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MrsSpringsteen
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Boston Legal
- Thread starter MrsSpringsteen
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The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
BonosSaint
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My dear. Sweet new wallpaper.
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MrsSpringsteen
Blue Crack Addict
Alan or Brad? 
I have Denny if you prefer-not in the singlet though
I have Denny if you prefer-not in the singlet though
BonosSaint
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Alan. Brad's too pretty. Denny works best in fantasy and not actual pictures. Particularly actual pictures in singlets.
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MrsSpringsteen
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BonosSaint said:
So are you confessing to having sexual fantasies about Denny/Shatner?
BonosSaint
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Yeah, it only takes about 4 seconds of my time--so if I'm in a hurry.
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MrsSpringsteen
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MrsSpringsteen
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It was so good last night, how come no one watches it?
ABC doesn't promote it either, it's a shame. It feels like some sort of secret society if you love this show.
It's not on again until the end of the month, election and other stuff I guess.
ABC doesn't promote it either, it's a shame. It feels like some sort of secret society if you love this show.
It's not on again until the end of the month, election and other stuff I guess.
BonosSaint
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Not on until the end of the month? Not on during Sweeps? This show is wonderful. Some of the most unique characters I've ever seen.
Last night's episode was priceless.
(One of the few other members of the secret society)
Last night's episode was priceless.
(One of the few other members of the secret society)
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MrsSpringsteen
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It's pre-empted on the 21st for the American Music Awards and on the 14th for Shatner's new game show-oh goody
But it's on Sunday the 26th after Desperate Housewives, then again on the 28th-supposedly both new episodes
The Season 2 DVD set comes out on the 21st
But it's on Sunday the 26th after Desperate Housewives, then again on the 28th-supposedly both new episodes
The Season 2 DVD set comes out on the 21st
Doozer61
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thetitans2k
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last nights show was brutal. This show is getting way to crazy. Last season was much better.
BonosSaint
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Yeaa, it's back. Alan's getting a little creepy again. Good to have him back in form
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MrsSpringsteen
Blue Crack Addict
Oh my God , that show is f'ing insane
I love it so much
Again tonight
I'm not a fan of Coho though, Coho should go. No offense Craig Bierko, it just isn't working for me
I love it so much
Again tonight
I'm not a fan of Coho though, Coho should go. No offense Craig Bierko, it just isn't working for me
Last edited:
Doozer61
Blue Crack Addict
and i am getting a little tired of Hands 
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MrsSpringsteen
Blue Crack Addict
I love Hands-I know what you mean though, the noises etc can get annoyingI hate the way they killed Daniel Post off too
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MrsSpringsteen
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Fantastic episode last night, I am still laughing at what Alan said to the white supremacist Olsen twins.
It's probably not on again until January
It's probably not on again until January
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MrsSpringsteen
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They finally showed Denise's baby bump last night, kind of strange considering..
Julie Bowen vowed last month that she’d “shock” her “Boston Legal” co-stars by nursing on set after her baby was born, but yesterday she took her promise one step further. TV’s “Extra” reports the actress went into labor yesterday on the set of the legal drama! But according to the celebrity news show - who was on the scene at “Boston Legal” - at least two of Bowen’s co-stars remained unfazed. Apparently, William Shatner and James Spader had no problem joking around about Bowen’s water breaking during shooting. This will be the first child for Bowen and her husband, Scott.
I fell asleep last night and had to record the last half hour. I don't know, something seems off about BL now
Julie Bowen vowed last month that she’d “shock” her “Boston Legal” co-stars by nursing on set after her baby was born, but yesterday she took her promise one step further. TV’s “Extra” reports the actress went into labor yesterday on the set of the legal drama! But according to the celebrity news show - who was on the scene at “Boston Legal” - at least two of Bowen’s co-stars remained unfazed. Apparently, William Shatner and James Spader had no problem joking around about Bowen’s water breaking during shooting. This will be the first child for Bowen and her husband, Scott.
