Ally McBeal (Calista Flockhart)
Ally McBeal is the show’s quirky, endearing, and romantically hapless
heroine, a high-powered Beantown lawyer who works at the eccentric firm of Cage
& Fish. Despite comfortably inhabiting the role of a successful, modern-day
working woman, Ally nonetheless sees fit to flaunt her beauty with short
miniskirts, daydreams endlessly, and seems to be on a never-ending quest to land
the perfect husband - all of which has incurred the wrath of feminist thought,
which tends to label the show as a glaring setback for women everywhere.
However, it would probably be more accurate to describe the show as a
delightfully clever, postmodern twist on women’s television and Ally as the
center of this sunny, off-kilter world.
Ally has probably become most famous for her elaborate fantasy sequences -
most notably the dancing baby that served as a manifestation of her biological
clock during the first season. The fantasies are meant to be a reflection of her
rich imagination and strong inner-life, which have led many to label her a
soulmate of the firm’s most idiosyncratic lawyer, John Cage. However, now that
the show has reached its fourth season and decided to take a more “mature”
approach, Ally's vivid fantasy life has been curtailed to a more minimal degree
(no more dancing babies, sadly).
Ally joined the firm, despite the reputation of her obnoxious law-school
classmate Richard Fish, because of the lecherous advances of her first boss.
Once there, she found herself working side-by-side with her childhood
sweetheart, Billy (who randomly developed a brain tumor and died in the third
season), and his new wife, Georgia, which naturally led to various forms of
conflict. Although she clearly earns a good deal of money, Ally still lives in a
somewhat nondescript apartment with her best friend and fellow lawyer Renee
Radick, who often coaches her through the general pitfalls of life. While she is
certainly a skilled lawyer, Ally is also a neurotic soul who is notoriously
unlucky in love. Throughout the course of the show, she has gone through an
entire spectrum of boyfriends (including the infamous Fop and Hammond, the
bisexual coffeeshop proprietor), and while she may have found a keeper in
attorney Larry Paul, nothing is certain in the whimsical world of Ally McBeal.
