<nospam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:23am41tkcop938opk8530942pc6p8lmbe2@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Hi,
Hello.
> Thanks for your "is anyone there" post. I searched Usenet for an Ally
> McBeal group and thought that with the series long gone that these
> groups were all dead.
As mentioned elsewhere, the group isn't dead - it has just been turned
into
a car park.
> Now that I know there is someone here, can I ask
> a few questions?
Ask away, you might even get some answers. :-)
> (There are some spoilers, but by now I guess everyone
> knows what happens anyway).
You're going to tell me that something bad happens to Billy, aren't you?
> I just got the Ally McBeal dvds (hence my late arrival in this group).
Better late than never, as somebody once said.
> I've watched series 1, 2, 3, and am now halfway through 4. Series one
> and two were full frame but series three was wide screen. Series 4
> reverts back to full frame. I thought may be they had experimented in
> series 3 and decided against the wide screen aspect and thus gone back
> to full frame in series 4. But... I see on my (unwatched) series 5
> dvds that they are wide screen! Why the switching back and forth
> between screen formats?
Laziness on the part of Fox.
> Why did they not film series 4 in w/s too?
They did. For a really boring technical explanation see the very bottom
of
this post. [1]
> I am puzzled about Billy leaving.
You're not the only one.
> Surely the attraction of the show was the will
> they/won't they of Billy and Ally. Did the writers
> decide to get rid of Billy, which seems mad, or
> was it that Gil wanted to leave?
By the time Billy left, will they / won't they had already been answered.
They kissed, and although both talked about wanting to take things
further,
as is often the case, doing something isn't as easy as talking about it.
From that point on, the possibility of a future relation****p between Billy
and Ally was greatly diminished.
It would be logical to conclude that Gil knew that and could see that his
time in Ally was limited. So, he started looking at other projects, found
one and left Ally to pursue it. Unfortunately, it crashed and burned, but
he couldn't have known that at the time he left Ally.
> OTOH the writers may have found it difficult
> to stretch to 5 series of will they/won't they.
They found it difficult to stretch it to 3 seasons / series, never mind 5.
> With Billy gone, Georgia disappears too (good!) but why?
The official explanation is that she couldn't bear to work in the same
office as Billy any more. So, she went to work at Renee's law firm. From
a
pragmatic point of view, it could have been a salary reduction exercise by
DEK.
> Whatever happened to Rene's law firm?
Disappeared without trace. It offered the op****tunity for some excellent
sub-plots but DEK never saw fit to explore it in detail.
> We never see Whipper or Georgia again.
See comments regarding reducing salaries.
> Did these actresses wish to leave or did the writers want to replace
> them with fresh faces to keep things new?
Whipper was never meant to be a regular character. (Then again, neither
was
John Cage). As often happened with DEK shows, if something works, he
sticks
with it and so she became a recurring character, rather than a regular
character.
I assume that with Billy gone, Courtney Thorne-Smith could see there
wouldn't be any juicy plotlines for her now either. So, as actors often
do,
she "left to pursue other interests.".
I'm sure a quick hop over to the IMDB will show these "other interests" in
details.
> I thought we might see her firm fight Cage & Fish occasionally.
Renee's track record against Cage and Fish was far from noteworthy. I
haven't got the stats to hand but she lost big and often.
> I think it would have been "tidier" to have had Georgia move
> away after Billy left, perhaps to whatever part of the US she
> came from, perhaps to be nearer her parents?
That would have worked. Unfortunately, there were many alternatives that
would have been tidier than the one DEK chose. However, what's done is
done...
> I searched on google to find the answers to the above
> and accidentally found that in series 5, Rene disappears too.
Lisa Nicole Carson's contract was not renewed at the end of season 4.
> It seems the actress got into some trouble, so they dropped her.
That about covers it, yes. :-)
> Convenient that this happened between seasons!
Not as convenient as losing Robert Downey Jr. midway through the season
but
having enough footage on the cutting room floor to construct a likely
plot-line to explain his disappearance. (Sad that they'd already written
the rest of the season (including building the set for the house) and
penned
outlines for the following season based on him and Ally getting married.
Personally, this would have worked much better than Season 5, which as you
might not have seen yet, I'll refrain from commenting further on at this
stage.)
> But why lose Rene without a trace, why not have one
> sentence in one episode saying she had been offered a
> better job in another city and had moved?
No idea, sorry. Best guess is the same reason for the widescreen / not
widescreen - laziness (although this time it is on the part of DEK, not
Fox).
> I've got a few more questions, but I hope that will
> start to bring some life back round here.
Well, it seems to have brought me out of premature retirement, so fire
away
with your "few more questions" and we'll see what we (TINW) can do.
Regards
Gandalf
[1] And now for the boring bit...
For a while now most TV programmes have been shot in 1.66 (approx.16:9)
and
transferred to 1.33 (4:3) when / if necessary.
You might now be asking why shoot in 1.66, instead of 16:9. The reason is
simple - film camera set-ups. The default set-up for a 16mm camera is
super
16, meaning the gate is 1.66. For TV transfer, they just frame this.
Having said that, most US TV shows are shot using Super 35, which if
memory
serves me, is a 3 perforation 1.66 ratio.
Why? The same as always - cost. Shooting Super 35 saves about 25 percent
on film costs.
And the great thing about shooting in 1.66 (or 16:9) is that you have
enough
flexibility to move in both directions quite easily (into 1.85 or back to
4:3).
Having said all that, shooting, mastering and delivering are three
completely different things.
Thus far we have established how the shooting was done (and why), and that
was complicated enough. But the mastering and delivering bit is even more
complicated - especially with how things work for our American cousins,
which is, after all, where Ally originates.
All Fox TV shows are post produced in 16:9 (standard definition).
However,
Fox then deliver the show for network broadcast in 4:3 (by extracting the
centre of the 16:9). This is distributed to the various cable companies
who
pipe it into the homes of their subscribers for their viewing pleasure.
Fox wanted to do what is known as a "simulcast" which involves sending the
16:9 on the digital feed with the 4:3 on the analogue feed - both coming
from the same 16:9 master with the 4:3 extraction being done by the
network
in real-time during airing.
Originally, they wanted to air the digital feed 480p/24 but there were
problems creating the masters with a 3:2 pull cadence so they went for
480p/30 for season 3 (I think - the grey cells aren't what they used to
be?).
In short, Fox were experimenting with what works while mastering and
delivering Ally. If they hadn't been so damn lazy they'd have cut the
DVDs
/ videos from the original 16:9 post production version and, regardless of
what was broadcast at the time, all the DVDs and videos would have been in
16:9.
Hope that clarifies things for you. :-)
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