I finished Boston Legal while home with a migraine last night, so now it's time for me to talk about it at excruciating length. Spoilers, I guess, if you've been meaning to watch that for the past twelve years and somehow still haven't gotten around to it.
For those of you who don't know, Alan and Denny get married in the series finale. To each other. On purpose. It's more interesting than it sounds, and for a series that isn't specifically about LGBT+ issues and finished in 2008, that's already pretty interesting. Their entire arc is a brilliant deconstruction of the way we so often do not write relationships into fiction, but only indicate them with clichés and archetypes and rely on the audience to fill in the rest. The existence of love is implied by showing sex; the depth of the feeling is gauged by how much emotional turmoil the character has to go through before they can admit it. It's an equally brilliant reconstruction of how to write a loving, intimate relationship between characters when you don't have any of those cheap, easy shortcuts to fall back on.
I ran through the TV Tropes page while I was watching season 1. I'm the weirdo who likes spoilers, because they tell me what cool stuff to watch out for. The two of them are on it a lot, both for general character traits and for specific shenanigans, of which there are many. It's observed in several places that everyone talks about them like they're a couple, which is typically played for comedy. I expected a House-and Wilson vibe, where one of them is crazy and out of control, and the other one is also crazy but better at behaving in polite company. Maybe fewer mean practical jokes, but definitely bickering like an old married couple, poking each other in the embarrassing personal quirks, and occasionally someone catching a good case of jealousy when the other picks up a love interest or a sudden new friend.
I was very wrong. All of that does happen, but the description in this case was quite literal. They really do speak to, and about, each other using the language of lovers. Denny is the first to start it, and even complains about people assuming that a lot of these emotional concepts are restricted to romance; Alan is the first one to say 'I love you'. Neither of these things is treated as a revelation. There is an immediate tacit agreement over the first that yes, this is the correct way to talk about this relationship, and as for the second, Alan is really just reassuring Denny of something he plainly already knows.
Once the paradigm has shifted, it does not shift back. There's no on again-off again here; they have disagreements, conflicts, and a couple of actual shouting fights, but it is always back to 'I love you' once they cool down and talk. Which they do. Because they are grown ups. I will never not be a fan of people behaving like reasonable adults on TV, even if those people are otherwise prone to having sex with opposing counsel in the elevator at work, or shooting annoying people with paintball guns.
There is a refreshing lack of angst. There is no soul-searching, and no one wrestles with questions of orientation or identity. Denny assumes that whatever he's doing is the right thing to do, by virtue of the fact that he's the one doing it. He is a proudly heterosexual horndog who has been married to (and divorced from) half a dozen women already, and he loves Alan. End of. Alan is generally aware when he's being weird, he just can't make himself care. Exactly zero people ask him what the hell is up with Denny, and he issues zero spontaneous comments about it. He makes no effort to hide, and if he gives other people brain cramps, that is their own problem. In five seasons, it only becomes a plot point once, when a vengeful prosecutor tries to make a case against Denny that involves painting him as a (poorly) closeted gay man. It's ruined as much by Denny being oblivious as it is by the actual defense attorney.
The two of them don't originate in Boston Legal, but first appeared in a precursor series The Practice, which is a dark, gritty legal drama. Not my cup of tea, but I hunted down the relevant episodes regardless. They meet when Alan hires Denny's firm to sue his previous law firm, which fired him. I don't know what plot the writers had planned before The Practice was canceled, but they were clearly going somewhere. Alan thinks Denny's entertaining but might be obstructively daffy, and tries to manage him into staying quiet in court, which doesn't work. Denny thinks Alan is "confusing" and wonders aloud if he's trying to lose his case on purpose. The two are performatively friendly to each other immediately, with a distinct undertone of "come closer, I want to observe you". There is so much friendly so suddenly that at one point Alan makes a crack about being hit on, which in retrospect is far funnier than it has any right to be.
They are fascinated with each other. It reads as equal parts threat assessment and flirtation. Not the "I need to get my hands on you" of sexual attraction, but the "I need to know how you tick" of people driven by intense curiosity. 'Married' is maybe not where you'd guess they end up, but 'sharing a prison cell' gets good odds. Alan is blunt with others, with a distant compassion, a mix of philosophical observation and direct statements of what he has guessed about "you" from the outside. He tells people a lot of things he thinks they ought to hear, but which he suspects will make them dislike him intensely. He does it to Denny, informing him that he has spotted the initial signs of what will later be confirmed as Alzheimer's. But when that doesn't get him dropped like a rock, he admits to a moment of very personal judgement while watching Denny in court: "I am in awe of you." It's a nice emotional note to strike as The Practice comes to a close, but against that more realistic backdrop the both of them come off as very dangerous men, and their new connection threatens to make them dangerous squared.
There appears to be a time skip of a year or so before the softer, zanier universe of Boston Legal starts up. Alan is positioned as the main protagonist, with his already-close friendship with Denny sharing the spotlight. It's an unusual choice. The centerpiece relationship in an ensemble show like this is usually a romance, and often a rocky one. It's an easy way to generate dramatic tension. Because of the aforementioned lack of angst, though, the course of Alan and Denny's relationship is less a roller coaster and more a gentle upward slope of discovering what they want and are comfortable with. The two are vulnerable with each other in a way that neither is with anyone else; their private discussions of issues and events give a lot of insight that would otherwise be relegated to subtext in the performance, or omitted altogether as 'out of character' for the courtroom summations. It provides a lovely bit of grounding in what is otherwise a madcap world.
