Tracking the long career of half-forgotten TV auteur David E. Kelley

[TMC]

http://www.avclub.com/article/tracki...v-auteu-105810

At one time, David E. Kelley was probably the best writer working in Hollywood.

For anyone who didn’t spend the mid-’90s watching Kelley expand the limits of serial-drama week after week, that may seem like a dubious assertion. But Kelley was a genuine television prodigy, a prolific writer who created at least three or four classic series, and wrote the lion’s share of their scripts by himself. The subject of a New York Times profile before he was 35, Kelley was one of the handful of behind-the-scenes talents whose name meant something to the average viewer prior to the HBO era. His timing was a perfect piece of luck: Steven Bochco, the man behind Hill Street Blues, was launching a legal drama and looking for writers who knew the law at just the moment when Kelley, a Boston-based attorney, saw his first spec screenplay (1987’s From The Hip) go into production.

Kelley joined Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher’s creation, L.A. Law, as a story editor; when the original showrunners left after three years, he was promoted to replace them. Kelley supervised L.A. Law for two seasons, which included the show’s most infamous storyline (corporate barracuda Rosalind Shays and her plunge down the elevator shaft). He left to create Picket Fences, which struggled in the ratings but won two Outstanding Drama Series Emmys. Though this small-town saga was compared to Northern Exposure, to which it bore a slight resemblance, and Twin Peaks, to which it bore none at all, its themes and tone were uniquely Kelley’s. The show’s offbeat, self-referential humor concealed Kelley’s interest in universality. He created Picket Fences so that he could cover every television genre in one series, and address almost any topical issue that caught his interest.

The protagonists were Jimmy (Tom Skerritt) and Jill Brock (Kathy Baker), a married sheriff and doctor whose professions opened the door to crime and medical stories. Other characters took the series into the town hall, the school, the courtroom, and the private homes of Rome, Wisconsin. Many of the citizens of Kelley’s fictional town were weirdos and outcasts, but the town’s leading citizens shared had their own eccentricities and insecurities as well. Kelley’s M.O. was to introduce an extreme character—like the morbid coroner Carter Pike (Kelly Connell) or the crusty Judge Bone (Ray Walston) or the shamelessly sleazy lawyer Douglas Wambaugh (Fyvush Finkel)—and then gradually sketch in their hidden vulnerabilities and, always, their basic decency. Inclusiveness was Kelley’s major theme.

Much of Picket Fences concerned the burden of professional responsibility—the emotional toll of the hard decisions made by those who govern and serve. He followed that up with hospital show Chicago Hope, primarily notable for winning Mandy Patinkin an Emmy and for Kelley leaving in the middle of the second season. His next three series, all of which were also classics (or began that way, at least), narrowed in on different facets of that theme. The Practice was a down-market redo of L.A. Law, about a fledgling firm of young lawyers led by saturnine Bobby Donnell (Dylan McDermott). These attorneys were scrappers, known for their sleazy, win-at-all-costs tactics and disdained by their peers; Kelley took their nobility for granted. The Practice was a cerebral, serious-minded show that mined the life-or-death stakes of the law for heavy, forthright discussions of ethics and morality. Kelley was perfecting his “debate team captain as television producer” role, and his unadorned, precise dialogue—the opposite of the idiosyncratic, quasi-poetic rhythms that David Milch and Aaron Sorkin were developing at the same time—was the kind of subtext-as-text writing that The Sopranos creator David Chase, for instance, would come to deplore. But its remarkable lucidity could be stirring.

Ally McBeal, a second lawyer show that ran during the same period as The Practice, was a tonal inversion that caught critics by surprise and became an unlikely zeitgeist show. Its semi-comedic tone and magical-realist touches made Kelley’s name synonymous with quirk, and its at times befuddled depictions of young professional women tagged Kelley as either a feminist or a rank misogynist, depending on who was asked. Both of those talking points were red herrings that distracted from what Ally McBeal was really trying to do. Kelley’s biggest hit was his smallest-scaled endeavor, a soulful quasi-musical that courageously explored the touchy-feely aspects of adult life: the clash between professional and personal identities, the difficulty of connecting with other people, and, most crucially, the layer of ineffable, “Is this all there is?” melancholy that lurks within even the most successful people. Ally McBeal was Kelley’s mission statement. It was a work-in-progress blueprint for a life well lived, one built around music, holidays, and, most of all, families—not the ones people are born into, but those of our their choosing.

Boston Public, Kelley’s most underrated creation, offered another corps of beleaguered, dedicated professionals, but in a new setting: a dilapidated high school in a dangerous neighborhood. At Boston Public’s center was an unlikely friendship between two administrators with clashing leadership styles: school principal Steven Harper (Chi McBride), an idealist whose compassion could lead to bad decisions, and vice principal Scott Guber (Anthony Heald), a martinet whose hauteur hid an artistic soul. It was the last in a series of rich character pairings that seemed to arise out of fortuitous accidents of casting, like the arch bickering between Picket Fences seniors Wambaugh and Bone and the beautiful-dreamers bond between Ally McBeal (Calista Flockhart) and her boss John Cage (Peter MacNicol), both believers in things like unicorns and true love.

Kelley’s method was immediate enough to respond to the work of his actors (and he cultivated the best in the business). He wrote most of his drafts in four days, and felt that the magic got lost if he revised them too much. But speed meant that most of Kelley’s series lost focus after a few seasons. The epic cast changes in Ally McBeal and Boston Public showed Kelley getting bored with characters almost as soon as he concocted them and writing in replacements faster than the audience could follow along. Boston Legal, another lawyer ensemble spun out of the ashes of The Practice, won substantial Emmy recognition, but it was the first Kelley show that felt cobbled together with spare parts from his earlier work. Was Kelley finally all written out? His most recent creations, Harry’s Law (more lawyers) and Monday Mornings (more doctors), were intelligent and less obnoxious than Boston Legal, but covered familiar ground. And neither was a hit. (The verdict is still out on the Robin Williams comedy The Crazy Ones, for which Kelley is the executive producer, but not the primary writer.)

Today, Kelley stands out as one of the more unfortunate casualties of the cable revolution, a top practitioner of a kind of talk-driven quality drama that no one makes any more. He is only 57, and seems capable of either sliding into irrelevance or having a major creative resurgence. For now, here are 10 episodes (in chronological order by airdate) to serve as a reminder of how good David E. Kelley used to be, and how good he could be again.