Disorder in Court When ‘Practice,’ ‘Ally’ Mix

Welcome to the night when “Ally McBeal” and “The Practice” become the hideous Hydra hybrid.

This ratings sweeps-driven crossover--linking the plots of two series that appear on different networks--may have looked pretty on paper.

Although Fox’s popular and wondrous “Ally McBeal” is defined as a comedy by executive producer David E. Kelley and is entered as such in this year’s Emmys, it has its serious, tender side, too.

And even though Kelley’s less successful legal series, “The Practice,” is a stony, issue-minded, hard-bitten drama, it’s not entirely devoid of humor.

Both series are set in Boston, too.

Moreover, while “The Practice” is on ABC, it comes from the Fox network’s production sibling, 20th Century Fox Television--giving this brief two-network alliance a sort of familial symbiosis by which, theoretically, each of Kelley’s series creates interest in the other.

That makes him--but not tonight’s viewers of “Ally McBeal” or “The Practice”--the clear beneficiary.

Even thematically aligned series usually have incompatible rhythms that create problems when they intersect on behalf of ratings, as “Law & Order” and “Homicide: Life on the Street” have done, for example--with both of these terrific NBC crime series performing out of sync and below par as a result.

Yet now comes this much dicier embrace between “The Practice,” a conventional courtroom series, and “Ally McBeal,” which is not merely a comedy but, at its brilliantly absurd, inventive best, a flat-out farce centering on a law firm where:

* The senior partner sleeps with a bizarre judge but has a thing for Janet Reno.

* Another partner’s nose tends to whistle during critical meetings.

* The staff troops downstairs to a trendy club and dances after work.

* Males and females chat from adjoining stalls in the unisex bathroom.

* The star of the series--Calista Flockhart’s mercurial, micro-miniskirted Ally--hopes to achieve emotional stability by adopting a personal theme song.

And here we go tonight, in a plot to be concluded on “The Practice,” with this lovably loopy firm deciding to defend a client accused of hacking her husband to death with an ax. When asked to view the murder scene, Ally recoils. “I’m not going anyplace where there’s somebody dead. You know I have a thing about that.” And when the client whom she will help defend shows up, she blurts out: “There’s the killer!”

Proving that fantasy is no stranger to “Ally McBeal.”

Realizing that it’s out of its depth here, Ally’s firm at last refers this case to a group of Boston lawyers with criminal experience. Enter tough, dedicated Bobby Donnell (Dylan McDermott) of “The Practice,” initiating a weird union of apples and oranges that finds Donnell and his associates skeptical about Ally and her fellow noodles actually being lawyers.

Ally: “You think we’re all from Mars here, don’t you?”

Bobby: “I never said which planet.”

There’s some sexual chemistry between them. But the mere presence of Donnell--brusque, lawyerly and all business--sombers and tones down the show, to the extent that it’s far from “Ally McBeal” at its best.

And this gets much worse when the plot continues on “The Practice,” with Ally and her former boyfriend, Billy Alan Thomas (Gil Bellows)--the straightest arrow in Ally’s own firm--joining Donnell and his grim associate, Eugene Young (Steve Harris), on this underdog defense team.

Even more bizarre than the defense strategy here is the specter of Ally hardening into a rigid sconce on a series other than her own, one in which funny business is not a priority and where tonight the only concession to humor is prosecutor Helen Gamble’s (Lara Flynn Boyle) raised brow over Ally’s soaring hemline. In fact, Ally and Billy come across here as little more than empty suits, appendages grafted on solely for the purpose of luring “Ally McBeal” followers.

What they’ll see is “The Practice” at its most dreadful (following the preceding week’s superior episode), an hour whose strongest, most poignant moments by far emerge from a subplot carry-over that has Bobby’s interesting associate, Ellenor Frutt (Camryn Manheim), learning that the chiropractor she’s fallen for is a crook who’s been netted in a sting staged by her own firm. Very, very nice.

It’s the “Ally McBeal” extension that begins smoking midway and concludes in flames with a cheap, manipulative, overly theatrical cop-out that, typically for this series, sabotages its fine cast and tidies things artificially, allowing Bobby to conveniently wriggle off a moral and ethical hook.

Not that any of this may matter in the overall Nielsens, given that the Fox/ABC Hydra is expected to be decapitated tonight by Part 2 of NBC’s serpent-slaying “Merlin.”

* “Ally McBeal” airs at 9 tonight on Fox (Channel 11). “The Practice” airs at 10 p.m. on ABC (Channel 7).