Ken Tucker’s Pop Culture

My Top 10 Music list, a mixture of albums, songs, a book, and a DVD, as heard on NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross”:

1. Fiona Apple, “Extraordinary Machine” [album]
2. Spoon, “The Beast and Dragon, Adored” [from the album Gimme Fiction]
3. Martina McBride, “Pick Me Up On Your Way Down” [from the album Timeless]
4. Fiery Furnaces, “Rehearsing My Choir” [album]
5. Kanye West, “Golddigger” [from the album Late Registration]
6. Chris Willman’s “Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music” (The New Press, publisher)
7. The Detroit Cobras, “The Real Thing” [from the album Baby]
8. Lyrics Born, “I’m Just Raw” [from the album Same #$%@, Different Day]
9. Bob Dylan, No Direction Home [DVD, Martin Scorsese, director]
10. “One Kiss  Can Lead To Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found” (Rhino boxed set)

I just finished a year as New York Magazine’s film critic. The magazine did not run Ten Best lists this year, so if anyone’s curious, here’s what my list would be for the 10 best movies of 2005:

1. A History of Violence
2. Rize
3. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
4. Serenity
5. Cache
6. Grizzly Man
7. Munich
8. Brokeback Mountain
9. Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior
10. 40 Shades of Blue

And I’ll be glad to explain why, if you want annotations.

1. CSI
2. Arrested Development
3. Lost
4. The Late Show with David Letterman
5. Gilmore Girls
6. The Comeback
7. Eyes
8. Battlestar Gallactica
9. Breaking Bonaduche
10. Boston Legal

Over the years, I’ve spent a fair amount of prose criticizing writer-producer David E. Kelley for his facile glibness (see “Picket Fences”), his misogyny-disguised-as-a-critique-of-misogyny (see “Ally McBeal,” “Girls Club,” and “Snoops”), and his cheap-shot sensationalism (see “Chicago Hope,” “Boston Public,” and for that matter, see the chapter devoted to Kelley in my book, out in paperback in February).
The thing is, all of these qualities are present in Kelley’s “Boston Legal”… but I love the show anyway. Or at least admire a brazeness taken to a new level. “Boston Legal,” as you probably know, is what morphed out of the hollow shell that had become “The Practice.” Steadily squeezing out dull characters, Kelley repopulated them with eccentrics and nut-cases, and retitled the new asylum he’d built; he re-jiggered the tone to accommodate low comedy and high lunacy, and when he was done, all that was left was the Boston backdrop.
And so in place of “The Practice”’s sturdybut wan Dylan McDermott, we got wily but weird James Spader; instead of washed-out Kelli Williams, we got beet-red-faced William Shatner. This season, we also get Candice Bergen, glowing with dour wit, and “Ed”’s Julie Bowen as (a small miracle in Kelley-Land) a believable, over-worked, unlucky-in-love attorney (though I’m giving Bowen’s talent to put such a character across at least as much credit as Kelley’s in writing it).
Spader and Shatner have already won Emmys for their distinctively off-kilter performances; Shatner’s happy to do a parody of Shatner, while Spader is, as he’s proved in movies, happy to portray a complicatedly neurotic man and deliver long, tricky courtroom speeches with stoned-WASP aplomb.
In fact, I’m willing to bet that the opportunity to write for an actor as good as Spader is one reason Kelley has snapped into disciplined shape after so many years of lazy self-indulgence; well, that and his rage at the Bush presidency. Among other things, “Boston Legal” has become Kelley’s soapbox to inveigh, with thoroughly invigorating, enraged wit, against everything from the excesses of the Homeland Security act to the government’s centempt for the poor.
The Dec. 6 episode was a glowing case in point. Kelley used Shatner’s fat-fat-fatuous Denny Crane to mouth the conservative party-line on the left-stranded victims of Hurricane Katrina (”lazy,” he called them), and built an entire subplot around Denny shooting a paintball into the head of a homeless man begging for cash. (That the homeless guy was played by Michael K. Williams, Omar of our beloved “The Wire”, was all the better for the episode.) Along the way, “Boston Legal” took a swipe at the media, specifically Larry King, on which air Shatner’s Denny was scheduled to appear. Spader maintained that the only reason people watch shows like King’s is “to be entertained by shock and drivel.” Right on, David E.! Although it’s not doing gangbusters in the ratings these days, perhaps ABC, riding high on “Housewives” and “Lost”ness, will keep this series around. Long may “Boston Legal” prevail, at least so long as Kelley continues to write and produce such rowdy obstreperousness.