those on Ally McBeal) as if they were “torn from the headlines” (12). The young lawyers interviewed in Newsweek were considerably less likely to view Ally’s cases

as being true to life (Veronica Chambers, “How Would Ally Do It,” Newsweek 131.9 [2 March 1998]: 58–61). Susie O’Brien said, “Although the show has been billed as ‘all-too-real,’ I found it about as realistic as leg warmers are fashionable” (“Watch Out! Women and the Media,” Social Alternatives 17.4 [October 1998]: 62; see also Terry Kelleher, “Ally McBeal,” People 48.11 [15 September 1997]: 20). Some hype for the show did position it as a true-to-life portrait, however. See Henry Goldblatt, “Fox Nails the Gen X Vibe,” Fortune 136.5 (9 August 1997): 36. 12. Alan McKee refers to Ally McBeal as conducting “a series of thought experiments” in envisioning cultural alternatives (“Views on Happiness in the Television Series Ally McBeal: The Philosophy of David E. Kelley,” Journal of Happiness Studies 5 [2004]: 390). Ann Swidler argues for the importance of such popular culture imagery in expanding what she calls our “cultural repertoire,” the range of available behaviors to consider: A cultural repertoire allows people to move among situations, finding terms in which to orient action within each situation. At the same time, cultural imagery is used somewhat the same way bats use the walls of caves for echolocation. Bats know where they are by bouncing sounds off the objects around them. Similarly people orient themselves partly by bouncing their ideas off the cultural alternatives made apparent in their environments. A social or political novelty (stories of “open marriage” or the nomination of a woman for the presidency) will make us devour newspapers and solicit the opinions of our friends partly because we want to expand the repertoire of arguments and attitudes we have available for orienting ourselves to a new phenomenon. We locate our own

248  Notes to Pages 181–185

views by their distance from as much as their agreement with opinions available in our environments. And we seek to maintain a repertoire of cultural attitudes, images, and arguments wide enough so that we can orient ourselves among them. (Talk of Love: How Culture Matters [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 30–31) 13. When ratings for the show dipped in the fifth season, David Kelley suggested in an interview that perhaps Ally may have exhausted the material available given the narrow focus of the series: “There are only so many stories like this you can do,” he said. “We’ve moved sexual harassment law probably beyond where the law is at this point.” He said that, by the nature of its story lines, Ally McBeal was “a little more finite than other shows” (quoted in Bill Carter, “In 5th Season, Ally Seems to Be Stalling,” New York Times [10 December 2001]: E1). Matt Rousch seems to concur, wondering, “Is it possible to sue a TV show for sexual harassment? It’s about the only twist David E. Kelley has not come up with yet for the libidinous lawyers of Ally McBeal” (“What’s Gotten into Ally?” TV Guide [18 December 1999]: 20). 14. Leslie Heywood says that Ally potentially “neutralizes the feminist critique of larger issues by making the ideas behind that critique sound silly” (“Hitting a Cultural Nerve: Another Season of Ally McBeal,” Chronicle of Higher Education [4 September 1998]: B9). See also Deborah Zalesne, “Workplace Paranoia: Media Propaganda,” WIN Magazine (May 1999). 15. “Buried Pleasures,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 1 November 1999. 16. “Woman,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 18 February 2002. 17. “Girls’ Night Out,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 30 October 2000.

1 8. “Girls’ Night Out.” 19. “The Playing Field,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 16 March 1998. 20. “You Can Never Tell,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 23 November 1998. 21. “Changes,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 29 November 1999. 22. “The Playing Field.” 23. Kinney Littlefield, “Sex Colors Ally McBeal Premiere,” Orange County Register (25 October 1999). Susan Estrich states that she was once asked by a reporter to comment on a scholarship established for “female law students who are committed to following in Ally McBeal’s footsteps and using their sexuality to succeed in law practice” (Sex and Power [New York: Riverhead Books, 2000], 205). 24. “Changes.” The strategy of using Farrah Fawcett in this episode is similar to using another former Charlie’s Angel star, Kate Jackson, in “The Kiss.” Jackson appears as an anchorperson who was hired initially because of her sex appeal and then replaced years later by a younger version of herself (Ally McBeal [Fox TV], 22 September 1997). 25. Annie Sprinkle, Annie Sprinkle: Post-Porn Modernist (San Francisco: Cleist Press, 1998); Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997). 26. “Buried Pleasures.” 27. Ally’s tendency to wear very short skirts was one of the early controversies on the show. For an example of the press coverage of the short skirt controversy, see April Austin, “Short Skirts Go to Court,” Christian Science Monitor 93.109 (2 May 2001): 5; Brenda Paik Sunoo, “Anything Wrong with Ally?” Workforce 77.7 (17 July 1998): 17. Karen Durbin suggests that Ally’s skirts disturb people because they are a representation of Ally’s open vulnerability: “Her short skirts are a metaphor; she’s all but walking naked through the world” (“Ally McBeal: Razor Thin, but Larger

