BOSTON-BAKED CAST

I was bummed to read in this morning's LA Times that David E. Kelly had decided to shuffle the cast of Boston Legal for this coming fall season. The article said that fans shouldn't panic, because series regulars Candice Bergman, William Shatner and James Spader would still be around. But pretty much everyone else (including the pretty Mark Valley, who plays a Marine-turned-Lawyer; pictured here, on the far left) will be gone. I thought that maybe I had misread the article... so I wiped the sleepy from my eyes, and read it again. But no, I read it right. All but three of the cast members' options were not "picked up." The spokesperson for ABC said they wanted to keep the show fresh... as if the wild antics of the craziest group of lawyers on TV was getting stale.

The show is anything but stale. I'm not sure what the production schedule for this show is, the episodes always have that ripped-from-the-headlines feel. The cases the lawyers argue are topical, as well as well-written and acted with superb attention to detail and character development. Every episode was like a guessing game, an adventure in comedy, with a dose of social-awareness and political retrospective thrown in... well, just because they can.

For now, I'll trust that David E. Kelly knows what he's doing. But there had better be some great new eye-candy on this show, or I'm out!