Allison Marie McBeal is the central fictional character in the Fox series Ally McBeal played by Calista Flockhart. Ally is a Boston-based lawyer. She is shown as a woman who believes in love and is continually looking for her soul mate. She often hears songs in her head and experiences hallucinations, mostly of a dancing baby, due to her biological clock ticking and of sexual endeavors with various men.
Biography
Ally is the daughter of George McBeal, also a lawyer, and Jeannie McBeal. She claims to have at least one sister and one brother although neither are ever seen. She had a sister who died at the age of six. Ally attended Harvard Law School with Billy Thomas, with whom she had had a relationship since they were eight years old so that she could be with him. Billy, however, left Harvard to attend University of Michigan Law School, thereby breaking Ally's heart. The next thing the audience knows about Ally is that she lives with district attorney Renée Radick, and she is employed in a Boston law firm. Ally quit the law firm because her boss harassed her and was then recruited by old classmate Richard Fish to join his law firm, Cage & Fish. To her own surprise and horror, she found out that Billy, now married to fellow lawyer, Georgia, is working at Cage & Fish. She falls in love with him again, to the horror of Georgia. However, Ally and Georgia become friends and Ally learns to work side by side with Billy. Throughout the series Ally dated lots of men. Because Billy remained the love of her life, no relationship ever got serious until she met Dr. Greg Butters. Greg and Ally got quite serious until the two were spotted kissing by Billy. Billy felt so jealous that he imagined himself to be in love with Ally after which he declared his undying love for her. The two subsequently engaged in a short affair, which Ally finally broke off. Nonetheless, Greg broke off the relationship after finding out. The third season began with Ally engaging in sex with a guy at a car wash, it later turns out that he is the fiancée of a client, whom Ally subsequently tells of the liaison on her wedding day. Later, Billy discovers he has a brain tumor, and grows closer to Ally again. However, before anything can be done about it, Billy dies in Ally's arms in court after giving a passionate closing describing his life When Georgia later asks Ally if Billy had said anything before he died, she lies to her in order to spare her feelings. Ally started dating again, finally meeting a British lawyer named Brian Selig. The two started dating and ended up having a six-month relationship. When, after six months, Brian asked Ally to move in with him, Ally realized Brian was much too boring for her and then broke off the relationship. Shortly after that, she fell in love with fellow lawyer Larry Paul. They initially met when she walked into his office by mistake, and spent much time talking about her issues before she discovered he was a lawyer and not the therapist with whom she had an appointment. The two started a serious but rocky relationship. Although initially troubled by the fact that Larry had an ex-wife with whom he was still close and an ex-girlfriend who was also the mother of his child, it was soon evident that Larry was her soulmate. The two agreed to take the relationship long distance between Detroit and Boston when Larry's son visited and met Ally and told her he missed his dad at home. Ally then encouraged Larry to move back to Detroit to be in his son's life. Larry agreed and the two parted with the understanding that the relationship would remain and that each would visit the other until such a time that Ally was ready to move to Detroit. He left a note pinned to a snowman outside Ally's door on the evening he left for Detroit that said, "I will be back." While in college, Ally, in need of money, donated an egg for research, only to find out years later that it wound up getting adopted. One day a little girl shows up on her doorstep, claiming to be her daughter, prompting Ally to faint. She gets to know her daughter over the course of several episodes. Her most significant love interest for this final season was Victor Morrison but the relationship deteriorated quite quickly as it was evident that Ally was still in love with Larry. Subsequently, her daughter Madison is harassed by schoolmates and mourns her deceased father, so Ally accepting her bigger role now is to prioritize her child over her job and quest for love decides to move to her daughter's home city of New York.
Reception
Opinion on Ally McBeal was that she was demeaning to women because of her perceived flightiness, lack of demonstrated legal knowledge, short skirts, and extreme emotional instability. Perhaps the most notorious example of the debate sparked by the show was the June 25, 1998, cover story of Time magazine, which juxtaposed McBeal with three pioneering feminists and asked "Is Feminism Dead?". In 2004, Ally was ranked number 75 in Bravo's list of The 100 Greatest TV Characters. In June 2010, Entertainment Weekly named her one of the "100 Greatest Characters of the Last 20 Years". She was also listed in AOL's 100 Most Memorable Female TV Characters. Troy Patterson of Entertainment Weekly argued that Ally McBeal has similarities to Scarlett O'Hara of Gone with the Wind and that "Scarlett and Ally are fairy-tale princesses who bear about as much resemblance to real women as Barbie and Skipper." Patterson wrote that Ally is similar because she is also a child from a ruling class family, "pines hopelessly after an unavailable dreamboat", and has a "sassy black roommate" in place of a "mammy" to "comfort her".
