An early version of this article, which is based largely on the first series of Ally McBeal, was delivered as a paper (‘Ally McBeal ‘s Soundtrack’) at the Third Triennial British Musicological Societies’ Conference, 15–18 July 1999, University of Surrey.Google Scholar

1 Josh Levine, David E. Kelley: The Man Behind Ally McBeal (Toronto, 1999), 60.Google Scholar

2 For more on the history of women's comedy see Bonnie J. Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media-Culture, and the Women's Movement since 1970 (Philadelphia, 1996). Cable television has seen the advent of reruns of classic series.Google Scholar

3 On the use of stereotypes in situation comedy see Feuer, Jane, ‘Genre Study and Television’, Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Robert C. Allen (2nd edn, London, 1992), 138–60 (p. 153).Google Scholar

4 In the first series he is a fancier of older powerful women and a fetishist for the loose skin under their chins (their ‘wattle‘). In most of the second series he pursues beautiful bitch Ling, who denies him sex (considering it insufferably messy) but performs all sorts of alternatives to the sexual act itself.Google Scholar

5 On television as pleasure see, for instance, John Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies (Oxford, 1999), 94–107.Google Scholar

6 I use the word ‘narratively’ here simply to refer to music's metaphorical ‘use’ within the plot.Google Scholar

7 On television as distraction see Morse, Margaret, ‘An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television’, Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1999), 193–221.Google Scholar

8 See Morris, Meaghan, ‘Banality in Cultural Studies’, Logics of Television, ed. Mellencamp, 14–43, and (revised) What is Cultural Studies? A Reader, ed. John Storey (London, 1996), 147–67.Google Scholar

9 See Baudrillard, Jean, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St Louis, 1981), and ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman, A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (New York, 1993), 342–75; see also Stephen Heath, ‘Representing Television’, Logics of Television, ed. Mellencamp, 267–302.Google Scholar

10 McRobbie, Angela, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (London and New York, 1994), 2.Google Scholar

11 I am grateful to Nicholas Cook for suggesting, in connection with the pop-song voice-overs, that I think of television more as performance than as narrative.Google Scholar

12 On the vaudeville roots of situation comedy, see Mellencamp, Patricia, High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, and Comedy (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1992). Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York, 1994), 157, 165.Google Scholar

13 Gorbman, Claudia, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, 1987).Google Scholar

14 The classic statement on camp is Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”‘, Against Interpretation (London, 1967), 35–64.Google Scholar

15 Songs from Ally McBeal, featuring Vonda Shepard (1998), Sony Music Soundtrax, BK 69365. David E. Kelley is credited as the CD's executive producer, Vonda Shepard as its producer.Google Scholar

16 According to Shepard, quoted in Benjamin Svetkey, ‘Everything you love or hate about Ally McBeal ‘, Entertainment Weekly Online, 30 January 1998 (http://ally.hhsweb/archive/Magazines_and_Newspapers/Entertainment_Weekly/art_entertainmentwweekly.htm), Kelley chose the show's title track, ‘Searchin’ my Soul’, from one of Shepard's Warner albums (The Radical Light, 1992; WR/7599266882), even though in 1996 she had released an independent album in a more ‘complex, Laura Nyro-esque writing style’ (It's Good, Eve; 96453850032). Shepard now describes her two Warner albums as ‘slick and undistinguished’.Google Scholar

17 Goodwin, Andrew, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music, Television and Popular Culture (London, 1993), 102.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 75. This double function once even serves as a story-line: Renee jumps onto the stage in the bar to turn a love song (‘Love Me’, by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller) that Ally's date is singing to her into a sexy love duet (in ‘Happy Birthday, Baby'). Ally is outraged. And although Renee later insists that it was ‘only a song’, Ally takes some convincing that there is an ambivalence or a distinction between the singer's role as first-person narrator and as character. (‘You did everything but hump his leg!‘)Google Scholar

19 I am borrowing Barbara Bradby's term ('You-song'): ‘Do-Talk and Don't-Talk: The Division of the Subject in Girl-Group Music’, On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London, 1990), 341–68.Google Scholar

