She can turn the world on with her smile - wait! Wrong decade. You can make it Molly Dodd - wait! Wrong decade again. If Mary Richards was the poster child for the independent single woman of the '70s mid Molly Dodd for the '80s, Ally McBeal, played by Broadway actress Calista Flockhart, carries the torch into the '90s. Like her solitary sisters before her, she's strong yet vulnerable, independent yet uncertain. But unlike Mary and Molly, Ally McBeal allows us more than a glimpse into the brain and heart of the thoroughly modern woman.
We never saw what really went on behind the smiling faces of eternally optimistic Mary and eternally muddled Molly. With Ally, we see and hear what she's thinking in a Mitty-esque style of voice-overs, fantasies and flashbacks. On her way to her new job, we hear her say, "Today is gonna be a less bad day, I can feel it. Sometimes I wake up and I just know that everything is going to be ... less bad." When she wishes she could question a litigant better, she imagines herself as Barbara Walters. Feeling like an idiot after a dirty joke bombs, she runs six inches high through a crowded club. Lately the special effects have spread over to other cast members. In a recent recurring plotline about sexual harassment in the office, the male lawyers' tongues roll to the ground a la Mask when the pretty mail girt appears. It's a ploy rarely used in television, and one creator David E. Kelley wasn't a big fan of before he began using it here.
"I don't want to rely on it," says the man behind such critically acclaimed series as LA. Law, Picket Fences, Chicago Hope and The Practice. "I think that it's a device and if you write a scene well, you should be able to communicate a value without having to tell the audience 'this is what I'm drinking.' So I like to use them sparingly. The other problem I've always had with voiceovers is that they have a very detaching effect to them. On an unconscious level, it tells your audience that everything is safe because it happened in the past. So you don't experience it as much as you would if it's just played dramatically. We'll use them where we find we can maybe get further into a scene than we otherwise could. We've actually cut back on them because of Miss Flockhart. They were almost redundant. Some of the things we didn't have to say because she was giving us that with the subtext."
Indeed, Flockhart, 32, an award-winning stage actress (The Three Sisters, The Glass Menagerie). has a wonderful-ly expressive face that not only takes naturally to the camera, it's perfectly suited to the thoughts and emotions of the character. Even without the voiceovers and fantasy sequences, a slight rise of her eyebrow or tilt of her head conveys volumes. As for her television debut, Flockhart says. "I definitely wanted to do it because of the material. I think it's rare that somebody writes an interesting, unusual, smart. funny woman, so I was really turned on by the part." Aside from her theatre work. Flockhart has appeared in the feature films Telling Lies in America and The Birdcage as Robin Williams's son's fiancee. Her unusual name, which in Greek means "most beautiful," comes from her great-grand-mother, who was in turn named after a Catholic saint. "I used to make up names like Ann and Jennifer to avoid being teased while growing up in Iowa," she's said.
Ally McBeal had never intended to be a lawyer. She couldn't bear being separated from her childhood sweetheart, Billy Thomas (played by Vancouverite Gil Bellows), so she followed him to law school. When she outperformed him at Harvard, he transferred his ego to another school, leaving her behind.
Crushed, she carried on and graduated in the top of her class. At her first job, she's the victim in a sexual harassment suit and is sacrificed in favor of the aggressor. Out on the street, Ally literally bumps into her old law school nemesis, Richard Fish (Greg Germann of Ned and Stacey). "You look fabulous," he tells her. "I know," says she, "I just got fired for it."
He's the kind of lawyer who makes Johnny Cochrane look sincere, the kind of lawyer Ally swore she'd never associate with. "I don't like the law. The law sucks," he tells her. "But you can use it as a weapon." So when he offers her a job at his prestigious Boston law firm, natu- rally she accepts. When she meets her new colleagues, she is aghast to discover one of them is the childhood sweetheart, Billy. "Is working with Billy going to be a problem?" asks her new boss. "Because if it is, well then I can't do anything about it, but I'd be happy to sympathize." P> Matters are further complicated by the fact that Billy also has unresolved feelings for Ally, but he's married and is passionately in love with his beautiful wife, Georgia, also a lawyer (played by Melrose Place's Courtney Thorne-Smith), who eventually joins the firm.
