TV: Sharp drama back with more weird behaviour

By FRANCES GRANT

While medical drama ER has just made its stab for the ratings, legal show The Practice already had one of its key characters under the knife in last year's finale.

As end-of-the-season episodes go, it was a doozy: core cast member Lindsay Dole was stabbed by a man in "a nun suit" and recovered just enough to take part in one of the schmaltziest marriage-proposal scenes yet seen in prime time.

Proposer Bobby was in tears at her bedside; faithful friend Helen - Bobby's ex-girlfriend - looked on from the sidelines and gave the couple her blessing.

For a show which delivered some of the best storylines of any American drama last year, it was a sad lapse in taste - up there along with the excruciating death of Bobby Simone in NYPD Blue.

Fortunately, in last week's new season opener of The Practice (TV3, 8.30 pm), the show seemed to have recovered from that moment of dire sentimentality and it was business as usual for the firm.

Although it was strange that no mention was made of Dole's near-death experience, it was reassuring to see she and Bobby as grim-faced as ever, indulging in such sweet nothings outside the courtroom as "do you really think it was appropriate to do that?"

More reassuring still was the immediate appearance of creator David E. Kelley's now trademark fetish for, well, fetishes.

In the stablemate Kelley show, the frivolous Ally McBeal, it's the lawyers themselves who tend to have them - Fish's thing for older women's necks, for example, or Cage's obsession with preflushing the toilet.

As a serious drama, The Practice can't afford to undermine its staff in that way - the fetishes and aberrant behaviour are saved for the clients.

You just knew the man on trial for murder in last week's episode was going to be guilty of some seriously whacko behaviour. He was just the kind of ordinary-looking guy (a family man and a dentist with no visible dress sense) this firm specialises in.

Sure enough, the warping was soon evident. The dentist was forced to confess his fetish for bugs. "I get aroused when I see a woman step on them," he explained.

There are obvious compensations for having the sick and depraved on the books. Descriptions of a good cockroach-squishing fetish can do a lot to enliven an otherwise standard murder case or yet another yelling match round the conference table.

And then there was, of course, the welcome return of the series' chief psychopath, George Vogelman (a very ordinary looking guy with poor dress sense). "He's back," noted Eugene. Elm St, after all, would be nothing without Freddy.

Vogelman was last seen by viewers disguised in a "nun suit" and trying to gut and fillet Lindsay. Unfortunately, Ellenor Frutt (yep, with a name like that she has to be the show's "larger" woman) failed to notice the ill-concealed habit when she went around to his place for dinner.

All of which bodes well for a fresh series even if we do have to suffer a wedding between the show's two dullest characters. With the bug-man set to appeal and Vogelman sharpening his carving knife, there's room for the odd spot of conventional behaviour.