Getting pally with ally.(Ally McBeal television program)

'THOU shalt not follow a multitude to do evil," commanded Moses very wisely. The true-born straggler ("one that is separated by wandering off in some irregular manner from others"--Webster's Third) finds no difficulty in cleaving to this injunction. We stragglers are constitutionally averse to following a multitude to do anything, whether evil, good, or morally neutral.

While this reflexive contrariety preserves the straggler from many pitfalls, it does create minor problems, nowhere more so than in his appreciation of popular culture. I was, for example, slow to "get" the Beatles. They came to perform in my hometown during my last year of living there, before I went off to college. This was a sensation among my coevals. The Beatles' second hit single had recently come out, and there was an LP in the works, keenly awaited. A girl slightly known to me got her name in the local newspaper by waiting in line in the snow for 22 hours to buy tickets to the performance. I disdained the whole fuss, believed in fact that I had outgrown pop music altogether, to advance into the richer, more intellectual world of jazz. A few months later the Beatles were a worldwide sensation, and would be doing no more gigs in provincial English movie theaters. Ayear or so after that, I started to like their stuff ... by which time it was of course stale Brie to the people I was moving among.

This is what it means to be a straggler. We are constantly finding ourselves at a conversational loss where matters of pop culture are concerned. We catch up eventually, but by then the caravan has moved on. Everyone else has debated the thing to death, absorbed and internalized any real significance it might have had, and forgotten all the details. We are left talking to ourselves, at any rate for a decade or two, until the artifact in question becomes a legitimate object of nostalgia.

It is therefore with an air of apology that I report my most recent addiction. Three or four years ago I had a brief exchange of opinions with a friend. His opinion was that the TV show Ally McBeal was a work of true art and would endure in saecula saeculorum, world without end, Amen, like Euripides and Shakespeare. I had never seen the show when he made this comment, but I watched an episode, was unimpressed, and reported my unimpressedness to him. We exchanged a couple more e-mails on the topic, then the discussion lapsed ... until a couple of months ago, when a large box from my friend's Texas address appeared on my doorstep. Inside was his Christmas present to me: six neat cases, each case containing five DVDs, each DVD holding four episodes of Ally McBeal.

For those who watch as little TV as I do--I catch the news, the World Series, and occasional random fragments of everything else--perhaps I should explain that Ally McBeal was a "dramedy," which is to say a highbrow sitcom, featuring witty observation of life fortified with some social or psychological relevance and grad-school catchphrases. This particular show aired weekly from 1997 to 2002: altogether 112 episodes, of which I missed all but one. That one was late in the ...