Boston Legal is a show, much like it’s protagonist, at war between its best and worst instincts. I have often compared shows to The Shield in that The Shield rules and other shows suck, and that becomes extremely potent here in that BL not only shares dramatic instincts but also perfectly mirrors it in theme. It is, of course, a procedural about different members of a single, small organisation with single-episode plots as well as multi-episode and even series-length stories.
(Context: I have not seen The Practice, from the show spins off)
More importantly, though, The Shield is about a bunch of street-smart jocks whilst Boston Legal is about super-intelligent nerds. There is, of course, a slight difference in profession, the former being about cops whilst the latter is about lawyers. Nevertheless, Alan Shore serves the same role in BL that Vic does on his show: the guy who goes Too Far to save the day; who will push any ethical boundary to and at the same time tell the outrageous jokes nobody else has the guts to make; the guy who gets laid a lot.
There’s a scene that illustrates their similarities and differences perfectly: Alan is in a bar flirting with his girlfriend when they’re accosted by a guy who punches him in the face, and Alan calmly pays another guy to punch him back, setting off a barroom brawl in which he hands out increasingly absurd sums of money. It’s not at all something Vic would do, but it’s equally as rooted in masculine posturing and is very funny and cool.
Honestly, Alan is a fascinating character well-suited to being a tragic protagonist. He has zero ethics but deep morals that come from deep emotions. Early in the series, he advises another character to leave the law profession because he believes she can’t handle it, and when he tells her what he does is evil that he takes no pleasure in, I believe him just as much as I do his smug joy every time he’s pulverising his way through a case. This is a light and breezy show, and James Spader delivers every line with powerful conviction, as if Alan is allowing his emotion to come to the surface (even if his conviction is that the situation is very silly).
What we end up with is a guy who is constantly contradicting himself, but in a way that’s maddeningly fun. The way in which he’s very much like the show (and very much like The Shield) is his commitment to action so extreme that you constantly wonder how the hell he’s going to get out of this; his cases often conflict heavily with his values, and his whole identity is based around being dangerous without suffering bad consequences. For example, that bar scene spins out into an entire plot of him defending himself from charges of conspiracy to commit assault.
The first problem is that the show cheats to get him out of the really bad situations. It becomes exasperating when one realises he’ll never actually lose a case, and even more that he’ll never suffer any negative consequences for winning one. The dramatic cowardice is all the more frustrating because the show is really good at telling stories within its parameters.
The single best arc in the first season is when Alan defends a milquetoast man named Bernie who, in a fit of rage, murdered his overbearing mother with a skillet and called Alan in a panic before anything else. This is the show’s bread and butter; a seemingly unwinnable case with an oddball client, and there are many entertaining twists and turns as Bernie’s mother wakes up, reveals her son attacked her, then dies properly.
The episode ends with Alan giving Bernie a moist little speech about this being a chance to turn his life around, abandon his awful mother to the past, and prove he is more than a beaten-down son. This makes it very shocking and funny when Bernie shows up in the very next episode having murdered his next door neighbour and asking for defence. Alan isn’t just morally outraged but deeply hurt by this; he denounces Bernie as an evil little man and refuses to represent him.
It’s a very revealing moment. Alan can come off smug because he’s intensely, intoxicatingly smug; everything he does is driven by emotion, and most cases are an excuse to feel the high of being the smartest guy in the room. He genuinely feels the pleasure of his ego, he genuinely loathes himself for it, and he genuinely sits with the contradiction.
He’s also bullshitting himself, which leads to the second problem: Alan and Boston Legal are not just sexist, but ludicrous and embarrassing in their expression of such. I will concede that sexism is a bit of a blind spot of mine, to the extent that I have a comfortable tolerance for it; I point to Futurama as the indicator of how sexist something can be without me being bothered by it, because its awful jokes about women come from not understanding them as opposed to actively hating them. Callousness as opposed to maliciousness.
