Eli McBeal

I have been shirking my duties to the Star Trek: Relive the Majesty community for a little while now, and one of the things that has intruded upon Trek watching is Eli Stone, a surrealist lawyer drama that ended up in our queue because we needed our Jonny Lee Miller fix until the next season of Elementary is available. 

Eli Stone rightly draws comparisons to Ally McBeal; it's essentially the same show with a male lead and transplanted to San Francisco**, only with weaker writing.  In the first two seasons (when I recall Ally McBeal was good; it's been 15 years), they did a wonderful job of creating court cases whose ethical quandaries had parallels to the latest mini-crisis in Ally's life, and we would see how her personal decisions compared, contrasted, affected, and were affected by, her arguments in court.  Eli's cases and personal life are typically more directly linked, so the stories simply are not as rich.  

I've also been disappointed by the start of the second season.  Characters who were saintly in their tolerance of Eli's behavior in the first season are suddenly mad at him in the second season for acting in exactly the same way he always has; moreover, they seem to have extremely short memories when it comes to the fact that Eli's quirks seem to be part of what make him a good lawyer.  The ship is righting itself in the second half of season two, but I see why the show was cancelled.

All in all, it's not a bad way to multitask for ~20 hours over the course of a few weeks.

** one thing they do well in Eli Stone is to give you the sense that you're in San Francisco; I don't recall Boston being the setting of Ally McBeal so much as their unisex lavatory.