Notes to Pages 185–191  249

than Life,” New York Times [20 December 1998]: AR46). See also Michele L. Hammers, “Cautionary Tales of Liberation and Female Professionalism: The Case against Ally McBeal,” Western Journal of Communication 69.2 (April 2005): 167–182. 28. “Mr. Bo,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 22 January 2001. 29. “The Oddball Parade,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 28 February 2000. 30. “I Want Love,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 26 November 2001. 31. Mike Bygrave suggests that the changing boundary between professional and personal behavior has altered an important device of the romantic comedy, which he calls the “meet cute.” By having characters meet each other during a playful mishap (“man accidentally bumps into female stranger on the street, knocks over her groceries, helps pick them up, and so on”), Hollywood lets us know that these characters will become the romantic couple. Now such encounters are likely to be interpreted differently: A boss asks out his secretary. A cop dates a woman he has given a parking ticket. A man spots a stranger and follows her home, or anywhere else for that matter. All are likely to be seen as examples of sexual harassment instead of romantic encounters. (Quoted in Steve Neale, “The Big Romance Or Something Wild? Romantic Comedy Today,” Screen 33.3 [Autumn 1992]: 287) 32. “Fear of Flirting,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 19 November 2001. 33. “Queen Bee.” 34. “Nine One One,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), December 10, 2001. 35. “Pyramids on the Nile,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 15 February 1999. 36. “Queen Bee.” 37. “Boys Town,” Ally McBeal (Fox TV), 19 February 2001.

3 8. “Queen Bee.” 39. Ally’s unisex bathroom can be seen as an imagined version of the shared bathroom that figured in the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. 40. “Buried Pleasures.” 41. “Changes.” 42. For example, using the very same antipornography laws advocated by some feminists to close down lesbian bookstores, as happened in the highprofile case of the Pink Pyramid, a Cincinnati gay and lesbian bookstore with no explicit holdings. In 1994 the Pink Pyramid was charged with “pandering obscenity” because they offered a video of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo. For an account, see Marjorie Heins, “How Prosecutors Are Using Obscenity Laws to Stifle Dissent,” http://www.theroc.org/ roc-mag/textarch/roc-19/roc19-05.htm. 43. “The Playing Field.” 44. For an opinionated discussion of victim rhetoric, see Wendy Kaminer, I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995). On the use of victim rhetoric in the legal system, see Wendy Kaminer, It’s All the Rage: Crime and Culture (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995); and Alan M. Dershowitz, The Abuse Excuse: And Other Cop-Outs, Sob Stories, and Evasions of Responsibility (New York: Little, Brown, 2000). For a discussion of television portrayals of victims’ rights, see Rapping, “Television, Melodrama, and the Rise of the Victims’ Rights Movement,” in Law and Justice as Seen on TV, 236–251. See also Cathy Young, “Victimhood Is Powerful,” Reason 24.5 (October 1992): 18–23. 45. “Fear of Flirting.” 46. Amanda Dyanne Lotz similarly concludes, “In many cases Ally McBeal illustrates the inadequacy of current law and the constraints of using a legal system that attempts uniform application. Such

250  Notes to Pages 192–196

an interpretation exposes the limited utility of legal solutions and identifies a need for continued cultural and social examination to understand the formation and transmission of inequity and bias” (“Televising Feminist Discourses: Postfeminist Discourse in the

Post-Network Era” [Ph.D. diss., University of Texas–Austin, 2000], 125). 47. Dow, 214. 48. Stanley B. Greenberg, The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2004).

Afterword 1. As a contrast to the primetime situation, it is widely considered to take two years for a new daytime soap opera to establish itself with an audience. 2. In the 2000–2001 season Ally McBeal had the unfortunate distinction of having the largest ratings dropoff between regular season episodes and repeats of any show on the four networks (Associated Press Online, “ABC Wins Nielsen Ratings Week,” 14 August 2001). The news story noted that the five worst shows in terms of relatively poor rerun ratings all had a strong serial quality and that less serially oriented dramas and comedies fared better in reruns. 3. Notably, Kelley’s longest-running show in this era is his least serially driven one, The Practice, which continues in an altered configuration as Boston Legal. 4. Economics, of course, is a prime factor in the rise of reality TV. Though the rules of the reality television game mean that a network must commit to air a large number of episodes (as American Idol audiences pare down the show’s twelve finalists one at a time), the network may do so fairly confidently, knowing that the cost of producing such a series is relatively low. Cinematographer salaries and large contestant prizes are small change compared to the continuing costs of writers and high-profile stars, who can renegotiate for higher pay if the show stays on the air. 5. Kelley has bemoaned the rise

of serial reality television as decreasing the number of opportunities for writers and actors. Most visibly, he aired his criticism of reality television in a remarkably vitriolic episode of The Practice titled “American Hostage” (7 April 2003). In this episode aired on ABC, Andie McDowell portrays a woman who holds CBS executive Les Moonves (portrayed by himself ) hostage and threatens to kill him live on camera on the network that bids highest. The episode builds to the climactic moment when the woman refuses to kill the executive and instead turns to the camera, launching into a diatribe about how the television audience is given exactly the programming it asks for. Yet even Kelley seems to have come to accept the reality that reality television seems to be here to stay. He was one of the producers of the short-lived NBC/Bravo unscripted series The Law Firm in 2005. 6. Instead of airing programs around sweeps period and filling the intervening times with reruns, HBO and Showtime (like the BBC) wait until a significant quantity of a show has been produced, then air it in one consecutive programming block, followed by another long wait while more of the program is made. 7. Roger Hagedorn, “Doubtless to Be Continued: A Brief History of Serial Narrative,” in To Be Continued: Soap Operas around the World, ed. Robert C. Allen (New York: Routledge, 1995), 29. 8. My “two dangers” owe a great deal

