Kelley revisits ‘Boston’ revisions

David E. KELLEY, creator and executive producer of ABC’s dramedy “Boston Legal,” says he “never figured out” what was behind the network’s request that he cut all references to Fox News Channel in last Sunday’s episode but that he thinks it may have something to do with Janet Jackson’s breast-baring incident at last year’s Super Bowl.

“That was the first time in 18 years I’ve ever had a network squelch an idea,” Kelley said Tuesday night. “This was the first time that we really got the feeling that the network just did not want us to tell the story.”

Kelley’s remarks, made during a Museum of Television & Radio tribute to the series in Los Angeles, were his first public comments about his run-in with ABC’s standards and practices office over a “Boston Legal” episode called “Let Sales Ring.” In it, Alan Shore (played by James Spader) goes to court to challenge a high school principal who has blocked student access to a cable news network because of its conservative bent on the news. In the original script, Kelley identified it as Fox News Channel, but ABC ordered him to remove such references.

At first, he said, ABC executives told him they didn’t want direct references to Fox because the cable network is connected to Fox’s broadcast network, which is a competitor of ABC. Kelley said he was told, “ ‘We don’t want to give them any publicity, good or bad.’ ”

But then, Kelley said, they came back and said ABC didn’t want Fox in the script because “we just don’t want to speak ill of a competitor.”

In the end, he told the audience, he and other producers “just never figured out what was going on. I would be dishonest if I didn’t say we all took a deep breath and said this is just” a result of the Jackson “breast incident” last year. After the appearance, Kelley did not expand on his remarks and declined to comment further.

The FCC received more than a half-million complaints and slapped CBS with a $550,000 fine for its telecast of Jackson’s performance on the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, in which most of her right breast was briefly exposed. Since then networks have been more skittish about potentially offensive material that might draw complaints and fines.

ABC had no comment Wednesday on Kelley’s remarks. But the network had said earlier that its request to remove mention of Fox was based on its desire to abide by a long-standing policy “not to use real people or actual events.”

A former attorney who created such hit shows as “The Practice,” “Ally McBeal” and “Picket Fences,” Kelley said that until ABC’s request about “Boston Legal,” he had never felt constrained by network TV.

Even after the script change, he managed to tweak network executives through the character of Shore. At one point in the episode, Shore tells a fellow attorney, “I don’t know which newscast you’ve been watching recently but the First Amendment is losing its luster lately. Some networks are even censoring their scripted dramas.”