Originally published in the Age Green Guide, 12 June 2008.
Boston Legal, the strange hybrid of legal issues-based drama and comedy that recently returned to Channel 7 for its fourth series, walks a familiar tightrope for its creator David E. Kelley. Even at their best, Kelley’s shows somehow straddle the fine line that separates the very good TV from the very bad, and Boston Legal is no exception.
The show takes all the hallmarks of earlier Kelley productions – which include Picket Fences, Ally McBeal, Boston Public and The Practice – and takes them even further to the extreme. Kelley’s previous shows have been notable for his fondness for outrageous, almost hysterical plots: one episode of Picket Fences centred on a cow giving birth to a human baby; the high school drama Boston Public featured a teacher who used a gun to subdue his students; and even The Practice (ostensibly the prestige drama on Kelley’s resume) had its lawyers stalked by a serial killer dressed as a nun.
From day one, however, Boston Legal has been the most certifiable of Kelley’s creations. It was born from the ashes of The Practice, but where that program maintained a pretense of seriousness, its spin-off always pushed further into the realms of the absurd. Its signature character is Denny Crane (William Shatner), a once-brilliant lawyer who is suffering from dementia. Crane is still capable of moments of brilliant insight, but his behaviour is increasingly erratic, running the gamut from sexual harassment to shooting his own client.
It’s the perfect role for Shatner. His acting style has always been at once hammy and charismatic, leaving you undecided if he’s terrible or actually strangely brilliant. The answer is probably that he’s somehow both at once. His role in Boston Legal is all performance, rather than acting: he is wheeled on to do his patented Denny Crane shtick, and the usual criteria buy which we might judge an actor don’t really apply. Shatner, like Crane, is there for his own unique brand of eccentric star power.
The uneasy co-existence of good and bad is the key not just to Shatner’s performance but to Crane’s effectiveness as a lawyer, and ultimately Boston Legal’s success as a show. It somehow makes things that shouldn’t work come off, and you are always waiting for the writers to finally lose control.
The signs of a show in trouble are everywhere. In its first three seasons the supporting cast has churned endlessly, with characters often discarded without explanation midseason. (Shatner and James Spader are the only founding cast members left). The show’s visual style is needlessly erratic, full of visual tics like whip pans and twitchy zooms. And the writers have become overly fond of postmodern gags such as characters referring to the show’s own script contrivances, or singing along with the theme music.
Yet the show has worked, so far, through being endlessly entertaining and building itself on the solid grounding provided by a few key cast members. In addition to Shatner’s flamboyant Denny Crane, there’s James Spader’s Alan Shore, a womanising and apparently immoral lawyer who is constantly drawn to the defence of the marginalised and defenceless.
Spader is the series’ big gun, acting-wise: where Shatner gets through on star power, Spader is a serious actor working hard at an ambiguous part. He makes Shore into a genuinely complex character, capable of despicable behaviour, yet also much more inclined to genuine kindness than his more socialised colleagues. Shore is the show’s voice of conscience, and Spader has fun with the contrived but meaty big-issue speeches that Kelley and the other writers provide him.
Shore’s liberal and humanitarian bent is provided comic balance by Crane’s right wing, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later philosophy, and the friendship between these two men is the heart of the show. Their blokey camaraderie is offset by Candice Bergen as Shirley Schmidt, the partner at the law firm who provides some grounding in sanity. Schmidt is given many dry one liners – the character is a close cousin of Bergen’s Murphy Brown – but in the context of Boston Legal, hers is essentially a straight role.
In the early episodes of this new series, there are signs that the writers may be trying to steady the show: the courtroom cases are a little more restrained, and there has been a welcome focus on the decidedly non-eccentric junior lawyer Katie Wells (Tara Summers). Yet the old habits don’t go away, and you can already start picking the cast members who seem destined to disappear from the show without explanation. The stretches of decorum on Boston Legal are merely a brief respite; it won’t be too long before Denny Crane shoots someone again.
When Kelley’s shows work they are exciting and unpredictable, but all have followed the same trajectory, eventually collapsing as the insanity became self-defeating. Eventually, no doubt, Boston Legal will lose its balance and its studied eccentricity will go from charming to grating. For now, like Denny Crane, it’s just crazy enough to work.