From Media Life Magazine. Christian Clemenson, pictured, portrays Jerry Espenson, the lawyer character with Asperger's syndrome on "Boston Legal."When “Boston Legal” debuted in 2004, the Iraq War had recently started, the economy had yet to tank, and David E. Kelley was one of the lone voices of dissent against recently re-elected President George W. Bush.
Times certainly have changed. There’s no longer much need for that voice of dissent as the country readies to transition to the Barack Obama era.
After four years spent rallying against the Bush administration through the various court cases of “Legal,” which also showcased some of the wackier characters in primetime, Kelley’s ABC show leaves the air for good tonight with a two-hour series finale.
“Legal” never drew huge ratings or received quite the attention of Kelley’s other shows, including “Ally McBeal” or “The Practice,” the show that spawned “Legal.”
But it was beloved by Emmy voters, who rewarded James Spader and William Shatner for their hambone acting year after year. And it spotlighted deserving though aging talent like Candice Bergen, Betty White and John Larroquette by giving them often over-the-top storylines that allowed Kelley to espouse his liberal political views.
“Legal” has averaged just a 2.4 adults 18-49 rating this season, ranking 55th on broadcast, and it never got the lift from longtime lead-in “Dancing with the Stars” that ABC would have liked. The network agreed to one final 13-episode season mostly in deference to Kelley, giving him time to wrap up the series’ sometimes-meandering plots and allowing viewers, a small but dedicated cadre who’ve remained loyal through several timeslot changes, some closure.
“Legal’s” exit will mean that Kelley, one of the most prolific television producers of his era, will be left without a show on television for the first time in two decades. After the failure of his Fox show “Wedding Bells” last year and his exit from ABC’s “Life on Mars” early in the development process, Kelley is now developing yet another lawyer-focused show for NBC.
Here’s what Bret McCabe of the Baltimore City Paper says about the show:
One of the more politically anarchistic television shows in recent memory says farewell tonight with a two-hour series finale from Boston Legal. And this show's outright ridiculousness comes from an unlikely source, perennial middlebrow television scribe David E. Kelley, the man behind the heinous Ally McBeal, although that series provided the groundwork for some of the inspired mayhem of what made Legal such as blithe entertainment. Legal actually split the difference between the mannered wackiness of McBeal and the self-righteous seriousness of the show it spun-off from in 2004, The Practice. Like both, it's set in a fictional Boston law firm, and like both, it liberally mixes both serious-and fairly typical-courtroom drama with comic interludes. What makes Legal so much better than both previous programs is how it blends its intelligence and comedy, in a way that Kelley only sparingly employed on The Practice, specifically when Steve Young's Eugene character used the "United States of America defense," in which he shamelessly appeals to a jury's
patriotism to win a client's freedom. It was a closing argument monologue that
hit both comic and cynical buttons at once, and Young's performance pushed it
into the patently absurd.
Legal became a show almost entirely of such inspired moments, thanks in large parts to the comedic team of William Shatner and James Spader. Both played outright stereotypes-Shatner's Denny Crane an aging pro-gun, free-market, liberal-hating conservative; Spader's Alan Shore an empathetic, well-educated liberal-but the show permitted the actors to push these one-dimensional cutouts far, far beyond hyperbole. That such outright polar opposites are best friends on the show is one of Legal's many, many curveballs.
As with The West Wing's later seasons, Legal gave you the feeling that its writing staff was creating the world it'd rather be living in on the show. Instead of resorting to sanctimonious idealism, though, it turned to pokerfaced ludicrousness, creating not only a comically metafictional show, but one that was surprisingly politically responsive as well. Dialogue frequently included in-jokes that revealed the characters knew they were on a television program-in one of the show's silliest moments, it seamlessly moved from pre-credit setup to credit sequence by having a character sing the instrumental title theme-and episodes touched upon topics in the media cycle with surprising timeliness. It skewered Republicans and Democrats with equally good-natured menace during this election year, and the firm's cases tackled Big Tobacco, the for-profit health care system, employment discrimination, and even fought capital punishment in Texas. Along the way, the show treated typically tasteless sitcom punch lines as facts of life as common as water: little people, sexual fetishism, sexual deviance, rampant promiscuity, erectile dysfunction, Asperger's syndrome, cross dressing, heterosexual adult male intimacy, and experimental medical treatments. And in perhaps in the show's most radical attempt to march to the beat of its own drummer, its cast ran through a casting agency's roster of physically attractive young actresses but the show's most unabashedly objectified female character is the sexagenarian Candice Bergen.
The kicker, of course, is that this blatantly insane television universe started to look more sane than the world that it lampooned. Adieu.
