So, do I think that the second season of Boston Legal improved upon its first? Sadly, it’s “short answer, yes with an if; long answer, no with a but”. It’s technically fixed many of the symptoms of problems I identified – the women’s plots are better, the protagonists lose more often (even Alan), and it’s even made more ambitious storytelling choices in which the consequences of our character’s actions come down upon them… but it’s still all in service to easy entertainment. I don’t actually hold unambitious goals against any work – if you’re making a comedy, I’ll take it on that level, if you’re making the best drama ever made, I’ll take it on that – but it’s always frustrating to see real potential in something get squandered for the sake of comfort, particularly such a rich cast and set of ideas.
Boston Legal is very much a product of the 00’s, at least as I remember them. One little aspect is its light metahumour, with Alan making several references to the fact that he’s a character in a television show – my favourite is him casually remarking that he hasn’t seen Denny all episode, though I also have a lot of affection for him saying the reason he and a lawyer played by Kerry Washington haven’t seen each other in a while is because he went off the air for the summer and she went to do some movies. By far the most profound use of meta-references, however, is Denny explaining to Ivan (played by Tom Selleck) that they are both ‘leading men’ – they move through life doing whatever they want with no fear of the consequences of their actions.
Meta-humour seemed to come to a boil over the course of the 00’s; there’s not much difference between the tone of the meta-gags of BL and the meta-gags of Metal Gear Solid (released in 1999) – we all know this is a work of fiction with its own structures and rules, and we’re not gonna let that get in the way of our investment in the story. This is distinct from the meta-gags of, say, superhero films at the time (think “What did you expect, yellow spandex?” from the first X-Men). All this collectively feels like it was building up to the explosion of meta-humour that seemed to define the late 00’s and all of the ’10s; both the “we’re not gonna say we’re in a story but we’re definitely gonna act like it” sensibilities of Community and the MCU as well as the outright observations of things like later Family Guy and Rick & Morty.
At the time, the most popular webcomics were also often metafictional as a matter of course, which would naturally skew my perceptions a bit, but I think it really was a time when people were playing with what television and stories could do; the fact that DVDs made it easier than ever to track continuity and especially storytelling decisions must have been a factor, much as the mixture of immediate audience feedback and easy access to archives in webcomics affected that. Boston Legal sits in this interesting position between two eras, still driven by basic procedural and soapy logic but willing to acknowledge the artifice.
The other thing that roots this in its time is the intense homoeroticism. I recall the adults saying that we now lived in a post-racial post-bigotry harmony that made it okay to make ironic racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes, and of course that was a) wrong, and more importantly b) created this very weird space where heterosexual men (as well as those of us kidding ourselves) would express love for each other in a way that sounded and looked gay, and the humour was that we were all comfortable with that. This is present not only here, with Alan and Denny (I am aware the show ends with them married), but with Turk and JD on Scrubs, Abed and Troy on Community later in the decade, all the male leads on How I Met Your Mother, and all Pegg/Frost characters in any Edgar Wright work.
I remember people saying – and even thinking myself – that maybe we were all being codependent and refusing to acknowledge that, but in retrospect this might have been the healthiest part of nerd culture at the time. Certainly, it’s nice that Alan and Denny both support each other; I talked last season about how wonderful their scenes together are as they simply allow each other to be. This season’s biggest Haha They’re Actually Gay joke is when they literally sleep together so that Denny can support Alan through his night terrors, and they frequently express their love for each other in ways that go beyond masculine expectations but are, nevertheless, sweet.
In fact, it feels like another thing that boiled over – not just into men literally coming to terms with their sexuality (and even gender), but men developing healthier relationships with their emotions and each other. I’ve certainly found it easier to relate to men comfortable with making those kind of jokes, and even channelled the intense homoeroticism when I lived for a year with my best friend in an Alan and Denny-esque quasi-romantic bromance, in what was up until recently the happiest time of my life. Two friends who genuinely love each other willing to support each other through hard times.
