Bring on the Next Girl

Executives at the WB Network were so proud when the late-night comedy “Mad TV” lampooned their new series “Felicity” that they screened the sketch for visiting TV critics in January 1999. Not every program, after all, generates enough buzz and discussion to make it a ripe object for ridicule.

In that respect, “Felicity”--the story of a pretty young girl who makes the impulsive decision to follow a boy she barely knows to college, skipping the opportunity to attend Stanford--clearly achieved its place in the popular culture, just as “Ally McBeal”--the story of a pretty young woman thrown together with a lost love who happens to work at her law firm--had done upon making its debut a year earlier.

It seems appropriate, then, for these two series to exit the stage together, with Fox’s “Ally” bidding farewell Monday and “Felicity” graduating from prime time two nights later. Each has had time to craft what amounts to a finale, even if neither title character has really completed her journey of self-discovery--the requirements of series television being such that its denizens must appear to go through major life progressions while essentially running in place.

Call them girls, interrupted.

And “girls,” the feminist implications of the word notwithstanding, is really the operative term here. Both Felicity and Ally were and always have been girls--girls who fretted endlessly (either via elaborate fantasies or taped voice-over self-reflection) about girl things, girls who worried excessively about committing faux pas around cute guys, girls whose world was seldom invaded by any serious real-world concerns that reached beyond their personal sphere.

Young women and teenage girls flocked to the series, whose engaging characters--coupled with their telegenic stars--propelled the shows onto magazine covers and spurred heated debate about everything from the length of Ally’s skirts to Felicity’s hair. Those same WB executives who basked in critical response to their show, in fact, later found themselves being grilled about whether they had damaged the franchise irrevocably by allowing star Keri Russell, to lop off her curly locks. Deluged by negative e-mail, an executive half-jokingly told reporters that after the “Felicity” experience, “nobody is cutting their hair again.”

Arguably, “Ally McBeal” had the more dramatic impact as cultural phenomena go and certainly in terms of its commercial success. Almost as soon as it premiered, Ivy League professors and female attorneys were sought for comment about the show’s reality or lack thereof and what messages that might convey to the audience. One academic labeled Ally a male fantasy, insisting that any thinking woman must despise her because she was so un-liberated--an educated career woman who still turned utterly goofy around guys.

This attitude was understandable but dead wrong. Although both shows were created by men (David E. Kelley in “Ally’s” case, with J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves dreaming up “Felicity”), for each show the audience overwhelmingly consisted of women--particularly demographically desirable young women (insert shot of network executives salivating here), who saw their concerns and issues reflected, albeit in exaggerated ways, in the characters’ travails.

In a 1998 interview, star Calista Flockhart--in one of those classic examples of the media, grasping for significance, thrusting actors into the role of sociologist--was asked to discuss the politically charged response to her character. About the best she could do was express mild bewilderment to see the show “being used by people as a vehicle to talk about feminism.”

Kelley also winced at the thought that young women might be patterning themselves after his creation.

“If someone comes up to me and says, ‘She’s my role model,’ I say, ‘Don’t,’” he said shortly before the show’s second season. “While you find her endearing this week, you may find her objectionable next week. Ally is Ally. She’s not supposed to represent a gender or age. She’s her own beast.”

Well, yes, but where’s the fun in that? After all, you can’t build a “20/20” piece or Redbook article around a silly TV show designed to do nothing more than entertain. It has to speak to “larger issues” that women can relate to in terms of their own lives--the kind of issues you can enlist experts, academics and women with no last names (“Debbie, 33, a dental hygienist who dates frequently”) to ponder and analyze at great length.

The simple explanation--that these programs were well-written, thoughtfully mixed comedy with drama and featured attractive casts--was hardly sufficient to satisfy these needs. So Felicity and Ally became icons, as well as commodities to be sold, marketed and emulated, in the same way little girls want to grow up to be Barbie or Pocahontas or Belle from “Beauty and the Beast.” All that changes is the nature of the fantasy and the cost and size of the accessories.

Sustaining such heat, however, has always been difficult, especially with new series clamoring for attention and familiar plot lines being pounded into submission. Where did “Felicity” have to go, really, after exhausting every permutation of the Noel versus Ben story, as the title character struggled to choose between two potential paramours? In similar fashion, how long could Ally remain jilted and lovelorn before trying the patience of viewers?

Of course, some of the latter show’s problems weren’t entirely of its own making. Ex-beau Billy died because co-star Gil Bellows wanted to move on with his career, while supporting player Robert Downey Jr. proved unable to fight off his own inner demons, prompting the somewhat awkward removal of a promising love interest for Ally. Small wonder that audience fatigue set in, plummeting from nearly 14 million viewers a week during the 1998-99 TV season to 9.4 million this season.

What’s perhaps more intriguing than the idea of “Ally McBeal” and “Felicity” simultaneously ending with a bit of a whimper--Lord knows the protagonists did their share of whimpering along the way--is the fact that their demise appears to have been helped along by newer examples of girls being girls.

Specifically, women, and especially those in the 18-to-34 age bracket, have found new real-life “characters” to fret over within the world of unscripted television. These viewers overwhelmingly chose ABC’s fabricated “reality” of “The Bachelor” over “Ally” through most of April. After “Ally’s” heavily promoted return with “Friends’” Matthew Perry as a guest posted ratings as scrawny as the show’s namesake, Kelley and the network decided to throw in the towel.

“Felicity,” by contrast, was never really a major hit, but it’s telling that one of the most popular shows to occupy the same time period was last season’s unscripted dating game, Fox’s “Temptation Island.” For a time, the water-cooler chat among young women was about whether Billy and Mandy would stay together, not Felicity and Ben.

Nevertheless, “Felicity” represented a significant asset in the maturation of the WB. Piling up rare awards for the network, the show earned a Golden Globe for Russell in its first season, just as “Ally’s” Flockhart was so honored the previous year. (This is a testament either to the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.’s ability to tap into the cultural zeitgeist or the ability of fruit-and-cheese baskets mailed out by the shows’ studios to tap into the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.)

Ultimately, it is a tribute to the writers and performers that these series resonated as deeply as they did before television’s version of the Grim Reaper came calling. It’s easy to forget how grueling episodic television can be for character-driven series: They risk boring viewers if the story doesn’t advance or turning off a sizable segment of their audience by hitting a sour note with some new wrinkle.

Still, it’s fair to say at this point that relatively few steadfast fans will truly miss, mourn or pine for these programs, the girls who embraced them having moved on to new pursuits. Soon enough, some razor-thin waif, real or imagined, will infiltrate this subculture, inspiring intense debate about her choices and hairstyles and clothes--debate to be teased and strung out, programmers hope, until said character can be assured of living on profitably in reruns for years to come.

Networks, after all, will be networks, just as girls will be girls.

*

Brian Lowry is a Times staff writer. His “On TV” column runs Wednesdays.