A show re-watched

I saw Boston Legal years ago when it first aired on Star TV in 2007 or thereabout over that familiar old satellite link. Back then, television had not yet become a convenience; it was an event. We had the set-top box, the slightly monstrous dish pointing towards the sky (we got the dish in 1996) like it was trying to tune into extraterrestrial frequencies, and the excitement of getting access to channels that felt almost illicit. It’s funny how, in the span of thirty odd years, television in India has gone from a single state-run channel plus a handful of satellite add-ons to over three hundred channels, with new ones cropping up almost every week. We’ve gone from waiting for a show to appear on the weekly schedule to drowning in content on demand. But I digress; because this isn’t about television’s evolution, fascinating as it is. It’s about Boston Legal. And more specifically, about a character in the show - Allan Shore.

When I first stumbled onto the show in that satellite age, what drew me in wasn’t the legal cases themselves, though they were bold, bordering on outrageous at times. What grabbed me was the willingness of the show to address political hot-potato topics and package them inside courtroom drama. It was storytelling that wasn’t afraid to poke, question, and unsettle. And at the centre of it all stood Allan Shore, the brilliant but deeply flawed attorney who made even the most complicated arguments sound like poetry. His closing speeches are in my opinion still some of the best written in TV history; articulate, incisive, and delivered with James Spader’s unique combination of confidence and fragility. Watching him argue a case is like watching a master craftsman at work. He didn’t simply present facts; he sculpted them into revelation. A younger me admired that intelligence without question. It was dazzling.  But as I’ve begun rewatching the show now, with years and experiences separating me from that younger version of myself, something else hits me far harder than his brilliance.

His flaws. His insecurities. His loneliness. His self-doubt dressed as charm.

Its dawned on me that what made Allan Shore compelling wasn’t the intelligence we all aspire to; it was the humanness we all recognised. His brilliance made him impressive; his flaws made him real. In Allan Shore, you see the person we all are: someone capable of greatness in certain areas and absolutely miserable in others. Someone who might be the smartest voice in the room one moment and completely incapable of handling a simple emotional truth the next. Someone who can win a case for a stranger but can’t always hold themselves together. Everybody is a bit like Allan Shore. Brilliant at something. Broken somewhere.

But what also strikes me upon revisiting the show; something I never fully appreciated, is his friendship with Denny Crane. There is hardly any other TV show that captures true friendship the way Boston Legal does. Not the glossy, idealised, conflict-free version of friendship. But the real thing; messy, contradictory, tender, and absurd all at once. Denny and Allan occupy opposite ends of the moral and ideological spectrum on many occasions. They disagree on politics, on women, on worldview, and even on what justice truly means. And yet, they always return to each other. Not out of dependence, but out of understanding. They see each other’s flaws clearly and accept them without the slightest intention of fixing them. That’s rare. Most friendships come with a quiet pressure: to improve, to adapt, to align. But the friendship between Denny and Allan exists on a different plane. They show up for each other exactly as they are. They sit together at the end of the day, cigars in hand, whiskey poured, sharing a silence that says more than dialogue ever could.

Denny, bombastic and fading; Allan, sharp-witted and emotionally frayed. Two men who would probably not be friends in any other universe, but in the universe of their lives have chosen each other. And stayed. In a world where friendships often dissolve under the weight of difference, theirs thrives because of it. Watching them now, older and perhaps a little wiser, I realise they represent a truth that often gets buried as we grow up: Friendship is not about similarity. It’s about comfort. It’s about being allowed to be your full, flawed self in someone else’s presence. Allan’s flaws don’t repel Denny; Denny’s eccentricities don’t overwhelm Allan. They laugh at each other, defend each other, criticise each other, and yet always return to that balcony.

The balcony becomes a symbol of something incredibly rare: a space where the world stops judging, and two people simply exist.

The show, for all its outrageous storylines and satirical tones, slips these profound truths into the quietest moments. It says that intelligence doesn’t save you from loneliness, and vulnerability doesn’t make you weak. It tells you that real connection transcends ideology, ego, and even reason. And maybe that’s why Allan Shore has stayed with me all these years. Not because of the intelligence I once admired from a distance, but because of the flaws I recognise now from much closer home. The rewatch reminded me that characters like Allan aren’t written to be aspirational; they’re written to be relatable. They reflect us back to ourselves in ways we often avoid acknowledging. We are all a mixture: sharp in one corner, soft in another, foolish elsewhere, brilliant in unexpected pockets. We stumble, succeed, retreat, argue, charm, collapse, recover and through it all, if we’re lucky, we find a Denny Crane or two who sticks with us. Someone who sees the entire landscape of our strengths and weaknesses and chooses to stay anyway.  James Spader breathed life into Allan Shore, but it’s the writing raw, compassionate, unfiltered that makes the character linger long after the show ends. The intelligence impresses you; the flaws embrace you; the friendship teaches you.

In the grand spectrum of human experience, maybe all we really want is what Allan and Denny have: to sit with someone at the end of the day and say, without words, I accept you exactly as you are. Brilliance matters, yes; but only when held together by the messy, beautiful, uncomfortable truths that make us human. And that friendship, true friendship, is one of the rare spaces where those truths can be shared without fear. 

Cirvesh