20 Michel Chion discusses the acousmêtre, or disembodied voice, in film in Audio-Vision, 129–31.Google Scholar

21 Corbett, John, Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr Funkenstein (Durham and London, 1994), 38–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 For instance, as Ally kisses professional colleague and passing love interest Bobby in the episode ‘These are the Days’, the song ‘Fools Fall in Love in a Hurry’ emerges from the soundtrack as knowing extra-diegetic commentary: Bobby later announces to Ally that he is not ready for a relationship.Google Scholar

23 Robynn Stilwell provides an analysis of the way in which Phil Collins's ‘In the Air Tonight’ is used as an overlay in both Miami Vice and Guiding Light. See ‘“In the Air Tonight”: Text, Inter-textuality and the Construction of Meaning’, Popular Music and Society, 19 (1996), 67–103.Google Scholar

24 Having seduced a man, invited him to her flat, and made most of the sexual running, Renee hits him when he starts the move from sexual play to foreplay (he misreads her first ‘No’ as part of the game); he returns her hit; she then kicks him out, breaking his neck. In a pre-hearing meeting, Renee is warned that because she is a trained kick-boxer there is definitely probable cause; Renee still insists on trying to defend herself in the hearing.Google Scholar

25 He explains to Renee that he did not ask her to testify because she was hostile and would have made a lousy witness; but because juries get suspicious if defendants are not prepared to take the stand, he allowed them to get the impression that she was prepared to testify but it was he who stopped her. He also needed an opportunity to say that the State had a lousy case, because they actually had a wonderful case and Renee had none.Google Scholar

26 For Lyotard's theory that all knowledge involves legitimation via a series of language games see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester, 1984), 41–7, 60–7.Google Scholar

27 Reprinted in John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (London, 1987), 146–93. The two Cages also share a prophetic bent: the composer's writings are full of prophecies about the future of music, and his 1937 lecture ‘The Future of Music’ is even concerned with film and electronic music; Cage the attorney is able to sense things before they happen, and has a similar tendency to make knowing predictions.Google Scholar

28 In Mikhail Bakhtin's sense; see Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1984).Google Scholar

29 Chion, Audio-Vision, 39.Google Scholar

30 Elaine's constant eavesdropping – through doors and via various electronic devices – might be interpreted along similar lines, as constantly exposing that it is possible to hear the sound that goes with a particular scene without seeing the scene itself.Google Scholar

31 As Jim Collins points out in ‘Television and Postmodernism’, Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Allen, 327–53.Google Scholar

32 Renee: ‘This guy [Freud] was the biggest sex perv going.‘Google Scholar

Ally: ‘Freud?‘Google Scholar

Renee: ‘Ally! Everything was about sex with Freud. The little spanker couldn't walk down the street without one hand holding his Id.‘Google Scholar

Ally: ‘That little spanker invented psychoanalysis.‘Google Scholar

Renee: ‘Which obviously makes him your hero. Here's a flash: Psychoanalysis came to him in a wet dream. Pardon the pun … Don't be whipping Freud out on me, girl! I got that guy sussed.‘Google Scholar

(‘The Dirty Joke‘)Google Scholar

33 The comedic exception that proves the rule is the final special episode of the English sitcom Absolutely Fabulous (‘The Last Shout’, written by and starring Jennifer Saunders), which ends with Edina (Saunders) bringing her daughter's fantasy wedding crashing to a halt when her (i.e. Eddy's) sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll fantasies suddenly come flooding back to her. She has a vision of rock-chick Marianne Faithfull as God standing behind the priest singing ‘They've [sic] gotta get out of this place’ (Barry Mann/Cynthia Weill), with Marianne's voice intoning ‘You know it too’ as she takes a slow drag on her cigarette.Google Scholar

34 See Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s, ed. Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton (London, 1995), and John Mundy, Popular Music on Screen: From Hollywood Musical to Music Video (Manchester, 1999).Google Scholar

35 Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, ‘Rock and Sexuality’, On Record, ed. Frith and Goodwin, 371–89.Google Scholar

36 Svetkey, , ‘Everything you love or hate about Ally McBeal ‘.Google Scholar

37 Readers with access to the internet are referred to video clip 2 at <www.jrma.oupjournals.org>. The clip shows a scene near the beginning of ‘Cro-Magnon’ (first series) in which Ally hallucinates a dancing baby as she is about to leave for a sculpture class with Georgia, the latter having chosen to join Ally after hearing of the model's unusually large penis. Billy expresses his disapproval.Google Scholar

