Al Qaeda's in line at the bank, France is flirting madly with fascists, New England is plagued by an earthquake, and the clergy can proffer no succor, as they're all in hiding from the law. Still, a thin ray of light pierces this darkness: Ally McBeal has been canceled. There's nothing like a miracle to restore one's faith in the future.

It's not that the show itself is so dreadful (well, alright, yes, it is: the sophomoric, smug humor, the prurience forced to stand in for originality, plus Ally herself, possessed of neither a sympathetic nor credible bone in her famously skeletal collection of same, but I digress). More dreadful -- and disheartening -- is the fact that so many women loved it for so long. Worse still is that they loved it because they identified with Ally, and worst of all is that it so gratified them to own up to this (sort of a Sisterhood in Pathos Is Powerful groundswell, pass the Kleenex). That scores of young women would tune-in each week to feel vicarious self-pity by sympathizing with the putative woes (no perfect boyfriend, whither baby, etc.) of a young, healthy, successful, Harvard-educated lawyer kept me up nights in ways that Tom Ridge's color-coded warnings never could.

It's not because I don't understand that the connection between worldly success and happiness is only tentative, or that we don't all have a profound need for deep human connection in our lives. It's just that by thirty-something, couldn't Ally have begun to see gifts and good fortune beyond the false friends who'd let her down? Couldn't it once have occurred to her, in that big city of Boston, that if you're looking for meaning in life, and you work in an office full of raging, power-mad, lust-driven rivals, maybe you ought to switch trolley lines at Downtown Crossing on a whim now and then, and see what else is out there?

The show's creators liked to bash the bashers by characterizing them as humorless, old-guard feminists put out by Ally's indifference to their generation's struggles on her behalf. Whatever. What really bothered at least this detractor was not even Ally's plaintiveness, but the show's eroticisation of this, and the fact that -- with Eros being the presiding god, she therefore couldn't -- wouldn't -- let it go. But now it's the year of the burkha, and the whiny, self-pinioned American girl is, finally, so last season.

Issue Date: April 25 - May 2, 2002