UCLA School of Law

In discussing popular culture products, it is important to distinguish between story (or “narrative”) and storytelling (or “narration”). In the lawyer genre in film and television, the conventions call for objective narration. This means that relatively little is disclosed about the characters’ inner lives. Stories strive for verisimilitude and the emphasis is on what the characters do and their motivations for doing it, but without delving into their personal lives or emotions. Perry Mason, the prototypical television lawyer, had no personal life and no emotions other than wanting to find the real killer and free his always-innocent clients. Ally McBeal was a true genre buster because it involved subjective rather than objective narration. There was no effort to simulate verisimilitude. The stories foregrounded Ally’s personal feelings and her frustrated love life. The legal cases she worked on were silly and basically extensions of her personal problems. The subjective storytelling was intensified by innovative uses of music and by computer graphics such as the notorious dancing baby, symbolizing Ally’s concern over her biological clock. In addition, Ally McBeal episodes departed from the genre in matters of narration since the stories dealt with a great variety of gender and sexuality issues to the near exclusion of legalistic material.