I fell asleep last night and had to record the last half hour. I don't know, something seems off about BL now
BonosSaint
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I slept through it last night.
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MrsSpringsteen
Blue Crack Addict
Tonight
I hope it's better this season
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MrsSpringsteen
Blue Crack Addict
I've been so out of the loop that I just found out that this is the last season-starts tonight. It's sad but it is time for it to go. All I ask is that Alan and Shirley hook up before the end, pretty please.
At least we'll always have the DVDs
NY Times
September 21, 2008
The New Season Television
Boston Lawyers Get a Few More Days in Court
By JACQUES STEINBERG
MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif.
DENNY CRANE and Alan Shore, the two high-priced lawyers played by William Shatner and James Spader on ABC’s “Boston Legal,” were having a spirited argument about the continuing liability of big tobacco when the conversation was brought to a halt by the unfurling of a zipper.
It was Crane’s.
“My junk,” Mr. Shatner’s character lamented to Mr. Spader’s from the corner of his opulent office, as he peered into his open suit pants. “My junk failed me.”
“It’s receded,” he added, recounting a recent bout of impotence. “Like a turtle too ashamed to come out of its shell.”
The scene, from the first episode of the series’s fifth (and final) season, which begins on Monday, is true to any number of installments that have preceded it. Since being spun off from “The Practice” in 2004, “Boston Legal” has drawn attention for plumbing ethically tangled issues like assisted suicide, the execution of the mentally impaired and the neglect of military veterans, with a leavening of theater-of-the-absurd moments. Less noticed is that the series has also sought to explore the contours and complexities of male friendship in a way that few, if any, other shows have ever attempted.
Since the middle of the first season virtually every episode has ended with Mr. Shatner and Mr. Spader settled in club chairs on the balcony of Crane’s office, talking late into the night about their (apparently) platonic affection for each other over sips of Scotch and puffs of cigar smoke.
“I sometimes think the episode might just be a vehicle to get us to the balcony scene,” Mr. Spader said, clad in one of Shore’s elegant pinstripe suits, his diction as tight as his character’s, during a pause in filming on a recent afternoon.
Shore and Crane, who are otherwise skirt-chasing womanizers, sometimes follow their cathartic balcony sessions with a seemingly innocuous sleepover, either because they don’t want to be alone or want to keep talking.
“Where does male love begin and end?” Mr. Shatner said in his dressing room here on a recent morning, when asked to distill what “Boston Legal” was ultimately about. “I’ve never had male friends like that. Never to this extent of being such a buddy that it displaces the intimacy you might have with a woman. It’s interesting to speculate what the limitations are.”
In a telephone interview from his home in Northern California, David E. Kelley, the series’s creator and principal writer, said he had come to fashion those balcony scenes from “a nostalgic longing we all have for a time in our life — and it’s probably high school or college — where we really had the flexibility of schedule just to sit with a close friend and share thoughts.”
“We’re all on such treadmills,” added Mr. Kelley, the father of a son and daughter with the actress Michelle Pfeiffer. “When you get married and have kids, you’re home reading bedtime stories at that hour.”
For a time last spring Mr. Kelley was convinced that Crane and Shore would be having their final balcony session on last season’s finale, in May. He even wrote that episode with the two pledging to go off and spend more time fishing and less time working.
“I was sure it wasn’t coming back,” Mr. Kelley said of the series. The issue was, at least partly, money. “We were very far apart on license fees,” said Mr. Kelley, who produces the show with 20th Century Fox Television. “ABC wanted the show back, but at a number that made financial sense for them. Their number didn’t make sense for us. It was a negotiation.”
From ABC’s perspective there was also the matter of ratings: this past season “Boston Legal” was ranked 50th among prime-time shows on broadcast television, according to Nielsen Media Research, with an audience of about 8.9 million — a loss of about 200,000 from the prior television season, but a drop of 1.3 million from the season before that. (As a counterbalance to that math “Boston Legal” is a perennial Emmy winner, with Mr. Spader and Mr. Shatner having won multiple times for their roles; each has been nominated again this year, along with Candice Bergen and the series itself, for outstanding drama.)
