Ally McBeal – Season 5 Calista Flockhart 2003 DVD Top-quality Free UK shipping

The first half of the fifth season of the popular comedy-drama based around the antics of America’s zaniest legal practice. In ‘Friends and Lovers’ Ally meets lawyer Jenny and hires her to come and work at the firm. ‘Judge Ling’ has Ally, Jenny and Glenn work on a case involving strangely glamorous older woman Claire Otoms (Dame Edna Everage). ‘Neutral Corners’ finds Ally making an infomercial. ‘Fear of Flirting’ sees Richard step in when John goes missing. ‘I Want Love’ has Jenny’s mother Francis (Jacqueline Bisset) ask the firm for help. ‘Lost and Found’ finds John making a return visit. In ‘Nine One One’ Ally helps a minister (Tom Berenger) who is undergoing a crisis of faith. ‘Playing with Matches’ sees Ally consider having an affair with Jenny’s mother’s fianc Tim. ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ has Ally buy a house and hire handyman Victor (Jon Bon Jovi) to help fix it up. ‘One Hundred Tears’ finds Ally defending a man who has been pursuing his life-long dream of self-propelled flight. Finally, in a ‘Kick in the Head’, Ally’s ten-year-old daughter Maddie turns up on her doorstep.
The fifth season was the last series of Ally McBeal, and probably the least satisfying. While always at least slightly entertaining, it was troubled by two conflicting imperatives: first, to steer its neurotic characters and multiplicity of sub-plots towards a coherent and credible resolution; second, to sustain another series of a programme which had, by now, exhausted all the plot possibilities that were remotely believable. The result is a bemusing onslaught of new characters (Ally’s Mini-Me Jenny and a barely distinguishable phalanx of lantern-jawed male leads), celebrity cameos (Edna Everage, Christina Ricci, Barry White, Matthew Perry, Jon Bon Jovi), several storylines that would test the credulity of any of the curiously indulgent judges before whom Ally’s firm practises (notably the arrival of a 10-year-old daughter that Ally didn’t know she had) and one misbegotten attempt to anchor the programme to the real world (the “Nine One One” episode, an unwatchably mawkish allegory about the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States).
Granted that Ally McBeal was never intended to be realistic drama, but when the programme spirals entirely off into the realms of the surreal, any possibility of the sort of identification with the characters on which the programme once relied is lost. Though not without its moments, the sudden redemption of Fish, always the best-written character, is deftly handled. Series Five will be of chief interest to adherents who stuck with it through the first four and so wanted to see how it all ends; in keeping with the central character’s defining motifs of solipsism and self-pity, it does so with a whimper.
On the DVD: Ally McBeal has episode selector on each disc, and a scene selector within each of those. The final disc contains two short and desultory documentaries on the series billed, somewhat hopefully, as “Special Features”. A French audio soundtrack is available, as are subtitles in English, French and Dutch. -Andrew MuellerSee all