Last night marked the penultimate airing of ABC’s Boston Legal. Before its finale next week, I thought I’d offer some thoughts about the end of a series that has proved so compelling yet also incredibly frustrating to me over the past five years. Though I’ve never missed an episode (see my earlier comments about commitment viewing), the formulaic repetitiveness of the last three seasons long ago led me to believe that Boston Legal had run out of creative terrain to explore–”outrageous” and “shocking” (to quote Henry Gibson’s Judge Brown), but content to be predictably so. In moving towards a definitive end, however (ABC made it clear at the beginning of the season it would not go beyond its initial 13-episode order), this final season has shown growth, giving me a picture of what Boston Legal could have been all along.
My initial interest in Boston Legal was twofold. First, I always loved The Practice, and after its cancellation, I was hoping that spin-off Boston Legal would provide my needed David E. Kelley legal fix. Second, I’m a sucker for William Shatner–especially in his self-parodic mode–and I was curious to see what he would do with the DEK formula.
Unfortunately, I was only satisfied on one of these accounts. I know many Practice viewers ran as far away from BL as possible, finding its shift in tone to be an insult to its parent series. While The Practice offered a serious, melodramatic treatment of Boston lawyering, its spin-off embraced comedy and pushed the eccentricities of DEK’s Ally McBeal to a whole new level. The nose-whistling and toilet-dismounting antics of Ally‘s John Cage seemed to be the template for an entire firm of characters at BL‘s Crane, Poole, and Schmidt: Alan Shore (James Spader) is a sexist afflicted with night terrors and word salad; Denny Crane (William Shatner) is a gun nut with Alzheimer’s (also a sexist); and Jerry “Hands” Espenson is a lawyer with Asberger’s syndrome, causing him to stomp, purr, and hop through his court appearances. Though the Shore and Crane characters were spun off from The Practice, their real parent was Ally.
So while my hope for more Practice would end in disappointment, the eccentricity offered a consolation prize: Shatner let loose. From his portrayal of a woman trapped in Captain Kirk’s body to his Priceline commercials, Shatner has always excelled at playing twisted versions of himself, and if there’s one thing Boston Legal has done right, it’s allowing both Shatner and James Spader to dig deep into their characters. So while the actual court cases became quite perfunctory over the course of four seasons, the series has successfully built a compelling friendship between these men of equal eccentricity, captured visually by the cigars and odd-ball discussion they share on their balcony each week.
The problem, however, was that strong friendship was so easily turned into formula. By my memory, only one very early episode does not end with Shore and Crane sharing drinks on the balcony, and their strong personalities tend to overwhelm guest stars/opposing counsel, making legal victory almost assured. Complicating matters, David E. Kelley’s penchant for recasting actually made it far more difficult to shake up the formula. At the start of season two, season one characters like Lori Colson were dropped and replaced without explanation. By mid season, many of those new characters were gone too. That cycle would be repeated several times, and given all these inexplicable, drop-of-a-hat cast changes, viewers like me had to give up on an hope of long term logic, continuity, or serialized storytelling, and settle instead for the comfortable antics of these two focal characters. The writers had established them as the best and closest of friends, and with such an unbreakable bond between them, basking in their shared, perfect wackiness would have to suffice. Often times, it wasn’t, and as the series aged, my interest waned, and I found myself watching out of obligation and a sense of time already invested.
In these final thirteen episodes, however, all this has begun to change. It’s as if the writers are working from a Bucket List to be completed before the end of the series’ life. There’s no more time for business as usual–it’s time to get things done!
First and foremost, the series has grappled with its own mortality as a television program through the character of Denny. While his struggle with Alzheimer’s served from day one as the basis for “Mad Cow” jokes and an excuse for crazy behavior, the disease did not have any real impact or affect any change in the character over the course of four seasons. But now, at the end, Denny’s condition has worsened, and the character has had to come to grips with the nearing end. The status quo, so upheld for four years, is changing, and the writers are using that as a lens to comment upon their own loss.
And it’s not just Denny. Though the series has always teased viewers with the possibility of intra-firm conflict (particularly over the desire to oust Denny as a named partner), I long ago gave up hope that the writers would actually engage these kinds of ongoing storylines (a particular strength of The Practice). But now, at the end, we learn that in this recession, the firm is bankrupt, and will presumably face some major shake-up (if not closure) before series end. I don’t know what that change is, of course, because this is actually an ongoing storyline!
Add to this a long-overdue willingness to shake up the series formula. There’s no getting away from that balcony scene at this point, but recent episodes have done what I would have thought impossible at this point so late in the game. Lawyers from Crane, Poole, and Schmidt are actually LOSING their cases. Last week’s “Thanksgiving” episode, perhaps one of the best of the series, did not feature a single scene in a courtroom, and instead put the characters together for an explosive series of revelations about Denny’s health, ongoing romances, and the firm’s economic health. This might not seem like much for Lost fans, but for a series this formulaic and repetitive, this is a major paradigm shift.
But most of all, DEK and his writers have realized that they are literally living on borrowed time, and anything they want to say they’d better say now. This has of course produced more of the political preachiness DEK is famous for, and what has become another predictable staple of the BL formula. But with the certainty of death comes a certain freedom. Last night’s episode featured guest star Betty White as a senior citizen suing the television networks for discriminating against older viewers in favor of younger viewers. DEK and his writers used this storyline as a forum to express their own disgust with the network, their own pride in fielding a cast of 50+ actors, their own concerns over the future of the television business in which aging means irrelevance. BL has always been a self-referential show; recently, the characters have referred to being in the middle of their “last season.” But last night’s episode broke the fourth wall by allowing TV creators to directly address their own cancellation (a la Arrested Development’s brilliant “S.O.B.s”)
There are, of course, hiccups in this transformation. The series did not suddenly turn into a well plotted, serialized masterpiece. I’m still wondering, for example, what happened to the disbarment proceedings that Alan Shore was supposedly going to face five or six episodes ago. In its final weeks, however, Boston Legal has changed in a way that is going to make me miss it after next week. While I opened by suggesting these developments might offer insight into the better show BL could have been, it’s also possible that this creative evolution is only something that can happen with the conscious knowledge that the end is near, and it’s now or never. In that sense, then, I’m glad for the cancellation, and for the first time in many years, I’ll be watching next week unsure of what will happen to these characters. Personally, I’m hoping that as oft-requested and promised, Alan will shoot Denny to spare him a debilitating illness, and must then defend himself in court. Formula may win out–and the two may close the series on the balcony as always–but for the first time ever, I have to say “We’ll see!”