I find Boston Legal sexism genuinely shocking and sometimes astonishing. At the beginning of the show, literally all the female regulars are written identically – wide-eyed naifs who are buffeted about by the male characters, hit on and lectured by them and responding with expressions of terror and confusion. It’s only through what I assume is a mixture of weak-but-present dramatic instincts in the writers and a heroic level of campaigning by the actresses themselves that actual characters emerge.
My favourite is Lori, because she proves herself Alan’s equal in terms of willpower and his opposite in almost all other respects, being completely ethical and above board, and choosing to hold herself accountable for her actions; when people try to call on her hypocrisy when she complains about unethical behaviour, she simply says her actions were wrong and she has chosen to change her behaviour. If Alan is an emotional creature, Lori is ruthlessly focused on the job at hand.
It makes the sexism stand out more. Look, I can roll with Alan and Denny being horndogs who follow their dicks; I believe that evil is a thing to be learned from and worth telling stories about, because something that is evil to you is, generally, something you wouldn’t think of. What I cannot tolerate is the cowardice in how the show develops its sexism; cowardice that clearly comes from the writers themselves refusing to acknowledge and deal with it.
I believe that writing fiction is the best way to find gaps, leaps, and errors in your own thinking. Aristotle says the best kind of tragedy starts with a good man in a state of happiness; you put someone in your own personal utopia and you can find assumptions that you realise don’t even work following your own logic. Any time the writers of BL find a hard moment, they take the easy way out, and they’re so good at writing scenes – always finding the most entertaining moments to string together – that it makes the misses more infuriating.
The absolute worst moment in the season is when Alan’s secretary files a sexual harassment claim against him. I was surprised in the first place, because this is clearly a show where the main jokes are Alan saying outrageous things because he thinks they’re funny and Denny saying outrageous things because he doesn’t think at all. I was surprised in the second place because she’s portrayed as sympathetically as possible; she makes it clear she likes Alan personally, she enjoys working for him, and she has no interest in extorting money from him or quitting, she just wants him to stop making sexual comments.
The third surprise was when Alan takes her completely seriously; he calls a meeting with her, is hurt that she went over his head with the complaint instead of talking to him directly, and sincerely hears her out. These were all good surprises, and the pleasure just on a technical writing level at delivering a nuanced and difficult take on this conflict was immense.
The bad surprise was when Alan’s solution was to fire her. He gives her this condescending bullshit speech about how he’s basically protecting her from himself and his uncontrollable sexual urges and the way he literally cannot process the image of a woman without imagining her naked, and he makes all these promises about, oh, he’ll totally protect her career from the consequences and being put back in the secretary pool will totally not derail her rise, and he’ll totally understand if she files a lawsuit.
Now, as a character move, this could actually work. It comes off, once again, as a Vic Mackey moment in which it is incumbent on him to fix the situation, and ideally without changing his behaviour. Alan spins it his own way in that his justification is intricate and florid, and this end up revealing a new nuance to the basic idea. I read a study on the ultra-disciplined (which is to say, ultra-productive), and the study concluded that people like this actually have very few limits of any kind on their behaviour.
Think of Mozart in Amadeus and you get the impression I got of the study – his intense productivity comes from the fact that it simply doesn’t occur to him not to do everything that pops into his head.
Alan fits into this quite neatly. He drinks, smokes, and fucks with the same intensity and casual attitude that he practices law; maybe he really does believe it’s impossible for him to stop saying horny things. This is what I mean by learning from evil; perhaps if I were a little more impulsive, I could access some of Alan’s productivity without suffering all the effects of going Full Alan Shore.
The narrative, however, seems to leave no room for his actions to be seen as goddamned weak-willed cowardice, and at least in the first season the plot does not develop from there; Alan simply hires a woman played by Betty White, whose joke is that she says things even more outrageous than Alan. Alan has a false Recognition in which he is a Put Upon Anti-Hero Angsting Over His Evil Nature and not a man who chose to make women into sexual objects. I get where women’s are coming from when they say they don’t like men.
