University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review Volume 25 Issue 3 Article 3 2003 Saying Goodbye to Ally McBeal Paul R. Joseph Follow this and additional works at: https://lawrepository.ualr.edu/lawreview Part of the Law and Society Commons Recommended Citation Paul R. Joseph, Saying Goodbye to Ally McBeal, 25 U. ARK. LITTLE ROCK L. REV. 459 (2003). Available at: https://lawrepository.ualr.edu/lawreview/vol25/iss3/3 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by Bowen Law Repository: Scholarship & Archives. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review by an authorized editor of Bowen Law Repository: Scholarship & Archives. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. SAYING GOODBYE TO ALLY MCBEAL* Paul R Josepht Ally McBeal seems to set the standardfor the way a lawyer should be. ' I. INTRODUCTION Not all goodbyes are the same. They reside along a spectrum from "[s]o long, it's been good to know yuh," 2 all the way down to "goodbye and good riddance." It may be a function of the emotional power of Ally McBeal that I did not know what kind of goodbye to give Ally when I sat down to write this article. But I suspected that its goodbye would fall somewhere closer to one of the extremes than to the tepid "so long" middle. During its five-year run,3 Ally generated an unusually high level of emotional response. It is not every television show that makes the cover of Time magazine.4 It is not every television show that is made the poster child for the death of feminism.