A Really Great Friendship That I’ll Miss Seeing Every Week
What the show does brilliantly in its first episode of Season 5 is exactly what it’s been doing, quietly straddling the line between the over the top melodrama with a whole lot of tongue-in-cheek humor and the reserved and rather dignified power in the acting of James Spader. This is the kind of episode that could pull in even the most casual of viewers and remind them just what they’ve been missing. Remember when Denny and Alan got into the Coast Guard? They put that to good use in the opening segments of the hour which leads directly to the unique medical issue that Denny deals with for the rest of the episode. The court case at hand in this hour is a wrongful death lawsuit against a big tobacco company. When an ex-girlfriend (and the defense attorney in this case, played by Ally Walker from The Pretender) tells Alan that he has dead eyes, he is seriously affected and Spader gives a closing argument that could easily win him his four-billionth Emmy this time next year.
There is humor (I laughed out loud more than once), drama (I also got a little teary-eyed), and, at the core of the show, a really great friendship that I’ll miss seeing every week.
