Ally McBeal

David E. Kelley’s series about a lawyer who cannot keep her inner life inside her head first aired on 8 September 1997 and ran for five seasons and 112 episodes. We were fond of it at the time and we are still fond of the first two years. After that it is a show that has used up its one idea and keeps the lights on by hiring new faces, and the fondness becomes work.

The idea is a good one. Ally (Calista Flockhart) is a litigator in her late twenties whose fantasies, panics and resentments are shown to us as they happen: a tongue unrolls across a room, a rejection drops her into a skip. Kelley cuts these in at the speed of a thought, and the editors, Michael Hathaway and John Refoua among a long roster, keep each one short enough that the joke is over before it has to justify itself. In the first season the device tells us what a person is feeling without anyone having to say it, which is more than most courtroom shows manage.

Flockhart holds the whole thing together. She plays Ally as someone who is exhausted by herself, with a nervous mouth and a stare that lands half a second after the thought, and that is the only way the character works. Greg Germann’s Richard Fish is a proper comic invention, a managing partner whose every principle is a fee. Peter MacNicol’s John Cage, the stammering, remote, stage-frightened partner, is the best thing in the series. We laughed, in that first year, more than we have at most courtroom comedies since, and nearly all of it was MacNicol: a man who can barely get a sentence out in a corridor stands up in court, takes a long pause that nobody listening can bear, and turns out to be the only person in the building who can argue.

Then there is the bar. Every episode ends downstairs with Vonda Shepard at the piano, playing herself, singing something old while the lawyers drink and the week’s lesson is spelt out in the lyric. Danny Lux scores the rest, but the sound of the series is Shepard, and after thirty episodes we found she was telling us how to feel about scenes that had already told us. It is a small thing and it adds up.

The office corridors are the show’s real set. Billy Thomas (Gil Bellows) and Georgia Thomas (Courtney Thorne-Smith) are forever walking in on each other’s confessions, and Elaine (Jane Krakowski) is forever on the other side of the door. The cameras, under David A. Harp, Tim Suhrstedt and Billy Dickson across the run, keep the offices bright and flat so that the fantasies stand out when they arrive. Nothing is lit to be remembered. The pictures are there to carry the talk, and in the early seasons the talk is worth carrying.

What went wrong is simple. Nelle Porter (Portia De Rossi) and Ling Woo (Lucy Liu) arrive to be cold and cruel, which is funny for about ten episodes, and the cases in court become excuses for a theme rather than things that might be lost. Ally herself stops moving. She wants a man and a child, says so weekly, is thwarted weekly, and the hallucinations that in 1997 told us something about her now tell us only that it is Monday. By the fourth season we were bored, and then cross, because the people in front of the camera were plainly still good and the scripts had stopped giving them anything but their tics. Kelley’s other series of that autumn, The Practice, kept its lawyers at the mercy of their cases; this one let its cases become decoration.

Watch the first two seasons, forty-six episodes at 43 minutes each, and treat the rest as something a friend tells you about. It carries a 15, mostly for the talk.