Nearly 30 years after it became a part of the cultural lexicon, with its dancing babies and unisex bathrooms and controversially short miniskirts, Ally McBeal has arrived on Hulu for a new generation to discover (the show had a temporary streaming life on Netflix, but was removed in 2017). Depending on who you asked in the ’90s, the show was either a revolutionary take on feminism and workplace dynamics, or too-whimsical-for-its-own-good collection of quirky (borderline offensive?) characters. Now that it’s streaming again, it’s worth revisiting to figure out if this once-beloved show still holds up.
Opening Shot: Ally McBeal (Calista Flockhart) is dressed for work, professional lawyer that she is, in a suit jacket and a tidy scarf around her neck, staring off in the distance. She narrates over a flashback where we see her as a child sniffing a boy’s butt. “I’m not sure how it all started. It was ’cause I smelled his bottom. It wasn’t that stupid, we saw dogs do it, that’s how they knew for sure.” The montage and narration continues, as young Ally and this boy (whose name is Billy Thomas, plays as an adult by Gil Bellows), follow their hearts and butts to college. The young couple gave each other their first kiss and took each others virginity, but their young love ends when Billy tells Ally he’s transferring law schools so he can attend Michigan, leaving her at Harvard – alone and single.
The Gist: Ally McBeal is a lawyer who quits her job at a Boston legal firm when she’s sexually harassed by a sleazy male associate. As she collects her things and leaves the office once and for all, she runs into an old classmate from Harvard Law, Richard Fish (Greg Germann). Fish is something of a sleaze himself, at least in the sense that he became a lawyer purely for the heaps of cash that help him sleep at night and not out a sense of morality or justice, but deep down he does retain a shred of decency.
Fish has just opened up a new firm where he’s a partner (alongside John Cage, played by Peter MacNicol who is actually not even in the pilot, but who is an integral part of the show throughout), and, knowing Ally from school, he offers her a job at his new firm on the spot, so she accepts. Richard doesn’t immediately offer one key bit of information though: Billy, Ally’s estranged ex, works there, too. This is enough to throw Ally off, but she’s even more thrown off to learn that Billy’s married to a lawyer named Georgia (Courtney Thorne-Smith, arguably the show’s biggest name at the time it came out thanks to her successful run on Melrose Place). And Georgia is not shy in explaining to Ally that, yeah, she feels threatened by Ally but is also ready to go on the offensive if she has to.
Ally’s world, at least in the first season, is inhabited by her roommate, Renee (Lisa Nicole Carson) and her colleagues at Cage & Fish; Billy, Fish, Cage, and know-it-all assistant Elaine (played by Jane Krakowski, excelling at her brand of self-important eccentric). Eventually, Portia de Rossi, Lucy Liu and Robert Downey Jr. would join the cast, but season one focuses on Ally and her coworker’s cases at the firm and their interpersonal relationships, especially as she tries to reconcile her unrequited love for Billy with the fact that he’s now happily married to a woman who admits she hates Ally.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Ally McBeal is a David E. Kelley show, and it’s one of his legal shows of the era like The Practice and Boston Legal, so they all share some DNA. (Real heads will remember the Ally McBeal/Practice crossover event.) But Ally McBeal also feels akin to Sex and the City. Both shows, featuring single, professional women in the late ’90s and early 2000s, were attempts at a feminist statement that layered comedy on top of sexual autonomy on top of very specific wardrobe choices, despite their own occasionally problematic themes. And when I say problematic, I don’t think either show is cringe material so much as they’re completely of their time, and our standards back then were a lot different.
Our Take: Even though all five seasons of Ally McBeal are already out there in the world, we’re judging the series here primarily on the strength of its pilot, which establishes itself completely in those first forty minutes or so. Some of the show’s now-signature elements seemed so specific and unique at the time: the stuttering voiceover, the silly CGI graphics, they felt revolutionary. (Anyone whose watched any number of K-Dramas though will tell you that using CGI effects to lighten the mood or exaggerate a situation is nothing new though, it’s just that Ally might have been one of the first mainstream American shows to do it and make it a signature feature.) The way the show openly talked about sexism, these choices and specifics helped to make the show the phenomenon that it was, and while you can nit-pick the feminism of the show, including Ally’s obsession with men and her insecurities, not that many other network series were even offering a strong female POV at the time. Insecurities and all, she spoke to a massive audience.
Some of the other aspects of the show, the comedy about body size and periods, the never-ending Vonda Shepherd music, are a little less tolerable in binge format – what was novel back then feels grating in large doses now. But we shouldn’t forget that the soundtrack was a selling point, the music of this show was integral to it’s existence. For what it’s worth, as far as we can tell much, if not all of the show’s original music remains intact, something that has kept so many shows from the ’90s off off streaming. We only just got Northern Exposure on Prime Video, and I’m waiting for the day I can stream classic episodes of The Real World with their original music. (I was forever changed when Tami from The Real World Los Angeles got her abortion to the backdrop of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.”)
For how much we talked about Ally McBeal back then, it’s interesting we don’t talk about it as much now, because ultimately, it was a great show, warts and all. It propelled so many actors into the limelight (it’s almost impossible to believe Downey Jr. was using this network show as something of a career comeback, though he eventually had to leave it due to his ongoing battle with addiction.) It gave TV watchers a weekly watch that was soapy and silly, but that cartoonishness never overshadowed the fact that it occasionally underlied a meaningful message.
Sex and Skin: The show has a TV-PG rating – I’m no prude, but given the liberal references to sex and cartoonish fantasies, it’s probably not something I’d watch with my younger kids. Despite it’s frank dialogue and innuendo though, it never gets graphic.
Parting Shot: Ally walks down the street alone. As she walks out of frame, scored to yet another original song by Shepherd, she says, “The real truth is, I probably don’t wanna be too happy or content, because 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. Whaddya know? I’m having a great time and I don’t even know it.”
Performance Worth Watching: Ally McBeal was anchored by Flockhart but it was always a true ensemble filled with characters that were successfully fleshed out from episode one. Even though Richard Fish is supposed to be a slimy, greedy guy, the show manages not to pigeonhole him as a sexist idiot, instead he uses some of his conniving qualities for good. Instead of wondering how anyone can stand him, Greg Germann’s performance lets you believe that deep down Fish is a nice-ish guy.
Memorable Dialogue: “I’m sorry, but I really hate you,” Georgia tells Ally when she learns that Ally and Billy’s relationship was several years long. “That’s okay because I hate you too,” Ally replies. “Really? You’re not just saying it?” Georgia asks, perking up.
Our Call: STREAM IT. If you came up through adolescence or young adulthood with Ally, the nostalgia of it all will likely be a welcome throwback. While not all of the “edgy” aspects of the show will mean as much to a modern audience, you can still appreciate the show for what it was doing and how much it captured the zeitgeist of the time. And, nostalgia aside, it’s a well-written legal dramedy with memorable and well-crafted characters that will draw you in. I’m just sorry if you end up with “Hooked On A Feeling” stuck in your head indefinitely after watching.
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.