Boston Legal: "Head Cases," "Still Crazy After All These Years" (David E. Kelley Productions, 20th Century-Fox, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Late last evening my husband Charles asked me if we could watch a DVD from the backlog rather than sitting at the computer watching YouTube. I obliged by breaking out the boxed set of the first (2004-2005) session of David E. Kelley’s series Boston Legal (which lasted five seasons on ABC), described on imdb.com as “a spin-off of the long-running David E. Kelley series The Practice (1997), following the exploits of former Practice character Alan Shore (James Spader) at the legal firm of Crane, Poole, and Schmidt.” Kelley had a quite long résumé as a TV producer and writer, including such shows as Doogie Howser, M.D. and Ally McBeal, but he was best known for his legal series: L.A. Law (his first credit, debuted 1986), The Practice and Boston Legal. The main difference between The Practice and Boston Legal is that, while both are set in Boston, the firm in The Practice was a criminal defense firm while the one in Boston Legal dealt exclusively in civil litigation. Also, like Steven Bochco, Kelley was a faithful worshiper at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL, and one of the things L.A. Law, The Practice and Bostonb Legal became known for is the infuriating inconclusiveness of the episodes’ endings.

L.A. Law had largely set the template for modern-dal legal shows, including two or three intersecting plot lines in each episode and so much sexual cruising goinig on between the members of the firm we’d be forgiven for wondering whether this was a law firm or a straight bathhouse. The central characters are Alan Shore (James Spader), who has been hired by the nationwide company that owns the firm (you didn’t think there were nationwide chains of law firms under the same ownership? Neither did I) to see if he can ease the firm’s principal lead partner, Denny Crane (William Shatner), into retirement. If he can’t ease Denny Crane out quickly and easily, he’s willing to play hardball (though given that Shatner was in all the series’ 101 episodes, it’s not that anything he tried actually worked). Meanwhile, there’s another member of the firm, Brad Chase (Mark Valley), who’s having an office romance with Sally Heep (Lake Bell). Among the other women in the law film are Tara Miller (Rhona Mitra), who like Sally has long auburn hair but unlike her has a vaguely British or British-influenced accent, and Lori Colson (Monica Potter), a blonde whose main function seems to be to stand around Brad and cast disapproving glances at the way he’s screwing through the hired help.

In the opening episode, “Head Cases,” one of the firm’s senior partners, Edwin Poole (Larry Miller), shows up for work totally naked between his suit jacket and his shoes (he does have a nice ass, or at least as much of it as we get to see) and is immediately whisked off to a mental hospital to recover from his latest “attack.” The main intrigues are a case dealing with Ernie Dell (Philip Baker Hall), who wants his marriage of six months annulled because he’s convinced his wife is having extra-relational activities on him; and Sarah (Jadzia Pittman), a young Black girl with a typically domineering stage mother, who was passed over for the lead role in the musical Annie because she’s Black and the producers wanted a white girl. What Ernie Dell doesn’t realize is that super-attorney Denny Crane, his friend since childhood, is also the man who’s having the affair with Dell’s wife. At one point Dell wants the law firm to hire private investigators to find out who the other man in Mrs. Dell’s life is, and when Crane and others in the firm keep putting him off. Later he hires his own private investigators, learns the truth and goes to the Boston Legal offices to threaten Denny with a gun – only Denny realizes that the “gun” Ernie is holding is just a blank-loaded starter’s pistol and therefore harmless.

Meanwhile, one of the other attorneys entraps the ex-husband of a client with a prostitute in order to blackmail him into letting her move to New York with their children so she can take a job as a medical resident. I was expecting that the Annie plot line would resolve either with the girl deciding that she didn’t want to be a child star (the writers, Scott Kaufer and Jeff Rake, dropped a hint early on that stardom is really her mom’s ambition, not hers) or the Solomon-like one of the judge ordering the two girls to split the role, The latter is essentially what happens, albeit with the Black girl just as understudy and being able to play three matinees, but only after Reverend Al Sharpton (as himself) makes a guest appearance in the courtroom and delivers an impassioned sermon-like speech riffing off the most famous song from Annie, “Tomorrow,” and insisting that the Black community in general and Sharon in particular want the sun to come out today.