Complicating the negotiations was that ABC and Fox Television were disagreeing over another show, an ABC pilot titled “Life on Mars,” that Mr. Kelley had adapted from a British precursor. Ultimately ABC Studios wound up becoming a co-producer of the show with Fox, which had the effect of removing Mr. Kelley.
“They probably wanted more creative control than I was used to giving, which made sense,” Mr. Kelley said.
Only hours before ABC was to announce its fall prime-time schedule, the network made a decision that would amount to a split verdict on “Boston Legal”: It would return for one more season, but a truncated one.
“Because we do love the show,” said Jeffrey Bader, executive vice president of ABC Entertainment, “we wanted to find a way for the show to come back and end in a way the show deserves.”
There are to be 12 episodes this year, as opposed to the standard 22, with the final show a two-hour finale.
“Creatively I wouldn’t have felt shortchanged if we ended after four years,” Mr. Kelley said. “We got to tell the stories we set out to tell. But I think there are more to tell.”
And so, in what has become the equivalent of a weekly video op-ed column, Mr. Kelley will again use Mr. Shore’s character in particular this season to rail (mostly in closing arguments in court) about any number of matters that are troubling him, including the disproportionate power of drug companies and the seeming inequity of a law that effectively prohibits malpractice suits by soldiers treated in military hospitals.
Having had his characters tally the dead and wounded in Iraq and bemoan the encroachment on civil liberties in recent years, Mr. Kelley may also have more to say about the Bush administration — in large part, he said, because few other scripted series have sought to take a political stand.
“Once I thought it was irresponsible for a producer to be espousing his own views and rants,” said Mr. Kelley, who worked as a lawyer in Boston before finding his niche in Hollywood working on shows like “L.A. Law” and creating others like “Ally McBeal” and “Picket Fences.” “I have since become convinced we are living in a time where it is irresponsible not to. We were witnessing the death of debate.”
Still, what viewers may ultimately remember about the show this season is the pathos of its characters, chief among them Denny Crane. He is a lion of a defense lawyer whose quirks, frailties and flashes of brilliance have provided Mr. Shatner a late-career opportunity to reintroduce himself to those who knew his work on “The Defenders,” “Star Trek” and “T. J. Hooker,” to say nothing of those ubiquitous Priceline commercials. Crane will continue to grapple with what appears to be the early onset of Alzheimer’s, in yet another pioneering story line for a main character on network television.
When he first appeared in the final episodes of “The Practice” — a show built on a firm as gritty as Crane Poole & Schmidt of “Boston Legal” is well heeled — Crane was defined by little more than the way he said his name. It was rapid-fire — from Mr. Shatner’s mouth, it sounded like “Dennycrane” — and it instantly announced a self-centeredness and impatience.
“We originally wanted a guy who thought saying his name was enough,” said Bill D’Elia, the executive producer who was hired by Mr. Kelley to shepherd the transition from “The Practice” to “Boston Legal,” and who has overseen “Legal” ever since.
Asked the source of that staccato delivery, Mr. Shatner had a ready answer: “I always imagined it being the way a snake flits its tongue out to taste the air. Denny flicks his name out there to get a reaction.”
What has never been entirely clear to Crane’s associates or the show’s viewers is this: When, for example, he appears in an office corridor fully dressed but for his pants, has he done so consciously (as a gag) or not? This season, Mr. Shatner said, he expects the character to become more self-aware.
Speaking during a break from rehearsing the fifth episode of the final season, Mr. Shatner said: “There’s an interesting chord being played, in a scene I’m paying a lot of attention to, in which I say, ‘I think I’m slipping.’ Later on I say, ‘I’m slipping.’ Then I say, ‘I know I’m slipping.’ ”
“I think Kelley is planning on something dire, with some disposition,” Mr. Shatner added, “or some disposal.”
