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Once in Love With Amy
City Pages . TV · Vol 20 · Issue 995 - December 29, 1999
By Jesse Berrett
The surprise hit Judging Amy is a kind
of woman's standard, in the key of
melodrama
Does irony have a gender? Judging Amy,
perhaps this season's biggest surprise hit--a
consistent Top 15 finisher since its
premiere--wouldn't recognize that mood even if
Dennis Miller lounged into Amy Gray's courtroom
and pretzeled every line into its exact opposite. A
classic woman's show, and the kind of socially
responsible programming you figured every studio
exec had routinely lobbed into the trash years
ago, Amy (9:00 p.m., Channel 4) is, as one
expects from the classics, stolid, reliable, and
hugely predictable.
Imagine the melodramatic predicaments a professional single mother (here,
Amy Brenneman), might possibly encounter on the job--self-doubt, a sick
daughter on the first day of school, sexist pigs in the DA's office--and check
them off, one by one, as they crop up. Yet amid a wasteland of frantically
copulating twentysomethings, Amy feels addictive in its low-key manner.
The program accepts these ageless clichés and shows you why they became
standards in the first place, soldiering through the mawkishness with sincere
respect for tradition.
At first derided as a rip-off of the
curly-haired-female-professional-steps-off-fast-track shtick that drives the
successful if low-aiming Providence, Amy immediately transcended its
origins to become one of the most adult programs on the box. Its premiere
episode issued a raft of predictable mom tropes from the slow lanes of the
burbs--Volvos, the first day at work (who'll eat lunch with me?), and a
clinching, celebratory Stevie Wonder tune when the judge is sworn in--but
subsequent episodes have driven slightly less worn paths. Still, this isn't the
show for anyone in search of head-spinning storytelling novelty. Rest assured
that every family blowup will be palliated--and then some--by hour's end.
Devoid of hip urban youth (unless you count Karle Warren, as Brenneman's
seven-year-old daughter, thus far not suggested as a frequent downer of
lattes), and with nary a male character in a dominant role, Amy rarely
struggles for a with-it aura or dramatic effect. Instead, the show offers a
low-key ensemble cast running through paces so ageless they might have
seemed familiar in Athens. Having jumped the partner track at a Manhattan
law firm, judge Amy Gray heads 90 minutes up I-95 to Hartford to work in
juvenile court, where she serves as main audience and final authority in cases
involving the most intimate relations--parents and children, teens and adults,
families and the welfare system. At home she wrestles with the needs of her
bright daughter, her imperious mother (a beyond-archetypal Tyne Daly) who
is a putatively retired social worker, and her perpetually between-jobs
brother (Dan Futterman), who is clearly set up as the gay sibling, but
somehow has not yet been revealed as such.
Clichés, of course, but so perfectly formed that seeing them drawn up serves
as its own source of pleasure: So this is how it's done. In part, that
effortlessness derives from the adroit mother-daughter pairing at the center
of the narrative. Probably only a female-run show would dare to present an
actor as smart as Amy Brenneman in such a role without wasting time
compensating for the supposed genitalia-shriveling effect on male viewers
forced to contemplate a woman possibly smarter than they are. (Or perhaps
you've failed to catch The World Is Not Enough, which showcases the
failure of either the producers or Denise Richards to even bother to imagine
how a female nuclear physicist might present herself to the universe.) For
that matter, note that the majority of press coverage of the show assures us
that Brenneman herself is happily married, lest we worry that the fiction of an
attractive, self-sufficient woman should bleed into the world offscreen.
Brenneman, who made her name as David Caruso's mobbed-up cop
girlfriend on NYPD Blue, attended Harvard herself, and she quite believably
conveys the warring social and cultural imperatives that still buffet any
woman in this position. Plop a wig on her head and this actress could render
so embattled a striver as Hillary Clinton sympathetic and maybe likable.
Even better is Tyne Daly as Judge Gray's eternally meddling mother.
Seemingly channeling Bea Arthur's caustic altruism, Daly cannot let pass a
single opportunity for instruction, nor allow a day to escape without her
intercession somewhere. An incorrigible optimist, she pries as both vocation
and avocation, urging her daughter to pull her hair out of her face in public
and going to bat in court for troubled children when she sees them being
given short shrift. In the process, Daly is never made to seem grotesque or
unlovable; she's difficult, mule-headed, intrusive, and yet she still essentially
means to do what she can't help seeing as her best to push her daughter to
ever greater heights.
Again, compared with similar incarnations of that demon mother appearing
these days on movie screens--Susan Sarandon in Anywhere but Here,
Janet McTeer in Tumbleweeds, Melanie Griffith in Crazy in
Alabama--Daly is the least reduced to caricature, the most endowed with a
valid worldview. Would a male-written show have granted her the same
opportunity? You don't have to read feminist critic Carol Gilligan to suspect
that on one of these series, she would have been saddled with a crotchety
old goat of a husband who would balance her acid with his own ornery
flavor of love.
But what most powers Amy is emotional verité--a lesson, maybe, for studios
hungering for the next trend? As both star and co-executive producer,
Brenneman essentially plays her own mother, a member of the first class at
Harvard Law that saw fit to include women. (Frederica Brenneman has even
served as a creative consultant for the program.) The star cannot, however,
be held responsible for the narcissistic title, which reportedly was the pick of
a litter of runts provided by naming consultants, beating out my personal
favorite, My Mom's a Judge.
Another executive producer, Barbara Hall, by reputation the driving force of
the show, uses her recent divorce, single motherhood, and boardroom
expertise to inform Amy Gray's experiences. As such, there's more going on
here than Douglas Sirk doled out an hour at a time. Most cheeringly, Amy
Gray does not pay special tolls for her career. The difficulties of mothering
are given their due (what if you take out your workday frustrations on your
child?), but we never see her pining away for a man in her life. The male
characters serve as either adjuncts to the women (Amy's brothers) or
impending threats who cannot appreciate the judge's intellect or presume
that they can argue their point by maneuvering her into bed. As in Hall's
previous series, I'll Fly Away, female bonding expands to fill the available
emotional space, hinting that the world still spins on its axis when men don't
run things.
Given that eternal teenage boys like Kevin Williamson seem to have shot
their wads, and that professional twentysomethings like David Kelley seem
to be hitting creative middle age a decade or so early, perhaps this will be
the hot new trend: dramas grounded in women's real, considered
experiences. Or perhaps not. More likely are
single-professional-with-curly-hair imitators, with Sherry Stringfield heading
to the salon and Julia Louis-Dreyfus trying valiantly to convince casting
directors she can carry a drama. But whatever the future, on a schedule
where this show is followed by the smirky boys' world of what the network
trumpets as "Dave and Craig"--that's Letterman and Kilborn for those who'd
rather not deal with these cads on a first-name basis--you can't help rooting
for whatever blend of feminism and corn Judging Amy finally offers.
Copyright © 1999 City Pages Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
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