The second episode, “Still Crazy After All These Years,” deals with a former attorney and girlfriend of Brad Chase, Christine Pauley (Elizabeth Mitchell), who once tried to kill him and ended up in a mental institution. Now Brad is actually trying to win her release, to the understandable discomfiture of Sally, the co-worker who’s also his current girlfriend. In one of the great scenes in this episode, the doctors at the hearing board considering her release declare that the only reason for her apparent improvement is the medications they’ve put her on – whereupon Christine reveals that she hasn’t actually been taking them. Instead she’s been accumulating them for weeks, and as the pills keep coming out of her pockets the way cutlery kept coming out of Harpo Marx’s raincoat, we get the point that Christne has got better on her own and not due to any meds. Only has she truly got better? For the second half of the episode,.Christine starts almost literally stalking Brad, turning up in the combination restaurant/cocktail lounge where he’s taken Sally (this show has more scenes in barrooms than it does in courtrooms), presumably because it was a place Brad took her during their affair. Later Christine turns up at a fancy office party being given by the firm, and when Brad confronts her and asks her why she hasn’t gone back to her parents in Chicago the way she told everyone at the institution she would when they agreed to release her, she says instead that she’s got her old job in Boston back and she intends to stay there. For Brad this is terrible news, even apart from Sally’s jealousy; it means that instead of being her legal guardian just long enough to get her to the train station to put her on the train to Chicago, he’s stuck with her indefinitely … and that’s the cliff-hanger on which the episode ends.

Also in the story is a deposition taken by Denny Crane of Martha Silver (Penelope Windust, daughter of the late director Bretaigne Windust, who did some of Bette Davis’s last movies as a contract player at Warner Bros.), a widow who’s suing her late husband’s cardiologist for “loss of consortium” because her husband died on the operating table. Denny viciously cross-examines her about her current sex life to establish that just because she’s lost her husband doesn’t mean she hasn’t been able to find “consortium” in the arms (and other parts) of living men. Her attorney brings Denny up on charges before the state bar, but Denny wins the case and not only avoids disbarment but settles the case for a low-ball figure by scaring the opposing attorney into avoiding a trial, which he might lose and get absolutely nothing either for his client or himself. In a bittersweet scene between Denny and managing partner Paul Lewiston (René Auberjonois, in one of the few roles of his career in which he wasn’t a screaming queen), the two of us reminisce about having seen Muhammad Ali’s laqst fignt, in which Larry Holmes pounded him into oblivion. “He could still box,” Paul says; “he just wasn’t Ali.” This is supposed to give Denny the message that though he’s still a competent attorney, he’s not the killer lawyer he used to be and maybe it’s time for him to retire.

I hadn’t realized that William Shatner not only was in Boston Legal, he was one of the major principals, and unlike stars like Errol Flynn, Robert Taylor and Tom Selleck, Shatner actually became less talented as an actor when he lost the hunky good looks everyone remembers him for on the original Star Trek. (At one point I even made a Star Trek joke about him; I had him saying to one of his adversaries in the firm, “I’ve fought Denebian slime devils! I can hold my own against you.”) I liked Boston Legal but I didn’t watch it at the time, at least partly because the seriam gimmick of ending each episode inconclusively bothered me (as it still does, though that’s less of a problem on DVD when you have the next episode right there instead of having to wait a week before it airs), and coming to it now what surprises me most is how much of a comedy it was. David E. Kelley and his writers put so many jokes into each episode this almost qualified as a “dramedy” (to use that horrible 1990’s concoction), and though the show holds up pretty well it’s certainly no match for Law and Order and its spinoffs and sequelae.