Which raises an immediate question: Might Mr. Kelley be planning to kill off Denny Crane, leaving Alan Shore bereft and bereaved?
As it turns out, Mr. Kelley does not seem to be leaning that way, at least partly for pragmatic reasons.
“One of the problems or challenges is that in this world of DVDs, series live on long after they air,” he said. “For whatever reason, the audience we have does seem to like to watch these episodes over again on DVD.”
“We’ve always been mindful that when these characters walk off into the sunset, that it be organic to the fun and spirit of this series, that you have the sense these guys are still out there doing what they do,” he said. “They just won’t be on TV doing it.”
At least we'll always have the DVDs
NY Times
September 21, 2008
The New Season Television
Boston Lawyers Get a Few More Days in Court
By JACQUES STEINBERG
MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif.
DENNY CRANE and Alan Shore, the two high-priced lawyers played by William Shatner and James Spader on ABC’s “Boston Legal,” were having a spirited argument about the continuing liability of big tobacco when the conversation was brought to a halt by the unfurling of a zipper.
It was Crane’s.
“My junk,” Mr. Shatner’s character lamented to Mr. Spader’s from the corner of his opulent office, as he peered into his open suit pants. “My junk failed me.”
“It’s receded,” he added, recounting a recent bout of impotence. “Like a turtle too ashamed to come out of its shell.”
The scene, from the first episode of the series’s fifth (and final) season, which begins on Monday, is true to any number of installments that have preceded it. Since being spun off from “The Practice” in 2004, “Boston Legal” has drawn attention for plumbing ethically tangled issues like assisted suicide, the execution of the mentally impaired and the neglect of military veterans, with a leavening of theater-of-the-absurd moments. Less noticed is that the series has also sought to explore the contours and complexities of male friendship in a way that few, if any, other shows have ever attempted.
Since the middle of the first season virtually every episode has ended with Mr. Shatner and Mr. Spader settled in club chairs on the balcony of Crane’s office, talking late into the night about their (apparently) platonic affection for each other over sips of Scotch and puffs of cigar smoke.
“I sometimes think the episode might just be a vehicle to get us to the balcony scene,” Mr. Spader said, clad in one of Shore’s elegant pinstripe suits, his diction as tight as his character’s, during a pause in filming on a recent afternoon.
Shore and Crane, who are otherwise skirt-chasing womanizers, sometimes follow their cathartic balcony sessions with a seemingly innocuous sleepover, either because they don’t want to be alone or want to keep talking.
“Where does male love begin and end?” Mr. Shatner said in his dressing room here on a recent morning, when asked to distill what “Boston Legal” was ultimately about. “I’ve never had male friends like that. Never to this extent of being such a buddy that it displaces the intimacy you might have with a woman. It’s interesting to speculate what the limitations are.”
In a telephone interview from his home in Northern California, David E. Kelley, the series’s creator and principal writer, said he had come to fashion those balcony scenes from “a nostalgic longing we all have for a time in our life — and it’s probably high school or college — where we really had the flexibility of schedule just to sit with a close friend and share thoughts.”
“We’re all on such treadmills,” added Mr. Kelley, the father of a son and daughter with the actress Michelle Pfeiffer. “When you get married and have kids, you’re home reading bedtime stories at that hour.”
For a time last spring Mr. Kelley was convinced that Crane and Shore would be having their final balcony session on last season’s finale, in May. He even wrote that episode with the two pledging to go off and spend more time fishing and less time working.
“I was sure it wasn’t coming back,” Mr. Kelley said of the series. The issue was, at least partly, money. “We were very far apart on license fees,” said Mr. Kelley, who produces the show with 20th Century Fox Television. “ABC wanted the show back, but at a number that made financial sense for them. Their number didn’t make sense for us. It was a negotiation.”
