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Kelley's 'girls club'
Quick end to critic-trashed legal eaglette series
By Toni Fitzgerald
It took Fox five years to euthanize a quirky David E. Kelley series about a neurotic female lawyer.
It took the network less than three episodes to give the boot to her three replacement attorneys.
“girls club,” the little-watched, poorly reviewed successor to Kelley’s longtime hit “Ally McBeal,” was put out of its misery yesterday, to the delight of critics everywhere.
“‘girls club’ is so entirely unpleasant to watch that one has to wonder if the writers are having us on,” wrote Media Life’s Ethan Alter last week. “Maybe we're not supposed to root for these women, but instead ridicule them for being so clueless and exasperating.”
The young women were attractive, but their carryings-on were far from interesting to viewers, who responded to the show as Alter had predicted.
They all but fled.
The show finished fifth in its time slot this week and at No. 82 overall out of 131 shows. Its 2.1 adult 18-49 rating put it at No. 69, tying it with three other rookie series but placing it well below the ratings “Ally” got even in its fifth-season doldrums.
The first-year show’s premiere drew 6 million viewers, a little more than half of what “Ally’s” season premiere bagged last season.
The news got worse from there. This Monday’s second episode dropped by 16 percent in total viewers and 18-49s.
In "girls club's" 9 p.m. slot Fox will air reruns of “Boston Public," beginning next week.
The concept of “girls club” is fairly similar to “Ally,” minus the neuroticism. Three female lawyers trying to make it in a man’s world and battling various bedroom woes.
But critics objected to the thin caricatures, outrageous yet superficial plots and unnecessarily crass language.
The problem with the latest effort from Kelley, the Emmy-winning force behind Fox’s “Boston Public” and ABC’s “The Practice,” wasn’t just that the show was awful. Some shows can survive and even thrive on so-bad-it’s-good approaches. Remember “Beverly Hills 90210?”
The new show was expensive to produce, with each episode costing about $1.7 million, with six completed.
But a far bigger problem for Fox is that the network never had a chance to see a pilot of the show before committing it to a primetime slot, and when it finally did and realized the show was deeply flawed, it was too late.
Kelley is held in such esteem as a producer that he can sell a show on his credentials, and it worked for Fox when it signed on sight-unseen for “Boston Public,” now entering its third season.
It did not work for “girls club,” even though Kelley had written every episode. Fox, realizing there was nothing that could be done at this late hour to revamp the show, simply killed it.
It did so at risk of alienating Kelley, a top TV producer with a string of hits shows and little experience at having failing shows shot out from under him. He remains the biggest name on the network, even with “Ally” gone.
At least publicly, Kelley is taking the cancellation with aplomb.
"While I am disappointed that the show did not succeed, I remain proud of the entire cast and crew of `girls club,' " Kelley said in a statement.
October 30, 2002© 2002 Media Life
-Toni Fitzgerald is a staff writer for Media Life
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