One funny little way Boston Legal parallels The Shield is that it has a main character relentlessly bullied by the antihero protagonist and who gets clowned on by the narrative in general. On The Shield, this character is Dutch, the geek who crows about his high test scores and win rate; on BL, Brad, the archetypal jock. My favourite moment with him was a scene in which he successfully takes down a violent man in court and still comes out looking like a fool because he brags the entire time about his military experience and turns out to have been mistaken in assuming the guy was bluffing about having a bomb.
In any other show, the blonde-haired square-jawed ex-Marine ex-hostage negotiator would be the coolest guy in the room, but here he’s a joke nobody takes seriously and fairly so because his desperation to be taken seriously gets in the way of him being taken seriously. And the show writes him so fairly; his best episode is one in which he is genuinely uncomfortable representing a lesbian client, and we have both the emotional journey of him connecting to her as a fellow human being, and the comedy of Alan taunting him with the word ‘lesbian’.
It’s an interesting word to use to describe a fictional character, ‘fair’. I think it’s important for writers to be fair to their characters, which means respecting their motivations. The fundamental principle of drama is that the character gets what they want. This separates it from comedy, in which the character doesn’t get what they want. The pleasure of a serio-comic character like Brad or Dutch is that they get exactly what they want – to show off how smart they are – in a way they definitely do not want.
It’s bad dramatic writing to have a character stop wanting what they want. You can reinterpret the terms of their motivation – perhaps Brad will change his behaviour as such so that the people around him like and respect as much as he craves – but you can’t change it without disrespecting the character and the audience who chose to follow them.
I see a lot of my relationship with my mother in the relationship between Alan and Denny – specifically, the end-of-episode cigar-and-drink chats. Denny is extraordinarily funny, partly because William Shatner brings a career-best performance (delivering patently absurd lines with complete sincerity, so many great facial expressions with my favourite being his smile as he silently encourages a defendant to hit on the judge) and partly because Denny is, paradoxically, completely honest about the mask he’s wearing at all times.
When he’s smoking with Alan, that mask comes off. If Alan thinks he’s comfortable with his contradictions, Denny doesn’t think about his contradictions at all, and it’s only with Alan that he’s free to bounce them around. Their discussions take place in Degree Absolute, where neither has to spin or lie because neither has to win anything; they’re free to explore actual truth.
This is how my mother and I talk to each other, and it’s been like that since I was a child; these essays have influence from many, many sources, but they’re rooted in those conversations and, through reason, breaking an idea down to its truest form. I think in my entire life I’ve met two people as willing to follow an idea as far as my mother, and in fact when I talk to her now, I have to catch myself and remember that unlike most people, she does not view criticism of her beliefs or methods as a personal attack of her character.
It’s things like this that make me recognise how thoroughly uncommercial my taste in fiction is. People have frequently asked me, do I ever just watch something? To which the answer is a resounding no. Beloved Soluter Babalugats put it well once when he asked the obvious counter-question: where does your brain go when you watch something?
But it goes further than that. The most truthful way of putting it is that I watch things so I have something to write about. It sounds empty when I put it like that, but it doesn’t feel that way; my writing kicked into gear when I stumbled upon the idea that I should start an essay by crunching down my idea to its most weekend and build from there. I’ve come to realise how much easier it is to process the world this way.
It’s far easier to process things like my relationship with my mother, or sexism, or jocks by using a TV show as a centre of gravity. I’ve read that the process of writing trains the process of thinking – language and structure you use affects the way you move through the world.
The upshot of this is that very few TV shows or movies are actually bad to me because I’m using them as a jumping off point for my own creativity as opposed to an end in themselves. I’m not saying this makes me better or smarter than other people; rather, it’s made me look at the negative experiences of my life a little differently. I’m less bothered by bad situations because I keep seeing their utility, even when I don’t see it yet.