Powerpoint: If you were my sister, Ally McBeal...

By FRANCES GRANT

Scenes from the return of Ally McBeal to our screens:

* Ally indulges in an activity which she coyly refers to as a "vulgar verb" in a carwash with a man who catches her eye.

* The daughter of the law firm's most important client begs Ally to sue her minister for refusing to marry her after he caught her engaged in vulgar verb activity with a man, not her fiance.

* Ally's flatmate Renee and Judge Whipper Cone perv at many men — sorry, audition men — for the job as receptionist for their new legal practice by asking them to take their shirts off.

Is this revenge? Is this women getting their own back? And has anybody else noticed how fetishised women and their behaviour are becoming in David E. Kelley shows?

Where once The Practice, for example, was one of the top American dramas on the box, this season it has descended into lurid cases where inevitably something nasty happens to women: a woman is murdered after helping a dentist out with his bug-crushing fetish, a woman is bitten on the breast by her dentist (dentists don't do well in his shows, either).

The ditzy Ally, meanwhile, has been irritating from the beginning, even when Time magazine was hailing her as "the Mary Tyler Moore of the 90s." Yes, Ally is a single working gal but the similarity ends there, despite her "liberated chick" look.

What she is is self-absorbed, petty, jealous, insecure, nostalgic, highly strung, clearly malnourished and obsessed with looking foxy. One of the show's devices is that we get to see what's going on inside her head. It's a pretty, empty box.

For all that, she's supposed to be a brilliant lawyer — the suspension of disbelief required is matched only by that needed to swallow Courtney Thorne Smith playing the same.

As for the other women in the firm: Barbie doll Nelle spends most of her time brushing her long, blond hair and dressing up in air hostess outfits.

The frosty Ling shuns "vulgar verb" activity in favour of dripping hot wax on her lover's chest and stroking his naked body with her hair.

If you don't think the Kelley attitude is catching, here's the actor who plays Ling, Lucy Liu, describing a close encounter in a magazine interview: "I was sleeping on my futon on the floor and some sort of spirit came down from God knows where and made love to me. It was sheer bliss. I felt everything. I climaxed. And then he floated away."

Some critics call McBeal the kind of female role model that these uncertain times deserve. The implication is that the times have been made uncertain by feminism and women deserve all the confusion they can be given.

Yet a show about single women and their love lives doesn't have to feature insecure, needy women making fetish objects of themselves. Take that bunch of hussies on Sex and the City, for example.

They don't sit around in anybody's fantasies, they take action on their own. They don't use euphemisms like "vulgar verb," they use the word itself.

For all they get bruised and confused by going head-on into female sexual freedom land, they make the best of their puzzlement. Like scientists, they pursue their experiments with zeal and accept their methods may have flaws.

Unlike Ally, the lead character Carrie is aware of boring other people: "Had I crossed the line from pleasantly neurotic to annoyingly troubled?"

And what makes this show truly liberating is the loyal and encouraging relationship between the women friends, the opposite of the suppressed aggression and jealousy which exists between Ally and her female colleagues.

Last week the British women's mags announced they will no longer publish fashion pictures of unnaturally thin women. Imagine what kind of liberating clean-up could be done on the female image on TV: out with confused, neurotic, narcissistic stick insects right now.