I suspect the reason a lot of this made it into the scripts as explicitly as it did was that it's couched in comedy. At one point, Alan develops night terrors and stress-induced sleepwalking. A normal person would talk to a doctor, but Alan decides that what he really needs is someone to sleep beside him, so they can wake him if he tries to sonambulate off his balcony again. He's not dating anyone at the time, so he asks Denny, who declines on the basis that the idea is way too gay for his comfort, whilst peeling Alan's fingers delicately off his own. It's an amusing character moment -- Denny is the rare person who is hypocritically nicer than his professed views would suggest -- that gains significance later when Alan starts bugging him to keep track of how bad his brain is getting. First, Alan starts booking their medical appointments at the same time, for convenience; then, Alan starts going down to the doctor's with Denny, for solidarity. At the final appointment, the two of them get Denny's prognosis sitting next to each other in the neurologist's office, Denny outright refusing to let go of Alan's hand. By the time they were done being funny, it was so well embedded into the story that no amount of controversy could make them write it out again.
Denny does eventually agree to be Alan's sleepwalking alarm. It is used as an excuse for a lot of slapstick, but also marks the start of their "sleepovers", which keep going even after the night terrors subside. From the sound of it, these involve drinking, eating a lot of junk food, watching movies, and just not bothering to go home at the end. It's ambiguous whether the two of them crash out in the same bed when this happens. When they travel together, they always share a room. (They don't need to. Denny has more money than God, and Alan, if slightly less blessed, could at least outspend several seraphim. They routinely wager on things to the tune of $50-100K.) The rooms shown have two beds, but this is the setup for a running gag, where one of them is startled awake by something and immediately yeets himself across the room and under the other one's covers. The first time gets a big YIKES from both of them, but the next one is more of a 'what the hell why are you waking me up'. It normalizes quickly. The last trip we see involves camping, where they share both a tent and a bedroll.
If you are absolutely determined to keep your No-Homo Goggles superglued on, you could read the ending as the best of friends getting one last good one over on the legal system before Denny is forced into retirement. You would have to try really hard. They don't end the series cackling at their cleverness over scotch and cigars, but quietly sharing a dance, happy to be married, alone on Denny's terrace. There is an actual wedding, albeit a small one, where they pick a venue and dress up and invite their friends. The initial proposal is Denny giving a list of ways that a marriage would protect his end-of-life wishes and Alan's ability to enforce them, but Alan thinks that's ridiculous, and it's certainly not why he says yes. The rest of the dialogue makes it abundantly clear: They marry for love. Perhaps not quite in the way you'd expect, but, as Alan is fond of saying, 'just the same'.
(Or, if you want to be pedantic, they commit for love, and marry to keep Alan from being hauled into court repeatedly for the rest of Denny's life, and probably well beyond, to defend his legal right to execute all the plans they've already agreed on. This was a common argument cited in the debate over same-sex marriage, which was still ongoing. The series finale aired a few years after same-sex marriage -- as opposed to "civil unions" -- was legalized in Massachusetts where the show was set, but well before it was ratified federally.)
Nothing goes to plan, of course. Denny makes a pass at the clerk when they apply for the marriage license, which annoys her and snowballs into an injunction against issuing the license that ends in the two of them going to court. Alan does have a rational, impersonal, general argument, which he delivers with his typical loquacity. The legal institution of marriage is essentially a package transfer of property control rights and powers of attorney to another person with whom you wish to manage your affairs in perpetuity. People are assumed to make this decision for emotional reasons, but there's nothing in the statute that says you have to. If two competent, consenting adults want to enter into this contract so that one can handle the other's medical decline and inherit all of his stuff at the end, there's no legal basis for stopping them.
His personal argument comes out much more succinctly when opposing council ticks him off and he gets up on his angry, angry soapbox, which is, "I love him. He loves me. We're partners." He tells their friends the same thing. I cannot begin to express how much I appreciate the complete lack of drama over this. Nobody is incredulous, despite both Alan and Denny having long, notorious track records for sleeping around, 100% with women. Nobody asks either of them if they're sure, or how this happened, or when they figured this out, or what they think it means. Nobody ever has a serious discussion about the nature of the relationship. It just is what it is, which I really wish would happen more, both in fiction and in life. The only person who even tries to argue that it's the wrong kind of love for a marriage is the opposing council, and the court rules that it doesn't matter.
I cannot help but wonder about the wider reaction to all this at the time, when I was paying no attention to media commentary. I'm sure a lot of people loved the finale and thought it was very brave, very funny, or both. A lot of other people probably hated it and were afraid they would catch gay cooties from the TV. A completely different group of people probably hated it because it wasn't gay enough -- there's no Big Damn Kiss at the end, Alan argues explicitly in court that they can't be denied a license just because they're not having sex with each other, and nobody has an epiphany or comes out as anything, all aversions which could be seen as queerbaiting.
The conversation would certainly have been much more difficult to have. The discourse of 2008 had not yet developed a lot of the terminology and distinctions available in 2020 to talk about attraction, orientation, and relationships. There would have been a lot of circumlocution, and arguments about how many exceptions you can rack up before you no longer fit in a particular category. The show itself lampshades the lack of any cultural shorthand for their relationship; Alan and Denny mostly settle on 'best friends', although in private conversation they also toss around phrases like 'the man I love' and 'soulmate' and 'affair of the heart'. Occasionally you get 'flamingo', from an instance where they patched up an argument just in time to show up to the office Halloween party in matching pink bird costumes.
Thus concludes my 2500-word essay about a show that's been off the air for a dozen years and has nothing to do with anything going on in the world today, but at least distracted me for several days.
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