38 Barbara Bradby and Brian Torode, ‘Pity Peggy Sue’, Popular Music, 4 (1984), 183–205, quoted in Bradby ‘Do-Talk and Don't-Talk’, 345.Google Scholar

39 Apart, that is, from Tracy turning on her example ‘theme song’ in a therapeutic situation.Google Scholar

40 'Rock ‘n’ roll was originally a synonym for sex.’ Frith and McRobbie, ‘Rock and Sexuality’, 371. In Ally McBeal, for Richard the dance floor is a ‘level playing-field’; for Renee, it is a place where she can strut her (Paglia-style) sexual stuff, try out her sexual power and explore explicitly sexual interaction (‘We practically tore each other's clothes off on the dance floor’, says one conquest in ‘The Inmates'); for Ally the slow dance is not really a dance at all, more a question of two people leaning on each other, ‘almost as if they'd fall down without the other to hold onto'.Google Scholar

41 'It can bring a lot of relief. All the sounds of a spousal relationship. You can carry it in your pocket. Track 1: your husband opening the car door for you like a perfect gentleman. [We hear a car door.] [Track 2]: his sleeping next to you. [We hear snoring.] Tracks 3 through 6: normal husband sounds heard around the house. [We hear various sounds, including a fart]’ In ‘Alone Again'.Google Scholar

42 Morris, ‘Banality in Cultural Studies’.Google Scholar

43 As John Fiske notes in Television Culture (London and New York, 1987), 254.Google Scholar

44 I have mentioned Richard's stated aim to make as much money as possible; but there are also Elaine's crazy inventions – face-bras and the like – for which she hopes there will be a large buying public; her demonstrations of them are like parodies of television shopping channels.Google Scholar

45 See above, note 15. P. Wollen has pointed out that ‘music video is a special mix of ad and program, for the visual act is an ad whereas the soundtrack is a sample of the commodity’. He also comments that fashion events have taken on the style of music video. ‘Ways of Thinking about Music Video (and Postmodernism)‘, Critical Quarterly, 28 (1986), 127–70, quoted in Fiske, Television Culture, 254.Google Scholar

46 ‘Vonda would like to thank the wonderful kindhearted David E. Kelley for giving me this tremendous opportunity. You're my hero! My dear Michelle Pfeiffer. Gail Gellman … ‘, etc. Prior to Shepard's appearance on the show, she was a little-known Los Angeles club singer who six years previously had been dropped by Warner Bros. Records after making a couple of records with them. Ally McBeal's creator-producer David E. Kelley and his wife Michelle Pfeiffer were apparently followers of her circuit act when he decided to include her in his new show. The show's popularity and the success of the CD Songs from Ally McBeal (on which she sings all tracks and wrote or co-wrote four) benefits Shepard enormously, especially considering that she appears on the show under her real name. There is never any confusion about her identity as performer; Vonda Shepard has a performing life both in and outside the show. Fans can access her website and find out about forthcoming gigs from links provided on the various fan websites for Ally McBealGoogle Scholar

47 Cf. Elaine's face-bra, constant gags about women's high heels, and Ally's ever-shrinking miniskirts – identified (in the last episode of the first series, ‘These are the Days') as a parodic sign of her desperation: having just been dumped again, she says, ‘It's not that I object to sadness. It's just that whenever I get depressed I raise my hem-line. If things don't change, I'm bound to be arrested.’Google Scholar

48 See McRobbie, , Postmodernism and Popular Culture.Google Scholar

49 Mulvey, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50 Silverman, Kaja, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1988), 58.Google Scholar

51 It also deconstructs the Mulvey approach narratively through a plot-line concerning a gorgeous, Barbie-like post-girl, at whom male characters gape, tongues morphed to the floor, as she moves in slow motion through the office to the soundtrack strains of high choral voices. Richard: ‘She was going to ask me a question once and I said, don't spoil it. I don't want to attach anything audio to her … That is nature at its best out there. They should get Richard Kiley to narrate her’ (‘The Promise‘). However, it is not just that gendered visual pleasure is parodied, it is later reversed when the women gape similarly at a male model.Google Scholar

52 Andrew Ross makes the point about Miami Vice and Hill Street Blues in ‘Masculinity and Miami Vice: Selling In’, Oxford Literary Review, 8 (1986), 151.Google Scholar

