Thursday 1 September 2022 10:52 PM What DOES the return of Ally McBeal say about women's lives today? Asks LIZ ... trends now
Rarely do I provoke someone to the extent that they answer back on the cover of a glossy magazine.
Yet, at the tail end of the 1990s, I did exactly that, prompting the biggest (and smallest) star of the day into expressly telling me in huge letters: ‘I’m thin, so what?’
I had been wailing in print — in my own magazine, Marie Claire, and in this newspaper — that Calista Flockhart, the star of Ally McBeal, was a danger to women’s health.
She was the kind of Hollywood thin that rendered her features too big for her face, her skull too large for her tiny body, clad as it ubiquitously was in a pelmet skirt that revealed her kidneys.
Ally was the anti-Bridget Jones. While Bridget was healthy, self-deprecating, sweet, funny, clever and a loyal friend, Ally was a she-devil who would trample any woman who got in the way of her catching the bridal bouquet.
Unlovable heroine: Calista Flockhart as Ally McBeal
She would also, pathetically, collapse in a puddle on the floor if she found an alpha male attractive.
She was ditsy, she was shallow, she was emotionally unstable (I lost count of the catfights) and she seemed to know nothing about law, despite the degree and the job with Boston firm Cage & Fish.
In short, she was just intensely annoying.
The show was steeped in fantasy, with bizarre visual effects hammering home to the viewers Ally’s inner emotions. Annoyed by a man, she throws him out of the window. Offended by a colleague’s pregnancy, a missile blasts a hole through that non-existent tummy. We’re not dim as well, we get it!
She was a simpering, flirtatious, skinny, hysterical cartoon, as far from being a role model for professional women as could be.
Maybe that’s why men fancied her. Indecisive, insecure, naive; Ally was quite literally the little woman any man could boss around.
Which is the reason Time magazine put her doll-like face on its cover in 1998, alongside cut-outs of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, with the line: ‘Is feminism dead?’
She was ditsy, she was shallow, she was emotionally unstable (I lost count of the catfights) and she seemed to know nothing about law, despite the degree and the job with Boston firm Cage & Fish
During that time, I was campaigning with the government for magazines and the media in general to stop celebrating extreme thinness. ELLE retaliated with Calista Flockhart on the cover, saying, ‘I’m thin, so what?’ A big, fat middle finger to me.
Later, in 2001, I put Renee Zellweger as Bridget on the cover of Marie Claire, applauding the fact that at last we were able to glimpse a woman with cellulite on the big screen.
Now, with news of an Ally McBeal reboot in the works, it looks as though irritating Ally and the annoying Dancing Baby — another computer-generated special effect that appeared whenever she contemplated her biological clock — are back.
Oh no. Oh, God, no. Do we really need a man-chasing, office-bound, superannuated stick insect whose main achievement is to still be the same dress size? Do we need men who remain squabbling, vain boys and refuse to grow up? Do we?
More to the point, have the producers realised that in resurrecting Ally McBeal, they will be relaunching the least woke show in the world at a time when you can land yourself in hot water simply by trying to define what is a woman?
No doubt the snowflake generation will nod their self-obsessed heads at Ally’s constant whingeing, but the script will have to be heavily updated to reflect the modern woes of young professionals today — not being able to ‘WFH’ is an infringement of my human rights, for example.
And yet, at first glance, Ally McBeal did seem presciently diverse, especially when compared with Sex And The City and Friends, which were contemporaneous on our screens (Ally McBeal ran from 1997 to 2002).
Asian actress Lucy Liu had a starring role, as did black actresses Lisa Nicole Carson and Regina Hall. The office even had a unisex washroom.
But scratch the surface, and a different picture emerges.
Lucy Liu was a stereotypical inscrutable block of Eastern ice. The black characters were curvaceous, loud, down-to-earth mother figures. The unisex loo was merely yet another location for characters to grope, bitch and wail.
Yes, Portia de Rossi was, in real life, a lesbian, but she didn’t come out publicly until 2005, after the show had ended.
Ally McBeal was the nail in the coffin of the professional woman, who had been growing in stature since the early 1980s. We were portrayed as ditsy, drunk, dishevelled and impossibly hormonal. Who, frankly, would employ us?
Ally McBeal was the nail in the coffin of the professional woman, who had been growing in stature since the early 1980s. We were portrayed as ditsy, drunk, dishevelled and impossibly hormonal. Who, frankly, would employ us?
In contrast, although they didn’t tick any diversity boxes, the four Sex And The City women were loyal, funny and ate and drank exactly what they pleased. Men came a very poor fifth.
Carrie was a one-woman celebration of fashion and individuality, whereas Ally McBeal, in her succession of mid-1980s power skirt-suits with clumpy block heels, was
