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This week's Ally was appallingly bad - as the writers, failing to be funny, settled on a style that was, at best, merely quirky. The problem is, all quirkiness and no real character development is like a vat of frosting. Bad frosting, at that. Yech.

I. Help! I'm Trapped In A Sitcom Factory

In the show's first - annoyingly precious - subplot, Ally auditions to be a temporary Tina Turner backup dancer, and eventually gets the gig. (Her secretary, Elaine, auditions and is a better dancer, but is rejected nonetheless.) Unfortunately, while Turner herself guest-starred, she barely spoke. If only she had. Auditioning the dancers, acting the diva, and ultimately singing, Turner sailed through with an elan and dignity that made me long for her to have a real role. Calista Flockhart, in contrast, mugged her way through, and in doing so, sold herself short as an actress this week.

I think it was a mistake for the show to focus - yet again - on Ally's neuroses and her need for the self-expression that her job fails to afford her. After her stint as Turner's backup dancer, Ally puts on her huge boxing gloves in the co-ed bathroom to rumble with anyone who crosses her path, frustrated that she can't be a backup dancer for her whole life. The spectacle is a little amusing - the huge gloves overwhelming the emaciated Calista Flockhart - but the point is a tired one: Ally is angry and sad because she feels trapped in her law job. Expressing herself simply by wearing weird, semi-transparent blouses just doesn't cut it for her anymore.

The question is, why's Ally so frozen? She has realized for some time that she wasn't meant to be a lawyer. But she cannot act on her epiphany. The constraints of the show - its need to stay within its basic sitcom parameters - thwart Ally's character development. The logical choice for her is to leave the law entirely. Instead, she stays because the show needs her to stay.

Billy - equally unhappy with his life in the law - also rebels in small ways, with his hair dye and men's movement meetings, but also, like Ally, keeps clocking in at the firm. If Billy and Ally grow close again - as the show suggested they will, when Ally hallucinates Billy in every seat at the Tina Turner concert and then makes overtures at renewing their friendship - it will only be a pact of desperation.

Billy and Ally's plight seems like a cross between Howard the Duck and Kafka. They are both trapped in a world they did not create (that of the sitcom as well as that of the law firm), and sentenced to do unfulfilling, meaningless work for reasons they do not understand (so that the sitcom can go on).

Each time Billy or Ally tries to break out, the show - like a video game that repeatedly resets itself at the beginning - will simply send them back to Fish & Cage. If they really rocked out, they'd rock right out of the show. I'd deal with a test pattern on Monday nights at 9 p.m. if only I could be comforted by the knowledge of their escape.

II. Of Fishes and Fetishes

Meanwhile, in the show's second - even more precious - subplot, Fish and Cage together represent a series of fired graphic designers, each stranger than the next. One of the designers has obsessive-compulsive disorder; another is obese; and the most interesting of the group is a transvestite, an African-American man who wears (tacky) women's clothes and a blonde wig.

The legal case is fairly clear-cut. Apparently, under their employment contract, the graphic designers were only supposed to be fired "for cause." That is, they were not "at will" employees. In his defense, their employer claims that their weirdness constituted "cause," because, he testifies, it made it hard for them to help the firm recruit and maintain a client base.

On behalf of the plaintiffs, Fish and Cage put on evidence that the fired employees were - apart from client recruitment, at least - excellent graphic designers, and that they were treated abusively by their employer. For instance, he wouldn't let them march in a parade on behalf of the company due to their odd appearance and behavior. Cage argues that while the cool kids always triumphed over the weird kids in grade school, that should change when we all become grownups - and that, therefore, these firings were wrong and the employees deserve money damages.

The consolidation of all these cases into one trial is unorthodox, but not unheard of. The employees - fired for similar reasons - might have attempted to bring a class action, but it's not clear that they have done so. Fact is, they probably would have lost a motion to "certify" a class because there aren't enough plaintiffs. There's no fixed rule for class actions, but it's almost always the case that the number of plaintiffs is in double digits. Absent certification of a class action, different employees with different contract or discrimination claims against the same employer generally will have different trials - not a single, consolidated case. But the trial judge can exercise his discretion to consolidate these cases to save time and resources, and that's what Judge Walsh apparently did here.

In the end, the jury finds for the employer, and the fired employees recover nothing. This finding seems to me a proper application of the law to these facts. The employees' admitted failure to maintain and expand the client base seems like good legal "cause" for firing them to me - whatever the moral merits of firing these employees may have been, and however obnoxious and unpleasant their employer obviously was. Put another way, these firings may have been morally wrong but they were probably not illegal. (A distinction that rears its ugly head in the law a great deal.)

The show implied that a few of the employees - the guy with OCD and the transvestite - might have brought disability discrimination claims as well. But the case was not presented or argued as if they had, except that the transvestite testified that a doctor had told him his fetish for wearing women's clothing was a "mental disorder." Failing to press the apparent disability claims was a missed opportunity for the plaintiffs. Fish & Cage may not be the crackerjack litigation shop it's supposed to be.

Although the plaintiffs lost, the case ended with a nauseatingly cute "parade of the weird" organized by Cage - apparently to comfort the employees who were frozen out of representing their employer in another parade. As my roommate commented, "This is like a P.C. version of Barney." To me, the specter of bizarro people boogeying around Boston was neither funny nor moving, as apparently intended. What was meant to be whimsy was merely flimsy; what was meant to be endearing, merely wearying. Your Reviewer was severely dismayed.

The transvestitism and fetishism (for articles of women's clothing), however, did interest me. I did a little research on fetishes in one of my favorite books, the brilliant psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan's Female Perversions. Kaplan writes:

A sexual fetish is significantly more reliable than a living person. It expects neither commitment nor emotional engagement. When the full sexual identity of the woman is alive, threatening, dangerous, unpredictable, the desire she arouses must be invested in the fetish. Unlike a fully alive, human female being with dangerous, unpredictable desires, who must be wooed or courted, fetish objects are relatively safe, easily available, undemanding of reciprocity. The French analysts say that the term fetish originates in the French word factice, meaning fictitious or artificial.

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