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Two Guys and a Girl: Robert Downey Jr. Triangulates Ally McBeal

The beginning of the Ally McBeal season premiere was a disappointment - but, luckily, only for Ally. Though Ally's boyfriend, Brian, seemed to be on the verge of a marriage proposal, in the end he offered her only a sapphire ring and a proposal that they move in together. While Ally was disappointed, viewers must have sighed a collective sigh of relief. Although Brian was cute and presentable, he wasn't anywhere near interesting or deep enough to be marriage material for Ally. But while this was instantly obvious to those of us out there in Televisionland, it took Ally an entire episode to figure it out.

It Takes A Felon: From Ex-Con To Sitcom

Was it me, or did the show immediately and dramatically improve as soon as Robert Downey, Jr. walked onscreen? Just out of prison, Downey is doing this sitcom with enthusiasm, as if it were live theater. Lines seem better - cleverer and sharper - when he speaks them, and Ally seems to perk up out of her unending Ally-ness and gain a bit of unpredictability when he's around. At their best, Downey and Calista Flockhart together on television come impressively close to providing the shivers that live theater can induce.

When we first meet Downey's character, Larry, he is half therapist, half pugilist. Ally chooses him as her new therapist merely because he's moved into her old therapist's office, and she consults him in order to mull over whether she should move in with Brian or not.

But for a therapist, Larry is awfully chatty and opinionated. In their first session, he contends that "Every relationship eventually comes down to sex," and asks Ally how the sex is with Brian. Though Ally is clearly taken with Larry at the start of the session, he ends up offending her. First he gets her to admit that Brian's inadequate in bed, and then he tries to convince her that she should alert Brian of his inadequacy ASAP. So far, so good - but Larry becomes a loser when he quips, "If you get married, you're going to spend all your time telling him he's inadequate anyway, right?"

That last part of Larry's exchange with Ally, by invoking the stereotypes of henpecked-husband-and-nagging-wife, smacks of the old-time sexism that we expected from Billy, and which may have led to his untimely demise. (Chauvinists, beware!) Nevertheless, Downey's character is instantly recognizable as not a sexist, but a subtle manipulator - and perhaps a seducer as well. He creates instant intimacy with Ally by noting that he has a folder on her that the old therapist left behind, and by getting her to talk about her sex life. Then he alienates her, but in a way that leaves her only ambivalently angry: While she's upset by what he's said, she also realizes some of it is insightful.

Elaine - with a terrible new haircut - also offers advice on the Brian situation, advising Ally to trap a good man at the first opportunity, since they're getting scarce. Rather than acting out of desperation, as Elaine advises, Ally decides to take Larry's advice and bring up her sexual complaints with Brian directly. He responds by asking her if she's "capable of having good sex" - "is it me or is it you?" She suggests it's him. He responds, "So you're indicting the relationship because of sex?" The show then cleverly cuts to this week's legal case (discussed below), which raises similar questions about whether relationships have to be all about sex.

Later in the show, another session with Larry follows, in which Ally mulls over how important sex is anyway - and Larry contends, in essence, that Sex Makes The World Go Round. Among other things, he points out that men "only enter into relationships for sex." Again he veers into sexism, and again the nagging wife stereotype comes out: "No wonder you want a husband, you're already a wife," he accuses Ally when she complains about his tactics. Then Larry annoys Ally further by suggesting that her critique of a sex-obsessed culture is only based on her insecurity about her own looks and ability to sexually attract men.

Ally leaves fuming, but later admits to Renee that she's attracted to Larry; Renee advises her to stay away: Though Brian is boring, Ally is always attracted to bad men - men who "burn her." Of course, this foreshadows that Larry - whose "badness" is at least exciting for viewers - will be around quite a bit this season, and Brian will soon be history.

And indeed, at the episode's end, Ally breaks up with Brian, returning his ring. We learn that one of her reasons is that his penis is as small as a "chicken thermometer." (Gosh, give the guy a break - surely he's a turkey thermometer at least?) Although Ally doesn't bring up penis size to Brian's face (rhetorical fellatio?), she is just as brutal as Larry has advised her to be with Brian: "When I look ahead, I see myself getting tired of you, tired of us," she tells him. He accuses her of having Prince Charming fantasies. She confesses she was with him "out of default": "It's not every day you meet someone to love." He orders her out of his office, saying that they won't even be friends after this.