Notes to Pages 196–199  251

to Jan Mukarovsky’s Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Value as Social Facts, trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970). 9. Caldwell. 10. Jeffrey Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” Screen 36.4 (Winter 1995): 371–393. 11. Ian Hunter emphasizes the role widespread education has played in the interpenetration of elitist and popular aesthetics. See “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 347–372.

12. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 19. 13. For instance, the Soviet montage and German Expressionist cinema of the twenties were initially incorporated into the classical Hollywood cinema through clearly time-bounded practices (montage and dream sequences) that did not produce whole new forms (until much later—music video and film noir). 14. Husain Haddawy, trans., The Arabian Nights (New York: Norton, 1990). 15. Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), 332–346.

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Index

Page numbers in boldface refer to the primary discussion of a particular topic. Absolutely Fabulous, 227n101 addictions, drug, 3, 218n81 Airplane!, 50 Akass, Kim, 207n17 Albert, Mark (character), 33, 150–151 Alberti, John, 207n17 Alias, 2, 7, 80 Alice in Wonderland, 227n100 Allen, Robert C., 3, 205n6, 226n97, 229n18, 241n2, 246n5 Allen, Woody, 238n225 Alley, Robert S., 210n35 Ally (television series), 209n33 Altman, Rick, 28, 30, 44, 76–77, 215n12, 216n30, 228nn9–10 Alvarado, Manuel, 207n18, 225n69, 228n11, 229n16 American Idol, 250n4 Andy Griffith Show, The, 1 Andy Richter Controls the Universe, 56 Ang, Ien, 222n29, 223n46 Annie, 113 Anthony, Susan B., 45 anthropology, 84–85 Appelo, Tim, 218n70, 222n30, 234n115 Arabian Nights, The, 198–199 Arnold, Thomas K., 213n2 Arrested Development, 195 asides, 49

Austin, April, 248n27 authorship, 6–7, 209n30, 210n35 Avengers, The, 4 baby, dancing, 55–56, 140, 166, 223nn40–41, 240n260 Babylon 5, 209n30 Bailey, Jim, 32 Baker, Ken, 234n116 Baker, Peter, 247n9 Band Wagon, The, 30, 220n8 Bark, Ed, 209n31 Barnhart, Aaron, 208n29 bars, 19, 28–30, 216n36 Barthes, Roland, 77, 228n13 bathroom, unisex, 109, 125, 152, 235n155, 237n213, 249n39 Baum, Kathleen, 227n100, 241n268 beauty, 8, 196–197, 200, 210n40 Bedell, Geraldine, 238n233 Bellafante, Gina, 219n91, 226n100 Ben Casey, 247n7 Bergstrom, Janet, 223n46 Berle, Milton, 152 Bernie Mac Show, The, 224n58 Bérubé, Michael, 207 Bianco, Robert, 212n59 Bierbaum, Tom, 209n31 Big, 240n261

268  index

binary opposition, 76–77, 228n11 Black, David A., 230n24 Blazing Saddles, 213n1 blurting, 81–83, 147, 231n29 Blustain, Sarah, 241n270 Bochco, Steven, 225n69 Boddy, William, 210n34 Bonanza, 241n1 Bon Jovi, Jon, 32, 142, 243n22 Boomtown, 195 Bordwell, David, 230n19 Boston Legal, 6, 208n29 Bourdieu, Pierre, 208n26 Boyle, “Happy” (character), 171–175 Brady Bunch, The, 215n16 Braxton, Greg, 242n19 Brewster, Ben, 228n10 Bronk, Lucette, 211n42 Brooks, Albert, 238n225 Brooks, Peter, 219n82, 240n250 Brotherhood of Poland, N.H., The, 193, 209n32 Bruckheimer, Jerry, 192 Brunsdon, Charlotte, 207n21, 207n27, 211n42 Buchanan, Larry, 195 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 2, 4, 6–7, 48, 80, 146–147, 178, 226n94, 241n3 Bukatman, Scott, 220n10 Bunker, Archie (character), 97, 236n155 Butler, Jeremy, 3, 205n6 Butters, Greg (character), 15 Bygrave, Mike, 249n31 Cage, John (character), 15, 22–23, 25–26, 29–30, 32, 35–36, 42, 44, 49, 57–58, 79–80, 90, 99, 104–105, 109, 123–131, 133–134, 141, 173–175, 186, 217n48, 237n202, 237n207, 238n221, 238n223, 238n225, 238n227 Caldwell, Gail, 241n6 Caldwell, John, 4, 9, 207n14, 210n35, 211n49, 217n48, 251n10 Campbell, John Edward, 242n18 Carmen Jones, 42 Carroll, Noël, 54, 213n4, 220n4, 222n35 Carson, Tom, 236n172

