Grace under fire

Sadly this post isn't about the mid-'90s sitcom starring Brett Butler, but one day we'll get to that seminal piece of sitcom history. Rest assured.

The "Boston Legal" parody of Nancy Grace ("Gracie Jane") - heavily featured in tonight's episode - just seems a little out of place given, you know, the recent very well-reported allegations that her and her show may have led to someone's death.

It's a good guess that these episodes were made before the Melinda Duckett incident, but it's jarring to see a show as generally lighthearted as "Boston Legal" point lighthearted fun at her in...light...of recent events (that's a lot of use of the word "light").

Old, "Practice"-era David E. Kelley could probably come up with a good, incisive statement on the whole ordeal with the analogue, but this current, wacky David E. Kelley is just painting with broad strokes - which was fine for old, crazy Nancy Grace, but seems too tame for current, bully-you-into-killing-yourself Nancy Grace.

This is still my favorite Nancy Grace moment, though:



On a totally different "Boston Legal" note, I like the Craig Bierko character a lot so far, but having another charismatic, morally-dubious lawyer running around only further dilutes Alan Shore, still the most interesting part of the show. The last season of "The Practice" was perfect because you had all these straight arrows running around and it was like "Holy crap, Alan Shore," but since everyone's goofy at Crane, Pool and Schmidt, he's seemed a little less of a threat - and another character with roughly the same bag of tricks seems sort of redundant.