So, Billy is dead and Ally McBeal will have to live the rest of her life without the love of her life.
Ho, hum.If that's a strange reaction, it's the best I can muster in response to this week's edition of the increasingly unwatchable "Ally McBeal." The fact is that I just don't care about any of these characters anymore.
While they used to be endearingly offbeat, now they're just annoyingly strange.
And nothing has so clearly demonstrated how far this show has fallen than the death of Billy (Gil Bellows). Viewers discovered that his strange behavior this season was the result of a brain tumor. And the growth of the tumor was causing him to have hallucinations -- including one that he and Ally had been married for years and were devoted to each other, which occurred just before he keeled over and died from a brain hemorrhage.
(As if watching it once wasn't boring enough, Fox is going to repeat the episode on Monday, April 10.)
If something like this had happened in the show's first season, or maybe even early in the second season, it would have been shocking and emotional. But creator/writer/executive producer David E. Kelley has turned "Ally McBeal" into little more than one big (and lame) joke, so Billy's passing was about as emotional as a trip to the grocery store.
Even the final scene, with Ally (Calista Flockhart) and Billy's estranged wife, Georgia (Courtney Thorne-Smith, who's also leaving the show at the end of the season) hugging in front of his grave was startling only in its lack of impact.
It's looking more and more like it's too late to save "Ally McBeal."
MOVING ON: This being television, we don't have a lot of time to mourn the dead. In the next original episode of "Ally McBeal," scheduled to air Monday, April 17, James Le Gros joins the cast as Bellows' replacement.
Le Gros will play Mark Albert, a "good-looking, 30-ish lawyer" who is an "excellent litigator" specializing in criminal cases. (Which might be a nice change of pace from all the civil cases the firm normally engages in.)
We'll just have to see what annoying eccentricities the new character will display.
SAY IT ISN'T SO: Word that David E. Kelley is going to have another show on the air this fall might seem like good news -- but it's more like iffy news at best.
Fox has announced that an hourlong series tentatively titled "The Faculty" -- a one-hour "drama with comedic elements" about the teachers at a New England high school -- will get on the air more quickly than it originally hoped. (Probably October, given that NBC has the Olympics on in September.)
And this directly contradicts what Kelley himself told TV critics just weeks ago when he said he didn't envision doing another show before early 2001 at the earliest and more likely fall of 2001.
Why does this matter? Because Kelley, who's notorious for micromanaging his projects, had five shows on the air this past fall -- "The Practice," "Ally McBeal," "Chicago Hope," "Snoops" and the half-hour, repackaged "Ally" (OK, make that 4 1/2 shows). He ended up devoting little time to "Hope" (despite promising CBS he would); he ended up devoting more time than he planned to "Snoops," although the show was never good and was quickly canceled; and the quality of both "The Practice" and "Ally McBeal" suffered.
I was hoping he'd devote more time to those two shows without the distractions of a third series.