Carter, Bill, 208n29, 228n8, 248n13 Carter, Nell, 25, 32 Caughie, John, 205nn4–5 Chambers, Veronica, 226n97, 226n100, 237n213, 247n11 Checker, Chubby, 24, 32, 108 Cheers, 75, 244n42 Chicago Hope, 6, 27 childhood/childishness, 88–91, 102, 104– 105, 111–112, 116, 119–121, 127–128, 139–143, 168–169, 240n261 Chion, Michel, 218n68 Cianfaglione, Tony, 201 Clark, Tracey (character), 15, 23–24, 136–139 Clayburgh, Jill, 138 class, 243n22, 244n42 Clinton, Bill, 180, 247n9 Cogan, David, 206n9 Cohen, Jonathan, 212n64 Collins, James, 209n31, 228n6 community, 20–21, 27–30 competence, 94 Cook, John, 5, 208n23 Coontz, Stephanie, 240n264 Cooper, Brenda, 231n32, 242n7 Copeland, Gary A., 207n15 Corliss, Richard, 245n50 Corner, John, 210n37, 210n42 Cosby Show, The, 146 Cowie, Elizabeth, 223n46 Crafton, Donald, 222n30 Creeber, Glen, 211n55, 223n46, 228n7, 230n20 CSI, 179 CSI: Miami, 194 CSI: NY, 194 cultural studies, 4–5, 206n13 D’Acci, Julie, 4, 207n20, 211n45 Dallas, 11, 229n16 Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, The, 50, 221n11 Deadwood, 195 De Certeau, Michel, 218n67 Delasara, Jon, 207n19 D’Elia, Bill, 214n12

index  269

Denora, Tia, 215n15 Denvir, John, 232n59, 244n32 Dershowitz, Alan M., 249n44 Designing Women, 225n70 Desperate Housewives, 195 Diamond, Neil, 29 DiBattista, Maria, 214n12 Dickens, Charles, 79–80, 230n23 difference, 155–156, 163. See also eccentricity Dika, Vera, 205n1 Dolan, Marc, 230n25, 236n181 Doll’s House, A, 219n86 Donahue, Ann, 246n1 Doogan, Bailey, 227n100 Doogie Howser, MD, 225n69 doubt, 65–69, 129, 226n97 Dow, Bonnie, 192, 205n3, 225n70, 235n124, 240n267, 243n23, 246n1, 250n47 Dowd, Maureen, 246n75 Dragonball Z, 2 “Dragon Lady” stereotype, 96–97 dramedy, 7 Dream On, 50 Drew, Robert, 216n32 Dubrofsky, Rachel, 206n10 Durbin, Karen, 246n75, 248n27 dwarfism, 163–164 Dylan, Bob, 22 Dynasty, 11 Eagle, Herbert, 211n52 eavesdropping, 109–110 eccentricity, 7, 43, 74, 105, 123, 125, 128–131, 149, 154–176, 243n24, 245nn51–52 Eisenstein, Sergei, 220n4 Elber, Lynn, 245n52 Elliott, Emory, 210n40 Ellis, John, 211n42, 227n101 Elsaesser, Thomas, 211n42, 220n9 Epstein, Michael M., 236n172, 238n224, 247n8 ER, 7, 10 Estrich, Susan, 248n23 E.T., 220n1

Everly Brothers, 24 Everybody Loves Raymond, 7, 78, 146 Ewing, J. R. (character), 97 Fabricant, Florence, 213n2 Faludi, Susan, 243n23, 244n45 Falwell, Jerry, 65 Family Ties, 178 fantasy, 56–61, 104, 119–120, 128–129, 133, 154, 167–169, 217n49, 223nn42– 43, 223n46, 224n48, 224n58, 225n79, 237n200, 238n227, 245n65 fatness, 156, 159–160, 161–162, 244n39. See also thinness Fawcett, Farrah, 184 Felicity, 7 feminism, 65–67, 120–121, 132, 178, 182, 219nn91–92, 235n124, 236n151, 248n14. See also postfeminism Feuer, Jane, 8, 211n43, 211n46, 211n48, 211n53, 223n43, 229nn18–19, 245n50 Fiddler on the Roof, 26 film, classical, 73, 75–77, 228n3, 229n19, 251n13 film studies, 4–5 Fish, Richard (character), 15, 21–22, 25, 29–30, 45, 81–91, 92–93, 95–96, 98, 109, 113, 125, 131–132, 136, 232n44, 232nn52–53, 233n69 “fishisms,” 83, 231n39 Fiske, John, 4, 205n5, 207n13 flashbacks, 61–63, 126, 225n72, 236n178, 245n65 Flashdance, 113 Flaubert, Gustave, 226n91 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, 239n234 formalism, 9–10, 81, 211n52 Fox, Larry, 213n2 Fox Television, 7, 209n31, 210n36 Friedan, Betty, 45 Friedman, Lisa, 212n63 Friend, Tad, 236n161 Friends, 7, 11, 146 Frith, Simon, 196, 251n12 Gabbard, Krin, 216n44 Garry Shandling Show, The, 224n61