Larry shows up at Ally's firm, surprising her in the toilet stall. He reveals that he's not a therapist, he's a lawyer - as she would have known if only she'd glanced at the plaque on his door. In a wonderfully played riff, he asks her what more he should have disclosed on the plaque to make it clearer: "I'm a lawyer? I went to law school? I sold out?" Downey's skill is in the way he underplays - rather than stepping on - the final quip, saying it softly and almost as an afterthought. His humor is funnier for being throwaway.

The show has reportedly signed Downey for 8 episodes and renewed him for 8 more. David E. Kelley should lock him up - oops, sign him up - for at least 80. Before Downey Jr. appeared, the show could have been subtitled Night of the Living Dead Attorneys. Now, as he comes back after struggling to kick his addiction, we might develop an addiction to him.

One Girl, Fat And Rich

Meanwhile, the supposedly legal aspect of Ally McBeal threatens to be just as woeful as it was last season. Last season leaned heavily on sexual antics to try to spice up lame, repetitive trials. Virtually every show was either a sex harassment case, or a case about annulling a marriage, and the constant sex references - usually neither funny nor titillating - got old fast.

Last season's annulments were based on a husband's anger that his wife hadn't revealed her breast implants before marriage, and on another husband's anger that his wife hadn't declared before marriage that she was a lesbian. As these previous episodes made clear, these types of "deceptions" generally aren't the kind of fraud that justifies an annulment. While they may cause one partner to cry fraud, they really aren't true fraud in the sense that the narrow doctrine of annulment requires.

This week's episode is de ja vu all over again. A wife seeks an annulment on the theory that her husband only married her for money. Her evidence? He's good-looking and poor; she's homely, fat and rich; while they had great "companionship," they never had sex; and he ended up cheating on her with a model. Legally, the evidence is just as weak as it intuitively sounds.

John Cage does a nice job examining his client, the wife, and cross-examining her husband (a serial modelizer, to use Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell's term), but Cage is fighting a losing battle. As his opponent points out on behalf of the husband, if every marriage that was motivated by money or ended by an affair were annulled, the law of annulment would swallow up the law of divorce. Unsurprisingly, he wins the case, persuading most jury members that the marriage was not wholly a fraud - in part because both spouses agreed that there was at least some basis for the marriage in their vaunted "companionship," if not in sex. Note to Cage: Don't prep client to happily agree to stuff that helps the other side.

The verdict is followed by another typically Ally McBeal move - the confession of a party that the case was Not About Money. Note to Show: People don't often incur thousands of dollars in legal costs to try cases that are Not About Money. This time, the husband forsakes any claim to the alimony he'll receive now that their breakup will be a divorce, not an annulment - and says that he loved his wife and would have stayed with her, but that she changed the terms of their marriage, apparently by asking for sex. How outrageous of her! That would drive almost any man to page through the Victoria's Secret catalogue for a little consolation.

Sex and Subtext

Cage summarizes the annulment case thus: "The homely girl got taken, and that's why we're here." While Cage warns that this slant on the case might be hard on his client's self-esteem, the show never really suggests that it is incorrect. Instead, the show buys into the idea that of course an attractive man would never want to sleep with a plus-sized woman - although he might want to marry her just to, say, hang around and play Scrabble.

Thus, as soon as this woman enters the firm, Fish pops up to comment sotto voce, "What a beast!" Cage asks Fish to feign attraction to her anyway, to boost her confidence. Fish protests, "I'd sooner pop a chubby for a tree frog," but he ultimately complies, complimenting her lavishly. Nevertheless, when the woman predictably shows up in his office to seduce him, Fish is as horrified as if he were the last camper left in the Blair Witch woods.

Not only does all this further the sexist "truth" that for women, appearance is all, but also the casting of the episode adds insult to injury. In typical TV-style, the actress whose character was supposed to be homely, sex-starved, fat, and repellent was - while not exactly a size 2 - quite well dressed and hardly repellent. She looks more like your average law firm partner than the Blair Witch.

Television seems increasingly to believe that ordinary people's looks are unspeakably horrible. Perhaps living with Michelle Pfeiffer has given David E. Kelley an unrealistic sense of the world.

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