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Along-running serial television narrative must maintain a precarious balance. It is difficult enough for the producers of a new television series to create a set of compelling new character relations that can capture a sizable viewing audience in its opening season.1 Once these relations are established ,theserialmustsomehowundothem,becausebydefinitiontheseries must move forward. Stuff happens, and in a serial narrative, events matter because a serial has a memory.2 Narrative incidents alter old relations, and characters become complicated as they accrue experiences. How can we examine the complex balance of characters across a serial, given the number of plotlines covered by the narrative? In time-bounded feature film narration, characters proceed toward goals, overcome obstacles , and so on. Certainly classic film narration and television serials share a similar “what will happen next” drive, and perhaps this forward-driven conception of narration can partly explain how serial television crafts its appeal.3 Here, however, I focus on a different understanding of narration, one that is less concerned with how plot events tell us what happened next. Rather my emphasis is on what plot events tell us about the interconnected world of the serial, how actions inflect our understanding of the dramatic community, and how the closed system of the serial sets up comparisons among characters. Others have noted that serial narrative sets up a network of intricately related characters who comment on one another’s actions. Daytime soap opera, in particular, tends to extend the ramifications of single actions (a one-night stand, for instance), spending a great deal of time on how characters in the tightly knit network anticipate, discover, analyze, and react to that action.4 But we still lack a way to analyze such narrative. t h rE E redeeming Ally Seriality and the Character Network  GreG M. SMiTh I want to take one approach to looking at serial narrative, an approach that should also be more broadly useful for exploring the way in which primetime serials deploy characters. At the same time, I want to argue for what is distinctive about Ally McBeal. As I noted in the previous chapter, Ally uses an ensemble cast, which is characteristic of much “quality television ,”5 but it makes little attempt to give a balanced portrait of a workplace. Rather than create a set of more or less well-rounded characters, each on his or her individual trajectory through the narrative, Ally McBeal depicts a network of central characters each of whom reflects, refracts, or extends Ally’s key values. The characters are defined as thematic variations on Ally herself, rather than placed into a clear relationship of narrative antagonism and allegiance. It matters less that Renee works for the district attorney’s office and therefore is more likely to face members of Cage and Fish in court. The issues raised by these cases matter more than who opposes whom in court or who wins or loses. The characters shift their alliances based on the issue at stake at the moment, and these shifts are made possible by the complicated character architecture of the series. The primary characters on Ally McBeal exist to voice exaggerated versions of one or more of Ally’s core beliefs. Following these characters allows us to discover the consequences of the roads Ally might have taken, and thus the system of characterization on the show depicts a complicated balance of possible outcomes rather than stake everything on the simple serial question, what will happen to Ally? As the other characters become increasingly dissatisfied with the lives they have chosen, we are left with only one viable alternative: Ally’s unrepentant eccentricity, which becomes the moral touchstone that all characters use to evaluate their own failings. The series gradually reveals that Ally’s refusal to give up on her dreams of romance is actually a more morally courageous stance than the other characters ’ pragmatism. By sticking to her romantic ideals, Ally has become the most grounded character while the others seem dangerously stuck in their own patterns of behavior. What Ally McBeal demonstrates is that a serial can progress by changing its basic attitude toward the characters, by asking the audience to reevaluate its judgments of character behaviors, not by changing the characters themselves.6 Ally McBeal shows us that the other main characters are stuck in the past, so it spends considerable time exploring the past as a way to discredit their present and future. To increase its ability to provide audiences with a steady...

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