270  index

Garwood, Ian, 217n57, 218n71 Gates, Anita, 226n99, 231n29 Gaynor, Gloria, 32, 217n49 gender, 2–3, 46, 67–68, 91, 99–102, 119–120, 125, 154, 167–168, 177, 179, 181–183, 187–191, 214n12, 225n67, 231n32, 233nn74–75, 242n22 Genette, Gerard, 225n71 Giddens, Anthony, 239n243, 243n23 Gilligan’s Island, 76 Ginsburg, Elizabeth, 213n2 girls club, 193–194, 208n29, 209n32 Gitlin, Todd, 227n1 Gledhill, Christine, 218n82, 220n9 Glen or Glenda, 196 Goldblatt, Henry, 247n11 Gorbman, Claudia, 213n4 Gordon, Rae Beth, 237n210 Gorton, Kristyn, 206n10, 219n91 Grace under Fire, 78 Graham, Jefferson, 230n22 Gray, Ellen, 247n6 Great Expectations, 80 Green, Adam E., 218n65 Green, Al, 31–32, 45, 56, 166 Greenberg, Clement, 6, 208n24 Greenberg, Stanley B., 250n48 Groban, Josh, 27, 42 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 156 guest stars, 62, 81, 145–176, 241n1 Gulliver’s Travels, 48 Haddawy, Husain, 198, 251n14 Hagedorn, Jessica, 234n96 Hagedorn, Roger, 195, 250n7 Hague, Angela, 207n17 Hall, Carla, 226n95 hallucinations, 31–32, 45, 51, 122, 128, 163, 166–167, 169, 237n200, 240n261. See also baby, dancing Hamamoto, Darrell, 234n96 Hammers, Michele L., 222n31, 249n27 Happy Days, 212n60 Haralovich, Mary Beth, 244n39 harassment, sexual, 61, 90, 153, 177, 180– 192, 248n13 Hartley, John, 205n5 Hawaii Five-O, 34

Heffer, Simon, 231n32 Heins, Marjorie, 249n42 Heller, Scott, 210n40 Herman’s Head, 50, 221n11 Heywood, Leslie, 248n14 Higgins, John Michael, 135, 173, 215n16 highbrow, 5–6. See also middlebrow Hill Street Blues, 11, 230n25 Hilmes, Michele, 209n34 Hirsch, Paul M., 205n5 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 158, 244n29 Holliday, Jennifer, 32, 39, 175 homelessness, 162–163, 169, 244n43 honesty, 85–86, 100, 104, 109, 115, 126 Hunter, Ian, 251n11 Hustler, 65 Ibsen, Henrik, 219n86 Illouz, Eva, 135, 235n131, 239n235, 239n243, 239n250 In Living Color, 7 Insole, Christopher, 244n28 intertextuality, 9, 216n38 Jackson, Chris, 216n36, 219n86, 239n250 Jacobs, Lea, 228n10 James, Caryn, 223n42 Jancovich, Mark, 208n26, 210n41 Jarvik, Laurence, 211n42 Jarvis, Robert M., 247n8 Jefferson, Margo, 224n62 Jenkins, Henry, 5, 205n2, 208n22, 213n65, 218n67 Jeopardy, 34 Jerry Springer Show, The, 8 John, Elton, 32 Johnson, Steven, 209n37 Joseph, Paul R., 247n8 Joyrich, Lynne, 220n9 Juhasz, Suzanne, 240n264 “jumping the shark,” 12, 212n59 Jurassic Park, 48 Kaiser, David Aram, 238n233 Kaiser, Jo Ellen Green, 238n233 Kaminer, Wendy, 249n44 Kaplan, E. Ann, 3, 205n6, 213n3 Katz, Jon, 227n101, 243n22

index  271

KC and the Sunshine Band, 32 Kelleher, Terry, 247n11 Kelley, David, 6–7, 13, 27, 42, 61, 66, 68, 155, 164–165, 179–180, 192–193, 208nn28–29, 209nn31–32, 210n35, 212n62, 218n70, 220n4, 225n69, 225n79, 226n93, 226n95, 228n8, 228n12, 231n29, 233n74, 234n115, 241n271, 241n6, 242n19, 248n13, 250n3, 250n5 Kelley, William M., 218n65 Kerr, Paul, 209n34 Khazzoom, Loolwa, 236n178 Kim, L. S., 206n10 Kimbrough, Charles, 89 King of the Hill, 7 Kipnis, Laura, 224n48, 244n39 Knight, Gladys, 222n38 Koltnow, Barry, 206n8 Kompare, Derek, 205n1 Kraemer, David J. M., 218n65 Kramer, Peter, 210n37 Krutnik, Frank, 238n225, 240n255 Kuppers, Petra, 209n30 L.A. Law, 6, 61, 155, 179, 212n58, 220n4, 225n69, 228n12, 234n115 Lahti, Christine, 87, 184–185, 188 Laing, R. D., 245n56 Landy, Marcia, 207n18 La Valley, Albert J., 220n2 Lavery, David, 207n17, 245n49 law, 21, 46, 86–87, 100, 103, 125–128, 147, 155–156, 158, 160, 170, 172, 179–181, 186–192, 239n240, 241n268, 246n4, 247n8, 249n46 Law and Order, 78, 145, 179, 194, 208n29 Law and Order: Criminal Intent, 194 Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, 194 Leave It to Beaver, 34 Leavy, Patricia, 224n58 Levine, Josh, 208n28 Lewinsky, Monica, 180, 247n9 liberalism, 8, 14–15, 133, 158, 177, 189– 190, 199, 231n28 Limbaugh, Rush, 14 Lipton, Michael A., 234n116 Listo, Mike, 222n32