The third part – and oddly, the part that strikes me as having aged the best – is the politics. This very much captures a liberal sensibility, and I mean that not only very specifically in terms of attitudes and policies, but in a grey and nuanced sense – it captures what is both good and bad about liberals. Alan is one of those lucky few people who may be at his most attractive when he’s morally outraged; the season makes a critical error of leaning too far in on Spader’s ability to play the clown for the first eight or so episodes, but it quickly course-corrects and gets him back on his game with what might be my favourite plot in the show.
Alan befriends a lawyer named Jerry, who we are told suffers from Asperger’s. Now, there are a number of ways this presentation can be criticised from a disability perspective. The chief one is that Jerry’s condition does not match any representation of Asperger’s that I understand it – while he does struggle with eye contact and emotional expression, his habit of holding his hands against his thighs (which gains him the cruel nickname ‘Hands’) and punctuating his sentences with ‘bingo!’ sounds more like OCD. Admittedly, this reflects real life diagnosis issues real neurodivergent people have, but it feels more like the writers putting a bunch of traits they like into a blender.
Less obviously, there is the issue that Jerry is presented as super-intelligent. He’s presented as being a database of law information – nowadays, we would describe him as having a clear hyperfixation on law as a special interest. My fellow neurodivergents have raised issue with this kind of presentation; as if a disabled person must be useful in order to be worthy of respect and interest, and of course neurodivergent people who don’t fit this stereotype find it inconvenient at best and soul-degrading at worst. It’s a common observation how many neurodivergent people slip into the cracks; not geniuses who ‘overcome’ their disability with some specific skillset, not so disabled that they really obviously need help (i.e. Federal funding and a support worker) just being alive. Left to their own devices and crumble.
It may be obvious from my wording that I don’t completely agree with this. Everything I just said is true, but also I’m willing to take individual representations of neurodiversity on their own terms. In this case, of course Jerry is a genius lawyer – they’re all genius lawyers. That’s the point of the show. More importantly, though, Alan ends up defending Jerry’s dignity beyond that. Because of a convoluted series of events, Alan chooses to defend Jerry, which involves proving in a court of law that he was discriminated against when the firm not only passed him over for promotion to partnership, but never once considered promoting him at all on the basis of his disability being weird and embarrassing – something that mortally offends Alan.
For all his rule-bending and -breaking, Alan fundamentally believes, like all liberals, that life is supposed to be fair. It is supposed to be that if you work hard, provide a valuable legal asset to a law firm, and are generally a nice and considerate person, you should be considered for promotion in Crane, Poole & Schmidt, no matter how initially off-putting your social skills are. One of my favourite things about observing the world the past fifteen years has been watching liberalism incorporate neurodiversity and queerness; developing language and social rules and rituals on the basis that, when you get down to it, it’s not fair that people are denied rights on this basis.
Alan might make soft little speeches about how he prefers being alone, but when you get down to it, he loves people. He loves how strange they can be, and he loves the person he can be around them and for them. He might fuck up the legal system every day for fun and profit, but he wants a world where people are free to be who they are as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone – a world of order. As he often conveys to Denny in their chats, he believes deeply in the principle of the thing. This is endearing and even empowering to watch as he verbally tears into CP&S over their dismissal of Jerry (who very much held a knife to the throat of a likeable leading character not one episode before).
I appreciate the people who’ve spoken to and about me like that, and I find myself thinking of my cousin’s nonbinary neurodivergent child being accepted into the fold of my mother’s board game club. There’s a neat moment in one episode where Alan imitates Jerry’s “bingo!” interjection, which immediately offends Jerry; Alan looks downright chastised, embarrassed that his attempt to fit in with Jerry badly failed, and doesn’t do it again. Alan’s evolving friendship with Jerry is one of trying to incorporate a strange, lovable person into his life.
The show’s solution to its women problem is the single most embarrassing decision it could possibly make: throwing out all the old female characters and bringing in new ones with no explanation. Monica Potter has maybe two scenes before being tossed aside; Rhona Mitra is at least given a little plot of Tara deciding to move on from the firm and Alan. It brings in its new characters just as awkwardly; indeed, the new characters are initially not only introduced as if they were always there, it silos them all off together for a weirdly long time, leaving me to splutter “Who are you people?” a few episodes in. It’s particularly bizarre to me that most of them seem to just wander off halfway through the season.
