Previously on Ally McBeal: Selfabsorbed, insecure Harvard Law School graduate Ally (played by Calista Flockhart) joins the Boston law firm run by the nakedly mercenary Richard Fish (Greg Germann). Fish is a thirtysomething with a fetish for stroking older women's wattles, the fleshy part of the throat, and his favourite targets have included Whipper Cone (Dyan Cannon), the judge with whom he had an affair, and the former US attorney-general, Janet Reno (played by a spitting-image look-a-like when Reno refused to play herself on the show).
Ally's colleagues include her former boyfriend, Billy (Gil Bellows), for whom she still carries a torch, even though he has married, and there are further complications because his wife, Georgia (Courtney Thorne-Smith) also works at the same firm. Later Billy will bleach his hair, join a vociferous men's group, and die of a brain tumour, although he continues to appear as a ghost, thankfully with his hair restored to his normal colour.
John Cage (Peter MacNicol), also known as The Biscuit, is a senior partner at the firm, and self-described "lawyer savant", regularly given to twitching and stammering. He has a remote toilet flusher which he uses in the unisex toilet shared by the firm's staff - where people are always saying the wrong things at the wrong time. He's involved with Nell Porter (Portia de Rossi), a new lawyer at the firm, while Fish falls for another newcomer, the abrasive, impatient Ling (Lucy Liu).
All of the staff's personal and professional problems are keenly observed by the eagle-eyed, insatiably curious secretary, Elaine (Jane Krakowski) who is unlucky in love - and ended up in a fight last Monday night with Renee (Lisa Nicole Carson), the district attorney who shares an apartment with Ally, when Elaine and Renee tussled for centre stage to sing the old Supremes hit, The Happening, at Ally's 30th birthday party.
That party took place, of course, in the bar downstairs in the firm's building, where the penultimate scenes of each episode generally take place and singer-pianist Vonda Shepard performs upbeat treatments of pop standards and serves as a kind of Greek chorus to the fictional characters, and in particular, Ally, who, as happens in the often melancholy final scene of each show, walks home alone and wistful in the night.
So it goes in the oddball and strangely endearing world of Ally McBeal, the show which the British media dubbed "the American Bridget Jones" and which the US magazine, Entertainment Weekly, said has "everything a hip one-hour comedy-drama should have - sharp off-kilter dialogue, a talented ensemble cast, and button-pushing story lines hot off the cultural Zeitgeist."
Now at the end of its third nine-month season in the US - that season has a couple of weeks to run on Network 2 on Monday nights - the show has been one of the most successful ever transmitted by Fox, the youngest of the four major US television networks. It has won Emmys and Golden Globes, Vonda Shepard's soundtrack album has been a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and many of the cast are being wooed by the movies - Calista Flockhart in Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her, a Cannes prize-winner this year; Lucy Liu in the imminent big-screen production of Charlie's Angels; and Jane Krakowski in the prequel, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas.
Ally McBeal is the one of the most discussed television series in years, not least because it prompts such unusually divisive reactions. I know nobody who thinks it's "quite good". I know a lot of people who can't abide it, yet seem to watch it very regularly, presumably to satisfy some masochistic cravings. And I know very many people who, like me, regard it as one of those very few weekly television shows which are essential viewing and must be taped if I'm out or away.
Recently, there has been a media obsession with the cast themselves, and miles of column inches expended on how skinny Flockhart looks. A CBS news station in New York reported that production on the series was halted because she had entered a clinic for treatment for anorexia. Less than an hour later the news programme was back-pedalling frantically, quoting Flockhart's agent as saying that she was looking forward to "a bucket of chicken" for her supper. And then there have been the reports that Lucy Liu has been causing a ruckus on the set of Charlie's Angels and even punching co-star Bill Murray.
To paraphrase a hamburger chain commercial, it's the difference about Ally McBeal that I enjoy. It is eccentric, off-the-wall, surreal - and entirely unpredictable, despite our familiarity with its firmly established main characters after three years. There hasn't been such an unusual production to emanate from the ultra-safe, advertiser-fearing world of mainstream US network television since those wild and crazy days of David Lynch's Twin Peaks.
What makes Ally McBeal such compulsive viewing is being consistently surprised by the unlikely directions it takes, being reduced to helpless laughter time and again by its zaniest comic absurdities and even being moved to tears on occasion, as in the recent episode where Elaine planned, and ultimately failed, to adopt a baby.