Not watching Boston Legal? You're missing one of the most entertaining shows on the air, and one of the richest performances you'll ever see

Is it possible that writer-producer David E. Kelley finally isn't going to destroy one of his TV series from within? Maybe it helps that he doesn't seem to be trying to do all the writing or producing on Boston Legal, or maybe he's finally found a way to accommodate his penchant for stark nuttiness with his remarkable talent for creating richly dimensional and compelling characters. It's hard to know which is more astonishing: his ability to create shows as vivid and gripping as Picket Fences and Ally McBeal and The Practice or his apparent compulsion to quickly render them unwatchable.

At the heart of Boston Legal is James Spader's just plain amazing, frequently outright virtuosic performance as Alan Shore, a near-pariah in the law firm of Crane Poole & Schmidt. From the DWT standpoint, the irresistible attraction is the glorious, soaring, barn-burning rhetoric of the closing arguments (mostly written by Kelley, I assume) in which Alan unfailingly makes all-but-irresistible cases for otherwise all-but-hopeless defendants. In Tuesday's episode, the firm was assigned a surely hopeless case: A homeless man (played by Mike Binder) has been seen by an eyewitness in the act of cannibalism following the death of another homeless man, who turns out to have been his only friend in the world.

The case is dumped on Alan, partly as punishment, and partly because who else could defend such a case? The defendant insists to him that he was merely carrying out his friend's wish to be cremated rather than have his corpse sucked into the city's health bureaucracy. He admits eating some of the roasted flesh--because, he says, he was starving. In court, Alan is up against the politically ambitious district attorney (Currie Graham--another of the repellently clean-cut, priggishly asexual roles he's been playing from NYPD Blue to House), and a hidebound, closed-minded "traditional values" judge (Henry Gibson). Here is Alan's closing argument to the jury:

ALAN SHORE: A billion and a half Christians routinely go to church on Sundays and ceremoniously eat the body of Christ, drink his blood. "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him." Jesus said that.

THE JUDGE [right, outraged]: How dare you!

ALAN [turning around, looking for source of challenge]: What? Who have I offended here?

THE JUDGE: Oh dear, you take the Holy Sacrament literally!

ALAN: Is that not done?

THE JUDGE: You have equated it with a vile and despicable act.

ALAN [approaching the bench, confidentially]: I apologize, your honor. [Louder.] I certainly don't mean to indict holy communion. But let's not carry on with the idea that the notion of cannibalism offends "the sanctity of life." It has roots, not only in sacrament--[to the judge] not to be taken literally--but also Greek mythology. It's still glorified in certain sections of both the South and, I believe, Malibu.

And I might add that it's not illegal. There's no federal law, no Massachusetts law that criminalizes cannibalism. That's why Mr. District Attorney "My Name Appears Second on the Ballot This November" Ginsberg has trumped up these other charges--desecration and so forth--and lectured you on "dignity" and "sanctity." There is no dignity in starving. When a homeless person is left to rot on a slab, the "sanctity of life" somehow gets trivialized.

Mr. District Attorney "My Name Appears Second on the Ballot This November" Ginsberg [right] wants you to be offended.

You know what offends me? We have in this country over a million homeless people. The government can't feed them, can't give them shelter, but hey, let's spend $60-70,000 to prosecute one who tried to stave off death. Let's spend another $45,000 a year to imprison him. There is no dignity in that. It's cruel. Mr. Nichols was cremating his friend to prevent the indignity of the unceremonious and degrading decomposition of his body.

As for why he ate, he told you. He was starving. [To a fashionably scruffy young male juror.] When was the last time you starved? [To an older, well-dressed female juror.] How about you? [To D.A. Ginsberg.] I know you're not starving, except for attention.

Let's face it, the only reason we're all here is because cannibalism makes for good television. What better to satiate some pre-election hunger pangs than a bellyful of media attention? Mr. District Attorney "My Name Appears Second on the Ballot This November" Ginsberg knows that. That's why he's handling this case personally. Not only does it give him a sensational platform for his shameless self-promotion, it also fits his notion of society, that it's not about understanding the homeless, it's about prosecuting them. Kind of makes you wonder, who here is really the cannibal?