Ally McBeal and Feminist studies...

I just wanted to share an interesting excerpt from my final paper for Com 6770 (Media Critisicm) in regards to Ally McBeal and some issues with feminist studies.*

Ally McBeal premiered in September of 1997. This pilot episode’s ratings “beat ABC’s Monday Night Football in terms of 18-49 year-old viewers, a novel event in the history of televised Monday Night Football” (Svetkey 1998). The show depicts the life of a single, independent woman who works in a successful law firm in Boston. “Ally McBeal represents one of the last major commercial productions to address feminism itself as the subject of its narratives as its evident in its numerous episodes on litigation and the human rights issues central to the feminist agenda, as well as its direct confrontation with sexual politics in the office” (Owen et. al 2007). The show’s creator David E. Kelly described Ally McBeal’s character in the following way:

“A positive representation of a strong, professional woman who, was not the hard, strident feminist out of the ‘60s and ‘70s…She’s all for women’s rights, but she doesn’t want to lead the charge at her own emotional expense” (Owen quoting from Bellafonte 1998).

      In addition to the Ally McBeal’s great audience’s reactions and the positive things that the creator had to say about this successful show, the series also benefited to the society in some of the content that it covered (i.e. sexual harassment laws and the issues of legal and social equity). This fact is shown through the plot line of the show’s pilot when we see that Ally quits a prominent law firm in which she got hired fresh out of Harvard Law School (Owen et. al 2007). The events that lead up to her walking out of this law firm are described as the following: “ …the firm fired her rather than Jack Billings, the senior ‘rainmaker’ partner in the firm who repeatedly grabbed Ally’s rear and who, when confronted with being fired himself, threatened to counter sue the firm under the Federal Disabilities Act, claiming he had an obsessive compulsive disorder that impelled him to squeeze butts” (Owen et. al 2007). After walking away from this situation and leaving the firm, she bumps into one of her collages from Harvard Law School named Richard Fish who invited her to join a firm that he and John Cage had started (Owen et. al 2007).  It is here at Cage and Fish, where Richard exposed Billings of his misleading and perverted defense claims. “Although the pilot episode affirmed the legal right of working women to be free from sexual harassment by powerful superiors in the workplace, it also affirmed that male power holders continue to regard occupationally competent, successful women as transgressive and attempt to discipline them through sexually infantilizing and intimidating behavior” (Owen et al. 2007). 

     Ally McBeal also came with much criticism from the more conservative spectrum. One example of this criticism came with Second Wave journalists and viewers who were frustrated at the “realization that hey were not being treated as equal partners in the civil rights movement, the peace movement, or in their everyday lives” (Owen et. al 2007). According to these feminists, Ally’s short skirts worn in the series “made her the antithesis of a feminist and a poor role model. They read Ally’s adoption of the signifiers of sexual feminine fashion as participating in the very sexism Second Wave feminism had struggled against and as legitimizing the hegemonic masculine view that all women are primarily and fundamentally objects of sexual desire” (Owen et. al 2007) .

     When Ally McBeal was at its peak (during the end of the first season), the question of  ‘Is feminism dead?’ resounded in an issue of Time magazine that came out on June 29, 1998 (Owen, et. al 2007). “Journalistic critics’ and viewers’ responses to this query were quite divided. Some argue that the series and its title character were a powerful expression of contemporary Third Wave feminism. Others asserted that the series was an elegantly crafted backlash against feminism, a televisual reflection of the antifeminist tropes in the writings of Kate Roiphe, Camile Paglia, Naomi Wolf, and Pene Denefield” (Owen, et. al  2007).

*Citations provided from the following sources:

Bellafante, Gina (1998). ‘Feminism: It’s All About Me!’, Time, pg. 58

Owen, Susan A., Stein, Sarah R., & Vande Berg, Leah R. (2007). Bad Girls: Cultural

     And Media Representations of Transgressive Women, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc:

    New York.

Svetkey, Benjamin (1998). ‘Kelley’s Heroes’, Entertainment Weekly, pp.32-34, 37-38, 40