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The now famed -- and sometimes defamed -- television series Ally McBeal was never intended to be the pop-culture icon it became a decade ago, according to creator David E. Kelley.
"I was always intrigued by that from the beginning, because that was not our intent," Kelley told Sun Media. "I was not really setting sail with a show that I thought would be that provocative."
Kelley is looking back now because Ally McBeal: The Complete Series just debuted as a 32-disc box set with Calista Flockhart's pretty face and controversially lithe body on the cover. Simultaneously, the Season One box set also made its debut.
"We were leading with our entertainment hats," Kelley says of the intention of the show, which revolved around a young, single Boston lawyer named Ally. "This was going to be fun and this was going to be an eccentric and odd character who was representative only of herself. I never meant her to be a symbol of womankind."
Symbol she became, after the show premiered in 1997 and ran five seasons -- two great, one less so, a rocky revival in season four, and then a total collapse in season five because new love interest, Robert Downey Jr., had bombed out of his career because of personal problems in four.
In the halcyon days, the subject of Ally became hotly debated, in part because of the quirky, even absurdist manner her love-and-law story was told. She even became the lightning rod of a Time magazine cover story on "the end of feminism."
"I never anticipated that her anxieties and insecurities would be as relatable as they were to so many," Kelley says. "I just thought Ally was Ally and there may be no other person like her. But there is one and our story is about her. So, when it did touch so many chords with different people ..." Kelley lets the thought linger. The feminism debate, in particular, stung.
"When that Time magazine issue came out, I was embarrassed by it. I think I remember ducking for cover. I remember saying to the reporter when it was coming out, 'You've got to be kidding! We're all taking this just a little too seriously!' This was a crazy character on television and to be saddled with 'the end of feminism' I thought was a bit much."
But that is also one reason Ally McBeal remains fascinating and now has impact on DVD. Yet the exaggeration of reality that is a hallmark of all of Kelley's TV creations also give his shows a limited shelf life. Ally McBeal went on too long, Kelley says now. And he knew it then.
"Ally McBeal truthfully was a very finite show. The studio had big syndication dreams and would always cringe when I would say that publicly because you want shows to go 100 episodes and live that rich syndicated afterlife. But I always felt that Ally was very finite because it thrived so much on its originality. Once you tapped that well, it was going to be derivative of itself -- and we did tap it."
Yet that very originality still has cache: The dancing baby, Ally in a dumpster, her tongue jobs, the Fishisms, Cage's frog fetish, the unisex washroom! The unisex washroom alone would have made the show notorious. Yet it was a happy accident, Kelley admits.
"Well, we had limited stage space" -- hence, no room for two washrooms on the set.
"And I also didn't want to build a room that was off-limits to certain characters. So we said: How about a unisex? And that was that. It was not a big social statement."
Funnily enough, it became one -- and still is.