Littlefield, Kinney, 221n11, 227n102, 248n23 Lost, 195 Lotz, Amanda Dyanne, 212n56, 219nn91– 92, 225n69, 228n4, 233n75, 238n234, 240n264, 243n23, 249n46 lowbrow, 5–6. See also middlebrow Lucia, Cynthia, 241n268, 243n22 Lyons, James, 210n40 Macdonald, Dwight, 6, 208n24 MacGregor, Jeff, 211n47 Macrae, Neil, 218n65 Madame Bovary, 226n91 Madonna, 4 Mander, Jerry, 210n39 Manilow, Barry, 31–32, 45, 98 Man of La Mancha, 139 Marchetti, Gina, 234n96 Marin, Rick, 226n100 marriage, 117–119, 238nn233–234 Married with Children, 7 Mary Tyler Moore Show, The, 216n38, 226n100, 245n50 M*A*S*H, 78–79, 178, 211n51, 230n21 Matallinos, Nikos, 207n15 materialism, 86–87, 91, 95, 232n59 Matsumoto, Jon, 218n71 Mayne, Judith, 212n58, 228n12 McBeal, Ally (character), 15–16, 22, 24– 26, 34, 36, 40, 42–44, 49–52, 55, 57–68, 81, 100, 102, 105, 107–114, 116, 122– 124, 127–131, 131–143, 165–167; as center of the world, 59–61, 165–167, 198; hating, 15–16, 212n63, 228n6 McGrath, Charles, 209n30, 231n27 McKee, Alan, 206n11, 214n11, 238n217, 247n12 McKenna, Susan, 206n10, 235n138 McPherson, Tara, 213n65 melodrama, 42, 50, 52, 55, 66, 76, 211n53, 218n82, 220n9, 221n29, 246n4 Melrose Place, 209n31 Mendoza, Manuel, 223n42, 246n1 mental illness, 166–169, 245n52, 245n56 Merlin, 48 metaphor, 220n4, 220n8 Metz, Christian, 245n57

272  index

middlebrow, 69, 208n25 Miller, Stuart, 208n29 Miller, Toby, 207n18 Mirapaul, Matthew, 223n41 Mitchell, Kathy, 235n155 Mittell, Jason, 210n39 Modleski, Tania, 3, 205n6 Monday Night Football, 209n31 Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 4 Moonlighting, 75, 211n48 Moonstruck, 245n52 Moorti, Sujata, 244n39 Moran, Caitlin, 241n272 Morse, Margaret, 213n5 Moseley, Rachel, 206n10, 224n58, 233n73 motherhood, 55–56, 75, 102–103, 107, 111–112, 121, 139, 141–142, 224n55, 233n71, 240n264, 240nn266–267 mourning, 122, 245n61 Muir, John Kenneth, 207n19 Mukharovsky, Jan, 251n8 Mulgan, Geoff, 211n42 Mumford, Laura Stempel, 229n18, 231n26 Murdock, Graham, 209n30 Murphy Brown, 89, 168, 178, 226n100, 240n267 music, 19–46, 53–54, 56, 138–139, 198, 215n15, 216n48, 217n55, 218nn64–66, 218nn68–69, 218n82; amateur, 27–31, 37–39, 42–44; as commentary, 33–35, 37; diegetic/nondiegetic, 20–21, 33, 37–39, 45, 49–50, 213n1, 218n71; as discourse/persuasion, 21, 24–27, 45, 213n5; gospel, 25–26, 39; interruptions, 24; leitmotivs, 34; lip synching, 29–30, 39, 216n42; lyrics, 21–23; montage, 36; musicals, 20–21, 23, 30, 44–45; as narrator, 38–39; performance, 20–21, 27–33, 37–44, 107–109, 113–114; professionalism, 21, 31–33, 37–39; as revelation, 39–42; swing, 19–20, 46, 106, 235n146; theme songs, 23–24, 64, 231n36; as unifier, 35–37; video, 20, 62, 213n3, 216n43, 251n13 Music Man, The, 26, 44, 219n89 My So-Called Life, 228n6