From ABC’s perspective there was also the matter of ratings: this past season “Boston Legal” was ranked 50th among prime-time shows on broadcast television, according to Nielsen Media Research, with an audience of about 8.9 million — a loss of about 200,000 from the prior television season, but a drop of 1.3 million from the season before that. (As a counterbalance to that math “Boston Legal” is a perennial Emmy winner, with Mr. Spader and Mr. Shatner having won multiple times for their roles; each has been nominated again this year, along with Candice Bergen and the series itself, for outstanding drama.)
Complicating the negotiations was that ABC and Fox Television were disagreeing over another show, an ABC pilot titled “Life on Mars,” that Mr. Kelley had adapted from a British precursor. Ultimately ABC Studios wound up becoming a co-producer of the show with Fox, which had the effect of removing Mr. Kelley.
“They probably wanted more creative control than I was used to giving, which made sense,” Mr. Kelley said.
Only hours before ABC was to announce its fall prime-time schedule, the network made a decision that would amount to a split verdict on “Boston Legal”: It would return for one more season, but a truncated one.
“Because we do love the show,” said Jeffrey Bader, executive vice president of ABC Entertainment, “we wanted to find a way for the show to come back and end in a way the show deserves.”
There are to be 12 episodes this year, as opposed to the standard 22, with the final show a two-hour finale.
“Creatively I wouldn’t have felt shortchanged if we ended after four years,” Mr. Kelley said. “We got to tell the stories we set out to tell. But I think there are more to tell.”
And so, in what has become the equivalent of a weekly video op-ed column, Mr. Kelley will again use Mr. Shore’s character in particular this season to rail (mostly in closing arguments in court) about any number of matters that are troubling him, including the disproportionate power of drug companies and the seeming inequity of a law that effectively prohibits malpractice suits by soldiers treated in military hospitals.
Having had his characters tally the dead and wounded in Iraq and bemoan the encroachment on civil liberties in recent years, Mr. Kelley may also have more to say about the Bush administration — in large part, he said, because few other scripted series have sought to take a political stand.
“Once I thought it was irresponsible for a producer to be espousing his own views and rants,” said Mr. Kelley, who worked as a lawyer in Boston before finding his niche in Hollywood working on shows like “L.A. Law” and creating others like “Ally McBeal” and “Picket Fences.” “I have since become convinced we are living in a time where it is irresponsible not to. We were witnessing the death of debate.”
Still, what viewers may ultimately remember about the show this season is the pathos of its characters, chief among them Denny Crane. He is a lion of a defense lawyer whose quirks, frailties and flashes of brilliance have provided Mr. Shatner a late-career opportunity to reintroduce himself to those who knew his work on “The Defenders,” “Star Trek” and “T. J. Hooker,” to say nothing of those ubiquitous Priceline commercials. Crane will continue to grapple with what appears to be the early onset of Alzheimer’s, in yet another pioneering story line for a main character on network television.
When he first appeared in the final episodes of “The Practice” — a show built on a firm as gritty as Crane Poole & Schmidt of “Boston Legal” is well heeled — Crane was defined by little more than the way he said his name. It was rapid-fire — from Mr. Shatner’s mouth, it sounded like “Dennycrane” — and it instantly announced a self-centeredness and impatience.
“We originally wanted a guy who thought saying his name was enough,” said Bill D’Elia, the executive producer who was hired by Mr. Kelley to shepherd the transition from “The Practice” to “Boston Legal,” and who has overseen “Legal” ever since.
Asked the source of that staccato delivery, Mr. Shatner had a ready answer: “I always imagined it being the way a snake flits its tongue out to taste the air. Denny flicks his name out there to get a reaction.”
What has never been entirely clear to Crane’s associates or the show’s viewers is this: When, for example, he appears in an office corridor fully dressed but for his pants, has he done so consciously (as a gag) or not? This season, Mr. Shatner said, he expects the character to become more self-aware.