"One of the elements in the series is that this woman, who is married to the long-lost love of Ally, she comes in and, much to Ally's dismay, she likes her and they do strike up a friendship," says Kelley. "Now, that friendship will complicate itself. Ally's building a friendship and a trust with Courtney's character because she knows that will serve as almost a wall from getting her to look at Billy. If she has to be loyal to a friendship with Billy's wife, that will stop her, maybe, from concentrating on or looking Billy's way." "Maybe" being the operative word; the sexual tension is wound so tight it's a wonder any cases get tried.
When Thorne-Smith left Melrose Place she had intended to take a long rest from television but couldn't resist Ally McBeal. "I wasn't really interested in doing an hour show again," she says. "I was tired, but I read the script and it was incredible. I just couldn't say no. And to get to work with David Kelley was just such a gift."
"I thought it was very interesting to populate the office not just with Ally's ex-love but the wife of his ex-love," adds Kelley. "I thought it would serve as a good centre to tell lots of stories. The character had to be a contemporary of Ally's because I also wanted to have a friendship. The character had to be beautiful because I wanted her to be a physical threat to Ally. I didn't want to give Ally any opportunity to say 'Oh, well, that's what he married, and she's this and she's that.'Ally summons up everything within her to find something wrong with Georgia and, to her chagrin, she ends up liking her. Finding two people who I think would mesh together, Courtney was a natural choice. And I've always been a fan of her work. We actually worked together way back on L.A. Law."
Rounding out the quirky cast are Lisa Nicole Carson as district attorney Renee, Ally's deep-dimpled roommate; Jane Krakowski as her officious assistant Elaine; Peter MacNicol (late of Chicago Hope) as razor-sharp, yet eccentric, partner John Cage, known as The Biscuit; Steve and Eric Cohen as the Dancing Twins (the two Stanford grads were originally cast as a one-shot sight gag but became so hot - they have their own website - they're now regulars); Dyan Cannon as Fish's sometime love Judge Jennifer "Whipper" Cone; and Vonda Shepard, the singer in the club that serves as the lawyers' watering hole (she's the voice on the show's theme song, Searchin' My Soul from the CD The Radical Light). Watching the show and how adroitly Kelley handles the thoughts, emotions and actions of Ally McBeal - and how closely women identify with them - you get caught up in the story and her predicaments and you find yourself smiling. You want to hug her, reassure her, protect her, but you wouldn't dare. She's been known to shove. Her rationalization and determination to always look on the bright side are amusing, if not pathetic. "I'm actually very lucky," she tells herself. "I get to wake up glad for a new day, grateful the last one's over."
It's astonishing that a man is behind the bang-on portrayal; if he could be cloned we'd all be from Venus. "I suppose I draw on women friends and people I know," admits Kelley. "I do get a lot of advice from different women, but not on this show." Not even from his wife, Michelle Pfeiffer, to whom Flockhart bears an uncanny resemblance, much to Kelley's surprise. "That would have to be a coincidence. That's the first time I've heard it, but I'm certainly going to look at Calista in a different way from now on." "I find it hugely flattering, but I don't necessarily see it," Flockhart told TV Guide about the comparison. "I feel like I have to apologize to her." That statement right there probably sums up Ally McBeal best: confident yet self-effacing; bold yet uncertain. As we heard in her head early on: "The real truth is that I probably don't want to be too happy or content, 'cause then what? I actually like the quest, the search. That's the fun. The more lost you are the more you have to look forward to. What do you know; I'm having a great time and I don't even know it."
Ally McBeal airs Monday nights at 9 on FOX and VTV.
