I love this movie so much

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

it is her show. and she does a great job. and this is the only important thing in this modern fairy tale about law, colleagues, trials and competitions, love and rivalries, desires, secrets and vulnerabilities. the use of humor - this is the great good point. and the source of the fascination who transforms Ally McBeal in media phenomenon. because it is surprising and cool and fresh and nice. and it is the pillar for discover a sort of adventure who surprise and give new dimensions to ordinary things. sure, the best thing is the music. and the strange Ally who has the marks of all the effort of Calista Flockhart to be become an icon of the last decade of "90's.

I loved this show. i really really did. ally is just... awesome. but why did it end this way ? the biggest dreamer of them all,did not get her dreams come true ? she left her friends,her family,her work,her everything ? why didn't she fall in love with matthew perry,or someone else? why she ended up alone ? this is so sad. i am disappointed.This show had a soul,had a story. billy died and no one grieved for him. they talked about him so rarely. and the fifth season is so not ally. i understand that she loved larry so so so much and he left her with a note. but i can't just take that ally moves to NYC, and how that she didn't get married,or fallen in love. i hate it. i hate the end. i expected so much more. in fact,i have watched all the season but i do not know how,i haven't seen the end. and i had a decision to start it all over again and see how it ends. i wish i've never done it.

Here's your standard episode of Ally McBeal: Ally- a young, attractive lawyer- bites her lip, rolls her eyes, hallucinates a cartoon and avoids making any emotional or personal decisions while her law firm defends a woman's right to dress like a whore and not expect any unwanted sexual attention whatsoever.Yikes.This show is disposable Hollywood-liberal schlock, a dreary timepiece, a false step in feminism. This was back in the day when women could get a man to do anything they wanted just by kissing another woman. Yawn... Ally is the fictionalized ideal of the woman-child who has it all but is still miserable because she doesn't know what to do with it. Or maybe she's just too stupid to make any concrete and assertive choices, paralyzed by the wonderful life she's made for herself. Poor Ally…The show was the brainchild of writer/creator/lesbian David E. Kelley, who seemed to genuinely believe the offbeat and often backwards fairy- tales he wrote each week. Ostensibly designed to liberate and empower women, the show was anti-male in every sense of the word: men were brutish creatures whose hostile sexual desires were thrown back in their face and openly mocked or they were impotent teddy bears. Middle ground and complexity are not Mr. Kelley's specialty. If only men could be as sophisticated as the strong women he writes, who take no responsibility for their sexuality, unless/until it suited their desires. You've come a long way, baby. Hypocrisy and arrogance abound.Maybe that's what made it all the more ironic that the Ally herself- Calista Flockhart- was suffering from severe anorexia during the show's run: like Ally, Flockhart was an attractive young rising star who worked hard to achieve stardom, only to learn that she couldn't handle it. Just a little girl after all... how decidedly female, how decidedly obnoxious... The show shut down production several times to accommodate Flockhart's hospital stints and attempts at recovery. Like Ally, Calista wanted to have her cake and not eat it too.Women- to a certain degree- will never fully understand their own sexuality, a simple fact of Nature that can't even be overcome in a fictional TV universe with unisex bathrooms and the open discussion of orgasm or lack thereof. For anyone to base their views of life, sex or feminism on this show would be criminal... it's trite, condescending and often plain ridiculous. David E. Kelley used the show's "legal" cases for all the wrong reasons: not to examine morality and society or to tell an interesting story- the legal issues were in fact Mr. Kelley preaching and moralizing to the audience about his own personal views of the way the world SHOULD BE- and why everyone should agree. He created the weekly scenario and played judge and jury all by himself, with the underlying message to every ruling being that Men are Bad and that women- no matter how ridiculous, childish, slutty or insane- should be blindly praised and rewarded. The show hasn't been seen since its cancellation and it probably never will be- it was a sexist and insulting view of the world by a self-loathing male who wanted to atone for the carnal desires of his entire sex.So what should a successful, attractive woman do when a man looks lustfully at her ripe breasts on full display in her low-cut top? Taunt him? Sue him? Stop eating until said mammary glands disappear? According to this show she should do anything except take some responsibility and cover up... that would be anti-Ally. GRADE: D-

I had forgotten that the early episodes of this series were a bit creaky. and at first Ally seemed so young, goofy and nervous that she felt more like a teenager than a smart 27 year old lawyer. But by episode 5 or so the show and the character finds it's stride. And if it doesn't quite measure up to the best 'grown up' TV of today, it still deserves praise for being one of the series that broke the mold of what a TV show was supposed to be. It had an openness to complicated tones that seamlessly mixed wild, sometimes surreal humor, more subtle humor and drama, to long story arcs and not easily solved once a week problems, and to being more about character than event, making TV a more novelistic and sometimes cinematic medium in the process. Certainly Ally McBeal wasn't the first show to do any of these things, but it was one of the first shows that was a big success with these new approaches, and that helped paved the way for many of the best dramas dramadies and comedies on TV in the years since. I'll admit, with years of even braver shows since, Ally McBeal no longer feels quite as special, and in fact now feels a little limited. Especially with DVDs allowing more than once a week viewing, a certain sameness to Ally's constantly fearful, broken heart and her funny/sad attempts to overcome it starts to plague the show. But there's still a lot to enjoy here. The performances are terrific from top to bottom, and every 'silly' character is given their serious and moving moments, and every 'serious' character is allowed to be laugh-out-loud funny at times. Special mention has to be made of Peter MacNichol's 'The Biscuit', one of the oddest, funniest characters to actually work brilliantly in any series. The writing is sharp and full of wit and pathos. The music is integrated in a way that was rare for TV before, but much imitated since, with montages to songs played and sung by Vonda Shepard (a great voice) who often also appears in the series as a singer at the lead characters favorite after hours watering hole. I do have to say, some of the music now feels, in retrospect, too on the nose. The songs chosen (or written) almost always have lyrics that are too spot on, too obvious a commentary on the action, That good and bad side to the music sort of sums up my perspective on the series looking at it again in 2011. I appreciate and admire it for what it gave us and TV, I still enjoy it, but I'm no longer just blown away by it. Not in a world of Breaking Bad, Weeds, Mad Men, Nurse Jackie, Arrested Development, etc. etc.