The 75th annual Primetime Emmy Awards stage became the office for the Cage and Fish law firm for the night — and the site of an Ally McBeal reunion.
Calista Flockhart, who played the title character, stepped out on the Peacock Theater stage in Los Angeles on Monday, January 15, alongside former costars Greg Germann, Peter MacNicol and Gil Bellows.
“I know I drank too much water [and] I had to put my Spanx back on,” Flockhart said in a voiceover from a bathroom set, mimicking her ADR from the OG series. “I look good.”
Germann, 65, MacNicol, 69, and Bellows, 56, then popped out of different stalls and the group started dancing a conga line. After host Anthony Anderson instructed the men to leave the stage, Flockhart remained to present Lead Actor in a Drama Series to Succession’s Kieran Culkin.
“I loved working Peter, Greg and Gil and I still do,” Flockhart gushed. “The entire Ally McBeal cast was so talented, it was groundbreaking, revolutionary [and] introduced us to a dancing baby and [a] unisex bathroom.”
Ally McBeal aired between 1997 and 2002, and starred Flockhart, now 59, as a young attorney employed at Boston’s Cage and Fish, the firm co-owned by her former classmate Richard Fish (Germann). Her ex-boyfriend Billy Thomas (Bellows) also worked at the firm, leading to plenty of drama.
“I had a great appreciation for Ally’s character and the uniqueness of the writing, the hallucinations and the voiceover and all that wonderful stuff that I’d never seen before,” Flockhart recalled to The Hollywood Reporter in September 2017. “One of the things I thought was so special about Ally was that she was not an ingénue; she was idiosyncratic, eccentric, intelligent, a work in progress. And she was opinionated, whether she was right or wrong.”
She continued: “She was an oddball just like everybody else. Usually in a play, series or movie, the central character is often the sane person and that’s the touchpoint for the audience. So when you make the central character goofy and off-the-wall and just as eccentric as everyone else, it’s risky because the audience doesn’t have that person to hold on to. I thought it was terrific.”
In the finale of Ally McBeal, Ally resigned from Cage and Fish and decided to move to New York City to reconnect with her long-lost biological daughter, Maddie (Hayden Panettiere).
Ally McBeal, which ran for five seasons, received 34 Emmy nominations during its run. The show won its sole Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1999.
“The Emmy is a testament to David [E. Kelley]’s writing and a talented cast who worked well together,” Flockhart added to THR. “The night was very exciting, and I felt very proud and so happy and honored to be a part of the show. It was incredible. They couldn’t decide if the show was a drama or a comedy because it didn’t really fit neatly into any category. I thought that was groundbreaking at the time.”
Ally McBeal also starred Jane Krakowski, Lucy Liu, Portia de Rossi, Robert Downey Jr., Lisa Nicole Carson and Courtney Thorne-Smith.
