Ally Mcbeal
Ally Mcbeal : A Retrospective
RonPrice posted on Aug 21, 2009 at 12:54PM
ALLY MCBEAL
In 1999, the year I retired from full-time teaching in Australia, the Ally McBeal show was at the height of its popularity. It won an Emmy Award for the Outstanding Comedy Series. The show ran for six seasons, starred Calista Flockhart in the title role as a young lawyer working in a Boston legal firm and focussed on the romantic and personal lives of the people in a law office. The environment was highly sexualized with dating and flirting, drinking and humour dominating. The show, the series, was heavily music-oriented. Ratings dropped off in the fifth season and the program was cancelled after six seasons. Feminists complained about McBeal’s emotional instability and lack of legal knowledge among many of their other complaints.1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Ally McBeal, Wikipedia, 2009 and a review of Tim Appelo’s Ally McBeal: The Official Guide, Harper Collins, 1999 by Ian Lace in Film Music on the Web, December 1999. Some called it the freshest, most deliciously politically incorrect show to have crossed the Atlantic: eccentric characters, outrageous madcap humour, cartoon-like fantasies and sentimental melodramas. A unisex restroom where the characters dance, sit on each other’s laps, discuss their innermost romantic yearnings, lose frogs down toilets and where toilet lids operate by remote control. Some lines like: "Men are like gum: after you chew awhile, they loose their flavour;” and "Tell me what kind of lie works here?" convey some of the tone of the series and..... Ally’s in the middle of a popular culture insistent on offering images of grown single women: frazzled, self-absorbed girls with male power and with female powerlessness seemingly harmless and cuddly, sexy, safe and sellable. Female bodies, traditionally sexualized & linked to emotionality operate as the barrier to women's full and effective participation in the professional and societal spheres.1 And I was settling down into retirement away from the fast lane, from being job- bed, from endless meetings and endless conversations--into solitude, into a world of writing, Bahá'í studies and none of the Calista Flockhart and that Ally McBeal!! 1 Michele L. Hammers, “Cautionary Tales of Liberation and Female Professionalism: The Case against Ally McBeal,” Western Journal of Communication, Vol. 69, 2005. Ron Price 19 August 2009 |