Boston Legal: Verility, Verisimilitude, and Vengeance (er, Justice)
Boston Legal: Verility, Verisimilitude, and Vengeance (er, Justice) by Roxanne McDonald
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It’s about time sexy went to smarmy and courtroom came to realism in a great TV show with great characters, great dialogue, and greater acting. |
What a terribly fun, delightfully dark show is Boston Legal. I typically steer clear of law dramas, but was drawn to investigating how the delicious James Spader works out performing in a antithetical manner as a character that while on the dark side—like many of his characters–is less likeable or intriguing as a “bad boy” but a bloated bad boy. Tsk.
We remember him as the stuff of our wet dreams in the early eighties, as the gorgeous cool one on the fringe of the Brat Pack,
as the elitist snob Steff in Pretty in Pink; the auto-eroticist Graham Dalton in Sex, Lies, and Videotapes; as the worst kind (attractive) of sociopath, Michael Boll, in Bad Influence. Now we get him as the pompous, even foppish caricature of a lawyer, Alan Shore. He is flip, nasty, and smarmy both sexually and in the courtroom; and as one traipsing the razor edge of the dark side, his quips land courtroom opponents on their asses as he wins with irreverence, iconoclasm, or the occasional self-effacing or beneficent gesture.
Boston Legal is made all the better, too, by the seasoned and sharp Candice Bergen playing Shirley Schmidt, the no-nonsense dynamo who brings another layer of absurdity to the auspices of high litigation.
And Captain Kirk all but put to sleep now, pretense is displayed with a self-centered, dismissive pride in William Shatner’s Denny Crane. The legal aptitude and rare burst of sensitivity notwithstanding, Denny is so repugnant that viewers are sure to keep watching, if only to seek out the possibility of at least a modicum of humanity in a character that proves Shatner’s acting reach goes much further than his arms—which after holding down the hokey but innovative Enterprise have since held a 2004 Emmy for his role.
The corners of the show are rounded out to complete and thereby make for a seamless program—by the celebrity and renown of such seemingly long lost performers as Constance Zimmer, who has gone from the recalcitrant Penny Barnes on Good Morning, Miami to the smokey yet swift-thinking Claire Simms, among many others.
And the bonding moment at the close of each episode
makes the whole hour most worth the smirks and sick laughs, as Spader and Shatner as Denny and Alan, muse, ponder, or commiserate.
What a brilliant crossover for Spader and Shatner and a fine segue for law shows that were more lackluster than alluring…as Boston Legal is. The only thing missing for perfect realism is the undeniably Bwostonian accent.
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