Survival of the thinnest

It's not easy being a woman in David E. Kelley's world, unless you're anorexic. ANDREW GUMBEL looks at the price women pay to be part of his TV empire.

Well, they were bound to start gossiping sooner or later, weren't they? No sooner did the news emerge that Calista Flockhart, the super-thin star of television's kooky legal drama series Ally McBeal, had collapsed on set and been rushed to hospital, than the entertainment rags and tabloids started coming on like a gaggle of pop psychologists at an anorexia symposium.

She's too thin, they all screamed in self-satisfied unison, as though that wasn't blatantly obvious simply by looking at her. She does have an eating disorder, they crowed triumphantly, recalling the many denials issued virtually since day one of Ally McBeal in 1997.

What other reason could there possibly be for her to swoon so badly that only six hours of intravenous pumping could restore her to the spectral semi-presence to which we have become accustomed?

Actually, there are other possible reasons that we should probably mention. Overwork, for one. These days in Hollywood, it's not uncommon to work 18-hour days back-to-back to meet production deadlines. The Ally McBeal team was racing to put the finishing touches to episode 12 of the season (the new season began in New Zealand on TV2 on Wednesday) when she passed out.

That kind of schedule is a strain, whatever your weight. Three nights without sleep, a couple of postponed meal breaks and, wallop, who wouldn't keel over?

Nevertheless, it seems hard to put the whole thing down to random misfortune or sheer professional gruntwork. This is Ally McBeal we're talking about, a show that purports to present a dynamic model lifestyle for today's young professional women but which can't help entangling itself in a succession of dysfunctional mini-scandals that appear to undermine its entire premise.

Alongside the long-running tabloid saga of Calista the Anorexic, there is the story of Courtney Thorne-Smith (who played Georgia). She quit the show so she could spend more time writing quirky little health manuals at home and working on "her novel."

This was, apparently, in reaction to the constant badgering from the show's producers about eating less, exercising more, and generally beating her reluctant body into gruelling submission.

"The amount of time I spent thinking about food and being upset about my body was insane," she said in an interview with the magazine US Weekly.

We also have Lisa Nicole Carson (Ally's roommate), who vanished from the programme for several weeks last year to attend to an urgent medical condition her family declined to specify. The rumours have been legion, and appendicitis is not among them.

She, too, seems to be more than a little preoccupied with her weight. A couple of years ago she boasted, perhaps ominously, that "life is a full meal." She was most recently reported to be considering a breast-reduction operation to make her look more svelte.

And, last but not least, have been the travails of Robert Downey jun, an actor whose troubles with hard drugs admittedly long precede his collaboration as a guest star on the show, but who nonetheless managed to throw cast and crew into a spin when he got himself arrested again and was told he could expect to return to the same jail cell he got out of last August.

It is extraordinary how much bad press has attached itself to this one television programme. Anyone looking for a reason could do worse than examine two things: the show itself and the man behind it, the undisputed supremo of American primetime television drama, David E. Kelley.

The premise behind Ally McBeal is immediately suspect. Here we have a paragon of the single career woman, who is nevertheless ditsy, seems to think eating went out with the 60s and wears skirts smaller than a postage stamp.

What's going on here? It doesn't help that she is surrounded by one babe more fabulously thin than the next, nor that her professional achievements are consistently upstaged by her neuroses that she insists on trumpeting to the wider world.

At the series' low point, the plot lines seemed to boil down either to a kind of female hysterical fantasyland, complete with special effects of heads spinning off shoulders, or to a succession of cat-fights and bitch brawls worthy of a Jacqueline Susann novel.

In one episode there was even a four-way hair-pulling, skirt-yanking session in a bathroom - all of it surreptitiously watched by the two male partners in Ally's law firm, who clearly thought this was the most fun they had had since graduation.

If Ally McBeal's feminist credentials reveal themselves to be no more than a male fantasy about power women (no accident, surely, that the show's Lucy Liu went on to star in the similarly flawed film version of Charlie's Angels), they are of a piece with much of David E. Kelley's other portrayals of women on the small screen.

The rest of Kelley's astonishingly prolific output as a writer and producer - The Practice, LA Law, and much of Chicago Hope, along with one or two new series every season - may not focus so specifically on the lives of women but his worldview comes through equally clearly.

The message, broadly, is: if you're a woman, you'd better be thin and charming. Anyone pushy or overweight invariably ends up humiliated, or dead, or both.

On LA Law, there was a female authority figure, played by Diana Muldaur, who vied with the men at the top of their law firm. Rather than admiring her, the other women in the office called her a bitch behind her back and were thrilled when she tumbled to an untimely end down a lift shaft.

In an episode of a now-forgotten series called Picket Fences, a fat woman killed her husband by sitting on him. In The Practice, the unusually sympathetic, overweight lawyer played by Camryn Manheim is played for a fool by a serial killer who almost does her in (signs of Kelley mellowing, perhaps?)

A fat woman even made a brief appearance on Ally McBeal once: feeling all too self-conscious about her appearance, she was suing her boss for instituting a swimwear-only "beach Friday" in their office. She lost, of course.

Kelley is nothing if not a slick operator and there isn't a single one of these sadistic or condescending portrayals of women that is not also, on some level, excellent entertainment.

What makes his shows so toxic is precisely how enjoyable they are - hence the title of a discussion forum once posted on the internet: do you watch David E. Kelley series, and if so, how do they make you feel in the morning?

One of his trademarks is to mix high-minded idealism - a big medical ethics issue, say, or feminism for that matter - and low tabloid values like voyeurism or sexual perversity. Like any supermarket newspaper in the States, he has his share of babies born without brains, or priests with mysteriously severed penises.

In this respect he has perhaps captured the spirit of the age with uncanny accuracy: we live in tabloid times and almost demand those values from our daily digest of news and TV.

The question is how high a price his casts have to pay to fulfil his - and our - fantasies. It has often been noted that women who associate with David E. Kelley come out thinner as a result.

His wife, Michelle Pfeiffer, is a good case in point, as are the assorted starvation victims of Ally McBeal.

Calista Flockhart's fainting fit may have been happenstance - one intriguing theory suggested she was upset because her boyfriend, TV satirist Garry Shandling, didn't like her dog - but episodes like it do seem to be proliferating.

How much thinner can they all get? And will we keep watching until they all just vanish before our very eyes?

- INDEPENDENT