Speaking during a break from rehearsing the fifth episode of the final season, Mr. Shatner said: “There’s an interesting chord being played, in a scene I’m paying a lot of attention to, in which I say, ‘I think I’m slipping.’ Later on I say, ‘I’m slipping.’ Then I say, ‘I know I’m slipping.’ ”
“I think Kelley is planning on something dire, with some disposition,” Mr. Shatner added, “or some disposal.”
Which raises an immediate question: Might Mr. Kelley be planning to kill off Denny Crane, leaving Alan Shore bereft and bereaved?
As it turns out, Mr. Kelley does not seem to be leaning that way, at least partly for pragmatic reasons.
“One of the problems or challenges is that in this world of DVDs, series live on long after they air,” he said. “For whatever reason, the audience we have does seem to like to watch these episodes over again on DVD.”
“We’ve always been mindful that when these characters walk off into the sunset, that it be organic to the fun and spirit of this series, that you have the sense these guys are still out there doing what they do,” he said. “They just won’t be on TV doing it.”
Carek1230
Blue Crack Overdose Get me off the internetz!
I just started to love this show last season when I Caught the last 304 episodes of the season and I couldn't wait for the show to start this season. I am so sad to hear this will be their last season. It's really a great show. Great cast
sue4u2
Rock n' Roll Doggie VIP PASS
I started watching The Practice from the beginning and followed through to Boston Legal. I'm going to miss this show.
Maybe USA network or one of the other networks that shows repeats will pick it up. There are episodes I'd love to see again not to mention the Boston Legal one's I missed working nights.
Great show..
Maybe USA network or one of the other networks that shows repeats will pick it up. There are episodes I'd love to see again not to mention the Boston Legal one's I missed working nights.
Great show..
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MrsSpringsteen
Blue Crack Addict
It's on ION TV now, if you get that channel
bono_212
Blue Crack Distributor
Damn, I didn't realize it was last night. Oh well, now I know, and I'll watch this one online.
So bummed about this being the end, because there's only one possible way for them to end the show. I mean, he's acting like he won't, but it seems like it's the way it *should* be.
So bummed about this being the end, because there's only one possible way for them to end the show
. I mean, he's acting like he won't, but it seems like it's the way it *should* be.
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MrsSpringsteen
Blue Crack Addict
Did anyone watch the series finale? I loved it
So sad to see it go
So sad to see it go
Carek1230
Blue Crack Overdose Get me off the internetz!
I watched the finale and recorded it. I am going to miss this show so much but I am glad there are so many re-runs regularly on ION and network late night weekends
bono_212
Blue Crack Distributor
That was the finale? 
. My friend kept texting me about it last night, but I was asleep. I missed the finale. I'm going to have to watch the finale on my computer.
it's over. I'm actually really really sad about this.
. My friend kept texting me about it last night, but I was asleep. I missed the finale. I'm going to have to watch the finale on my computer. it's over. I'm actually really really sad about this.
bono_212
Blue Crack Distributor
Ok, I just watched the finale. Words cannot express
Ah, I just hope there will be a spin-off. They hinted at it enough during the both the episode prior to, and the finale, and there were just so many unanswered questions.
Ah, I just hope there will be a spin-off. They hinted at it enough during the both the episode prior to, and the finale, and there were just so many unanswered questions.
BonosSaint
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That was an incredible finale. BL is (I guess, was now) the only show I watched regularly. I couldn't get over how they found actors that looked so much like the real SCOTUS. Scalia performing the marriage ceremony....
I remember I used to watch The Practice which I liked, but when they brought Spader in as Alan Shore, it was "Hello, what's this?" and my interest perked up considerably.
Definitely going to miss getting to see new episodes.
I remember I used to watch The Practice which I liked, but when they brought Spader in as Alan Shore, it was "Hello, what's this?" and my interest perked up considerably.
Definitely going to miss getting to see new episodes.
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