narratives, dual focus, 76–77 Naughton, James, 138 Ndalianis, Angela, 211n54 Neale, Steve, 217n62, 220nn2–3, 238n225, 240n251, 243n24, 245n52 Nelson, Robin, 207n15, 212n55 Newcomb, Horace, 205n5, 210n35, 241n1 Newman, Randy, 25, 27, 32, 44 Nochimson, Martha P., 212n56, 212n61, 214n12, 235n152 Northern Exposure, 8, 164–165, 244n48 nostalgia, 1, 20 NYPD Blue, 231n27 Oates, Mary Louise, 213n1 O’Brien, Susie, 63, 239n249, 247n11 O’Connor, John, 246n3 O’Donnell, Rosie, 135 O’Reilly, Bill, 14 Osmond, Donny, 171 Otoms, Claire (character), 15, 29, 147, 151–153, 182, 213n7 Ouilette, Laurie, 206n10 Oz, 7 Palmer, Robert, 62 past, importance of, 62–63, 74–75, 126 Patinkin, Mandy, 27 Patton, Tracey Owens, 206n10, 243n21 Paul, Larry (character), 41–42, 214n12, 218n81 Pearson, Roberta, 210n35 Pease, Edward C., 242n7 Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, 199 Perlman, Rhea, 135 Perren, Alisa, 209n36 Petro, Patrice, 229n18 Philadelphia, 156 Picket Fences, 6, 27, 164–165, 221n17, 244n48 Pietz, Amy, 29 politics, 14 popular culture, 1–2, 5, 16, 21, 37, 45–46, 162, 197 Porsdam, Helle, 246n4 Porter, Nelle (character), 15, 28–29, 45, 97, 98–106, 109, 113–115, 119, 123, 125,

index  273

131, 141–142, 234n113, 234nn115– 116, 235n135, 241n4 Posner, Richard A., 247n9 postfeminism, 45–46, 66, 103, 219nn91– 92, 242n22 Potter, Dennis, 5–6 Power, 183–184, 191 Pozner, Jennifer L., 226n94 Practice, The, 6–7, 9, 51, 61, 118, 147, 179, 208n29, 220n4, 221n17, 241n5, 246n6, 250n3, 250n5 Precker, Michael, 231n36 Press, Andrea, 243n23 production code, 23, 214n12 Psycho, 34, 62 psychoanalysis, 75, 90, 96, 116, 122, 136–139, 141, 228n7, 237n189. See also therapy/therapists public/private, 39, 43–44, 65, 89, 131–132, 151, 153, 158, 160, 185–186, 188, 226n94, 236n172, 240n267, 241n268, 241n270, 244n28, 244n32, 249n31 quality television, 7–9, 12, 74, 197, 209n34, 210n42, 211n45, 226n98, 227n1, 244n42 Queenan, Joe, 213n64 Queer as Folk, 195 Rabinovitz, Lauren, 244n39 race, 3, 32, 96, 154–156, 164, 216n44, 216n48, 222n38, 234n96, 236n172, 242nn19–20, 243n21, 244n47 Radick, Renee (character), 15, 24, 38, 114–117, 131, 154, 184, 236n172, 236nn178–179 Raging Bull, 34 Rapping, Elayne, 227n100, 242n16, 246n4, 246n6, 249n44 Read, Jacinda, 206n10, 224n58, 233n73 realism, 47, 59–62, 166–167, 181, 199– 200, 247n11 reality television, 194–195, 250nn4–5 Regalbuto, Joe, 168 remote control, 109 Reno, Janet, 85 Reynolds, Mark, 206n8

Richmond, Ray, 209n33 Right Stuff, The, 221n10 Robin, Steve, 218n70 Rocky, 23 Rogers, Adam, 226n94 Rollins, Peter C., 246n3 romance, 45–46, 74–75, 105, 114, 130, 132–135, 139–141, 158–160, 162, 167, 169, 187, 191–192, 217n62, 227n103, 235n131, 238n225, 238n229, 239n235, 239n243, 239n250, 240n255, 240n261, 240n264, 243n24, 245n52, 248n24, 249n31 Roseanne (Barr), 4, 11, 78 Ross, Karen, 244n39 Ross, Ysiah, 246n6 Rousch, Matt, 248n13 Rowe, Kathleen, 225n67 Rubin, Joan Shelley, 208n25 Saturday Night Live, 171 Schatz, Thomas, 228n5 Schneider, Karen S., 206n8 Schneider, Rebecca, 248n25 Schneider, Rob, 171–172 Schroeder, Fred E. H., 241n1 Scodari, Christine, 209n33 Sconce, Jeffrey, 196, 210n37, 230n23, 251n10 screwball comedy, 23, 214n12, 224n62 Scrubs, 56, 67 Sedgwick, Kyra, 167 Seinfeld, 227n102, 228n14 self, presentation of, 115 serial television, 10–13, 66–68, 73–81, 90–91, 98–99, 106, 122–123, 143–147, 150, 168, 171, 177–180, 192, 194–196, 209n33, 211nn53–55, 225n69, 228n7, 228n11, 228n14, 228n16, 229n19, 230n20, 230nn23–25, 231nn27–28, 250n2. See also soap operas sex, 87–88, 95–97, 100–102, 105–106, 110–116, 118–119, 131, 158, 180, 184–185, 188–191, 209n33, 235n152, 236n161, 238n233, 246n74, 248n23 Sex and the City, 4, 195, 209n33 Shalit, Ruth, 227n100

