The Practice was one of David E. Kelley's great series with the unrivaled brilliance of Dylan McDermott, Camryn Manheim, Michael Badalucco, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Lara Flynn ("gunrack?!") Boyle, and Marla (Party of Five) Sokoloff. The show, however, rested on the sturdy, charismatic, and impassioned back of Steve Harris, one of a number of awesome, bald, large black men on TV (see: McBride, Chi). Eugene Young was one of my all-time favorite TV characters, and it's a שבולימ"ה that Harris hasn't gotten more work that befits his utter awesomeness.
At the end of the run, however, The Practice was dying, its storylines played out. And like other Kelley vehicles that seemed to fly off the rail into the theater of the absurd (see: Picket Fences, Ally McBeal, Boston Public, and Chicago Hope - I was too young to remember if the same thing happened to L.A. Law and Doogie Howser, M.D. [which I just discovered he also created!!]). But then things changed - he premised the spin-off, Boston Legal (this guy loves Boston, no?) on absurdity, and let it ride its own insanity into the future. What ensued was one of the greatest TV shows of the post-West Wing era, a show who cast brilliant actors (Spader, Shatner, Larroquette, Julie Bowen, Betty White, Candace Bergen, Rene Auberjonois) in brilliant roles and let them have fun with each other.
Last night, Boston Legal came to an end, and David Bianculli has both a blogpost about it and a longer column/interview with David E. Kelley (Mr. Michelle Pfeiffer to those keeping score at home) in Broadcasting and Cable Magazine.
יהי זכריהם ברוכים.
Egocentrism
- egocentric
- Brookline, MA, United States
- I'll post rants here, and musings; articles and thoughts about articles. I'll keep it quite complex and yet astoundingly simple: whatever it is I am interested in at any given moment.
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