‘Ally Lite’ Mostly Junk Comedy Without ‘Mcbeal’ Substance

The most impressive thing about reformatting hourlong episodes of “Ally McBeal” into bite-size, half-hour chunks called “Ally” is that it can be done with any sense of comprehensibility at all. That it can be done, of course, doesn’t mean it should.

“Ally Lite” basically extracts one of the subplots that worked in tandem with other story lines on past episodes of David E. Kelley’s perky, Emmy-winning comic concoction and forces it to stand on its own.

What the people overseeing this prime-time experiment seem to have overlooked is that the reason such stories were used only as complements to an overall hourlong episode is because they don’t necessarily hold up alone.

Of three episodes made available for screening, only one - Ally’s wacky confrontation with the Pringles lady and her subsequent hearing on charges of instability - passes muster as a viable tale. The others - Ally saves an obese man’s life, then must fend off his romantic overtures; Ally referees a romantic spat between a minister and a choir leader, which causes her to reflect on her own miserable love life - simply feel thin and truncated. What’s most noticeable in “Ally” is what’s missing - the accumulation of Kelley-created quirky moments that lead to an emotional payoff at the end.

Meanwhile, to pad the episodes to the appropriate length, there’s all sorts of nonsense, from an excess of meaningless establishing shots to gobs of footage either choppily edited or sped up.

Music figures in a lot, too- too much for a half-hour show, in fact.

It boils down to this: “Ally McBeal” is a phenomenon that spoke to the Zeitgeist. “Ally’s” just a way to kill some time.