274  index

Shattuc, Jane, 213n65 Shepard, Vonda, 19, 33–39, 43, 50, 58, 108 Shining, The, 10 Shister, Gail, 209n33 Show Boat, 42 Simons, Jan, 211n42 Simpsons, The, 4, 6, 7, 178, 229n15 Singer, Ben, 220n9, 228n10 Singing Detective, The, 6, 223n46 Singin’ in the Rain, 30 Six Feet Under, 195, 223n46 Skin, 193 Skinner, B. F., 215n15 skirts, short, 248n27 Sleepless in Seattle, 217n57 Smith, Greg M., 212n57 Smith, Jeff, 217n55 Smith, Murray, 55, 221n29, 222n37 Snierson, Dan, 214n12 Snowdon, Lynn, 206n8 soap operas, 10–11, 50, 66, 73, 78–79, 130, 146, 179, 226n98, 228n2, 229nn17–18, 230n26, 239n234 Sobchack, Vivian, 222n34 Sollars, Werner, 239n235 Sopranos, The, 4, 7–9, 75, 195 Sound of Music, The, 34 special effects, 48–56, 220n2, 220n10, 222n30, 222n32, 222n34, 222n38; defined, 219n1; and horror films, 52, 54–55; as metaphor, 49–50; spectacle, 48–49. See also baby, dancing Spigel, Lynn, 208n25 Splash!, 245n52 Sprinkle, Annie, 185, 236n161, 248n25 Staiger, Janet, 4, 207n16 Stark, Steven D., 211n51 steadicam, 10 Steinem, Gloria, 45 Stern, Michael, 220n2 Stewart, Fiona, 240n266 Sting, 32 Straczynski, J. Michael, 209n30 Stroud, Michael, 221n17 Studlar, Gaylyn, 234n96 subjectivity, 47, 50–69 Sunoo, Brenda Paik, 248n27

Supremes (musical group), 25 Survivor, 194–195 Svetkey, Benjamin, 220n4, 233n74, 235n155 Swidler, Ann, 227n103, 239n235, 242n15, 247n12 Tajima, Renee, 234n96 Tasker, Yvonne, 242n14 television: and aesthetics, 4–5, 9–10; as “bad object,” 2, 6–8, 197; “classic television,” 1; television studies, 1–14, 195–196, 205nn4–5, 205n7, 206n11, 207n21, 210n37 Them!, 48 therapy/therapists, 22, 62, 75, 107, 123, 127–128, 135–139, 239n250 thinness, 3, 206n8 thirtysomething, 223n43, 228n6 Thomas, Billy (character), 15, 34–35, 49, 51, 99–100, 117–123, 136–137, 165, 237n200 Thomas, Georgia (character), 15, 28–29, 117–123, 165, 237n191 Thompson, Kristin, 206n12, 211n52, 228n3 Thompson, Robert, 216n29, 226n98, 244n48 Timberg, Bernard, 207n15 Time, 45–46 Torres, Sasha, 231n28 transvestitism, 24, 33, 83, 85–86, 147–153, 241n6 Tulloch, John, 207n18, 225n69, 229n16 Turim, Maureen, 225n72 Turner, Tina, 24, 32, 40 24 (television series), 195 Twin Peaks, 1, 8, 164–165, 236n181, 245n49 Untouchables, The, 4 Vassal, Elaine (character), 15, 24, 38, 40– 41, 46, 106–114, 115–116, 131, 184, 230n22, 235n152 Vavrus, Mary Douglas, 206n10 Vernallis, Carol, 213n3

index  275

victimhood, 93, 182, 189–191, 247n10, 249n42 Vidmar-Horvat, Ksneija, 224n46 Vineberg, Steve, 215n12 voiceovers, 63–69, 225n79, 237n207 Wainwright, Loudon, 27 Walus, Yvonne, 213n64 Waterboy, The, 171 wattle, 87 Weiner, Jennifer, 222n32 West Wing, The, 7, 178 Wexman, Virginia Wright, 239n235 Whedon, Joss, 210n35, 226n94 whining, 43, 47, 65–68 White, Barry, 23, 31–32, 35, 45, 53, 58, 105, 128–129, 215n14, 222n38 White, Betty, 135 White, Mimi, 228n2 Whitlock, Trevor, 220n4 Wilcox, Rhonda V., 207n17 Willard, Fred, 135 Williams, Betsy, 244n48 Williams, J. P., 211n48

Williams, Raymond, 199, 206n12, 251n15 Windom, William, 104 Winn, Marie, 210n39 Winokur, Mark, 245n51 Wittebols, James H., 230n21 Wizard of Oz, The, 34, 54 Wolf, Dick, 208n29 Woo, Ling (character), 15, 29, 40, 46, 91–98, 99, 101, 109, 132, 141, 147, 154, 183, 233n81 Wood, Ed, 196 Wood, Robin, 55, 222n36 work, 7, 142–143, 156–158, 180, 185–189 X-Files, The, 1, 4, 7, 80, 221n17, 238n229, 242n18 Xing, Jun, 234n96 Yarrow, Andrew, 20, 213n2 Zalesne, Deborah, 248n14 Zinsmeister, Karl, 210n39 Zontar, 196