53 Robynn Stilwell noted the opposite aesthetic values of Ally McBeal and The Practice in ‘The Music that isn't There: The Practice’, a paper delivered at the Third Triennial British Musicological Societies’ Conference, 15–18 July 1999, University of Surrey.Google Scholar

54 The remote control, the sheer number of channels available, and the delay of a week between episodes make viewing habits a crucial consideration when reading a TV show, though counter-balancing this inbuilt ephemerality is the combined effect of immediate reruns, the possibility of recording a whole series on a VCR – removing the need to miss any given episode and making the whole series personally available for repeat viewing – and the eventual possibility of buying commercial recordings of the entire series. In Britain, the first series of Ally McBealwas shown weekly on (terrestrial) Channel 4 and was immediately followed by nightly reruns on (cable) UK Living, which were fairly quickly followed by another rerun on Channel 4 in a later time-slot designed to lead smoothly up to the beginning of the second series. If you had become a fan halfway through the first series, there were plenty of chances to catch up before the beginning of the second. And this is not to mention the availability of detailed plot summaries available on the many websites of American fans, even in published books. So, while fragmentary viewing habits may affect an individual response at any time, the quick consolidation of whole series into a type of ‘work’ concept makes it hard to sustain ephemerality as a meaningful objection to analysis such as mine.Google Scholar

55 As Benjamin Svetkey summed it up in ‘Everything you love or hate about Ally McBeal'. The only alternative perspective I have read is that Ally McBeal is who America is as culture: ‘Ally is every narcissistic citizen who lords his or her quibbles over the rest of us … She's a bratty anti-hero lost in her private world who's [sic] greatest dream isn't truth or beauty or justice, it's to live in a country whose national anthem is the theme song to “Friends”; all she wants is some nice-looking fellow idiot who'll whisper in her ear, “I'll be there for you”. Ally McBeal is the opposite to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is about who America used to be as a nation: killer of demons, and about good versus evil.’ Sarah Vowell, ‘We have Met the Enemy, and She is Us’, Salon Magazine, 21 September 1998.Google Scholar

56 Bellafante, Ginia, Time, cover story, Vol. 151, No. 25 (29 June 1998).Google Scholar

57 McRobbie, , Postmodernism and Popular Culture, 2.Google Scholar

58 See, for instance, Gorbman, Unheard Melodies. On subliminal discourses, see Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. Nicholas Cook has recently proposed a more inclusive theory of all musical multimedia (see Multimedia, Analysing Musical, Oxford, 1998).Google Scholar

59 See Fiske, John, Understanding Popular Culture (London and New York, 1989), 49–68.Google Scholar

60 That is, Ally's silent theme songs, heard only in her head, and ‘You Can't Hurry Love’ (Brian Holland/Lamont Dozier/Eddie Holland) as a more or less ‘perceptible’ silent theme song in ‘These are the Days’: John Cage defends a man who goes around hitting couples on the head with a canoe paddle when he observes them struggling in the awkward initial stages of a relationship, unsure as to whether to make the first move or not. ‘I accelerate love’, he claims in court. Despite his best efforts and for the first time ever, John Cage loses the case. There are no references to ‘You Can't Hurry Love’ in the show, but the defendant's crazy claim that he can hurry it and the jury's shock-horror resistance to John Cage's powers of persuasion are enough to suggest that, like Diana Ross's mother, they know that you can't hurry love.Google Scholar

61 ‘I got to be with him [I know you will] on the midnight train to Georgia [leavin’ on a midnight train to Georgia, Ooo-woo!].’ At the end of the chorus, their repetition of her line seems more like an imperative ('I'd rather live in his world [live in his world] than be without him in mine'); and the Pips only seem to admit that the world is ‘his and hers’ after they have first stressed that it is his: ’ The world is his, [pause] his and hers alone.’ On the Pips as Gladys Knight's backing singers, see Eddy, Chuck, The Accidental Evolution of Rock ‘n’ Roll: A Misguided Tour through Popular Music (New York, 1997), 173–5.Google Scholar

62 Morris, , ‘Banality in Cultural Studies’, What is Cultural Studies?, 158.Google Scholar

63 McRobbie, , Postmodernism and Popular Culture, 3.Google Scholar