The most successful – which is presumably why she’s the longest-lasting – is Denise; she ends up filling the role of one of the few adults in the story, a version of Alan who actually played by and believes in the rules – socially as well as legally. You could also easily see her as a younger version of Shirley, and indeed the two of them end up having a very fun relationship of mentor/mentee, as both care deeply about being a Normal Person, which both interpret in terms of personal good taste.
I find it interesting that Brad and Denise end up romantically involved; Opposites Attract is something I have very rarely seen in actual partners (and the science backs me up), but the most common version of it I’ve ever personally witnessed is people like Brad (highly attuned to social cues and more than willing to churn them back out) and people like Denise (ambitious, driven, practical, always contemplating personal values) coming together. One thing that fascinated me about the Divergent trilogy was that it showed a romance between those two kinds of people from the inside.
I know I’m not generally attracted to practically-minded people who are most interested in maintaining traditional systems (if anything, I’m only now at the point in my life where I fully appreciate and can connect with people like that) and in turn, people like that tend to get very impatient with my constant questioning of the assumptions of reality. What is it about the Brads and Denises of the world, that they romanticise and seek each other out? In this case, it’s that Brad needs her help with something; in a rare case of the show being funny enough to get away with something childish, he discovers he’s a bad kisser and seeks out her advice. Is it really that simple?
Meanwhile, I like the new character Garret; he’s a junior associate who immediately comes off as a guy trying to replicate the actions of guys like Alan Shore but in a robotic and insincere way, which is not to say he’s ineffective. It’s a shame they don’t keep him around, because it would have been fun to watch him slowly interpolate the actual behaviours and attitudes considered acceptable at Crane, Poole, & Schmidt, or at least to see him get fired. This is a case where we have Peter Campbell over at Mad Men, playing out exactly that story for us. This is the upside of seeing things in a spiritual sense.
By the early stretch of the second season, enough continuity has built up that it often drives the story forward (by the end of it, Denny is fairly consistently referring to Alan’s night terrors and fear of clowns). There is an extent to which it feels to me like a lack of inspiration; all art is, of course, the process of filling in space and time and tricking you into forgetting that, but the writers consistently keep going back to the same wells. Continuity is the cheapest and best special effect, making you feel the weight of the fictional history being created, but you do have to keep doing new things with it. Continuity is the obvious main strength of Always Sunny, but every time the characters bring back the past, they use it in a new way; Dennis saying he doesn’t have feelings is seen as a moment of horror in the moment and used as a weapon against him many seasons later.
In this, we keep coming back to Denny doing something ridiculous or douchey and then worming his way out of it somehow; usually, because people around him (like Shirley) love him enough to forgive him and bail him out (sometimes literally). This ends up pointing us to an inevitable decision: would Alan choose between his career or his friendship with Denny? Because it’s becoming increasingly obvious that at some point, Alan would have to pick. He very obviously loves his job; at no point does he ever even seem to consider taking on the greater responsibility of partner, as compared to everyone else. And why would he? Quite aside from the fact that he would despise being The Man, he doesn’t need more money to fund his lifestyle and he’d have a harder time evading the consequences of his shady legal moves. The fact that he works for any institution at all seems a big compromise for him.
On the other hand, as much as he loves Denny, you can see how that friendship compromises Alan as well. Spader is an amazing actor, selling every time Alan puts aside his disgust with Denny’s politics (and occasionally actions) to enjoy his company. There’s one or two sequences this season where Denny goes so far as to incite Alan’s moral outrage – where Alan is astounded by the depths of Denny’s selfishness. This show is very much the product of a time where network shows (whether through a fear of alienating viewers, a genuine belief in the connections between human beings, or just thinking it funny) enjoyed showing characters who were politically opposed but emotionally friends.
For Alan, it’s very obviously a case of his pragmatism versus his idealism. Leftists of all stripes are historically accused of hypocrisy; Alan embraces that as a way of life. He fully believes that the system is unfairly stacked against women and minorities, and he’s going to take full advantage of that to live a comfortable life. He has fully separated his ideals and his actions as a matter of course and he doesn’t give a shit what you think about that. His friendship with Denny is both full expression of and greatest challenge to that – he keeps having to pick between being his version of a good person and being truly with another human being, and he keeps compromising the former.