There is a particular sound that runs through David E. Kelley's television, and it is the sound of someone rising to speak. A lawyer stands, smooths a jacket, and begins talking to twelve strangers as if the whole moral universe were balanced on the next ninety seconds. Kelley wrote hundreds of these moments across his career, and the remarkable thing is how rarely they feel like filler. He treated the closing argument the way a songwriter treats a chorus, the place where the episode finally says what it has been circling. To watch his shows in sequence is to learn a grammar, one where law is never just procedure but a stage for human beings to plead their strange and stubborn cases.
The closing argument as thesis statement
Kelley trained as a lawyer before he ever sold a script, and you can feel that training in the architecture of his episodes. The cases are rarely the point on their own. Instead they function as containers for a question, and the closing argument is where the writer steps to the lectern and answers it. On The Practice, his grittiest and most morally serious creation, those summations had real weight. The firm at Donnell, Young, Dole and Frutt defended people who were often guilty, or at least unsavory, and the show refused to let its lawyers feel clean about winning. Bobby Donnell and his colleagues argued the system rather than the innocence, and Kelley used the closing to insist that a flawed process was still worth defending, even when it set free someone you would not want as a neighbor.
That is the engine underneath all of it. Give a character a podium, a jury, and a genuinely hard idea, and let them talk until the idea lands. The Practice earned its drama by making those ideas cost something, and by letting the verdicts go the wrong way often enough that you never relaxed. It was Kelley at his most disciplined, the lawyer in him keeping the showman honest.
The eccentric supporting cast
If The Practice was the argument, Ally McBeal was the id. Here Kelley loosened the collar entirely and let the inner lives of his lawyers spill into the frame, literally. Ally's anxieties took physical form, most famously the dancing baby that hallucinated its way across the floor of her apartment, a goofy and oddly tender symbol of a biological clock she could not silence. The firm of Cage and Fish was a menagerie of tics and obsessions, from John Cage's remote-controlled toilet to a unisex bathroom that served as the show's true courtroom, where the real cases of the heart were tried. Critics argued endlessly about whether Ally was a feminist or a fainting throwback, and Kelley seemed delighted to be unresolved about it.
He gave a character a podium and a genuinely hard idea, then let them talk until the idea landed.
Silly and earnest at once
Then came Boston Legal, where the two halves of Kelley finally shook hands. Spun out of The Practice but tuned to a wholly different frequency, it paired Alan Shore, a brilliant and amoral litigator played by James Spader, with Denny Crane, William Shatner's vain, gun-toting, mad-cow-fearing legend of the bar. The series was openly absurd, full of fourth-wall asides and balcony cigars and a friendship between two men who called it the love of their lives without a flicker of irony. Yet within the same hour it would mount a thundering closing argument about civil liberties or capital punishment, Shore staring down a judge with the kind of righteous fury the show otherwise mocked. That whiplash was the whole design.
What holds the career together is a refusal to choose between the heart and the punchline. Kelley believed, episode after episode, that a show could make you laugh at a dancing infant and then ask you, in earnest, what justice is owed to the unloved and the guilty. The closing argument was always his signature move, the moment the noise stopped and a person simply spoke their conviction aloud. Across The Practice, Ally McBeal, and Boston Legal, he built a courtroom that was also a confessional, a comedy club, and a pulpit, and he never once apologized for wanting it to be all of those at the same time. Objection, sustained, repeat.