Am I too late to the party for Ally McBeal analysis?

I just watched 4 episodes of Ally McBeal last night. Here are some quick takes:

My take is that the show's appeal is that Ally is the unapproachable hot girl in high school and the show gives you a chance to live in her world.

This is reinforced by the fact that Ally acts like an adolescent: she has cutesy/girly mannerisms, she is pouty and has low self-esteem, she one of the most outwardly emotional people I’ve ever seen on screen or in real life, she escapes through fantasies, and she is overruled by her hormones. Although she tries to maintain that she is doing fine in life (she is) and that finding the right guy is just the last piece of the puzzle in her life goals, sometimes she’s overwhelmed with frustration.

What’s ironic is that this show is simultaneously really progressive in that Ally is highly capable, highly compassionate, and does very well in managing in what can only be described even by the standards of 20 years ago as a hostile work environment.

More than anything else, the show is just a really sexually charged one with really beautiful people on it (perhaps, Peter MacNichol won an Emmy because he’s not conventionally attractive and somehow managed to feel like he belonged). Nearly every time Ally meets a guy, I’m instantly put into will-they-or-won’t-they mode with guest star of the week. In one of the episodes I saw, a homeless guy derides her when she passes by (they do), in another episode, an obese man goes up against her in court (they don’t but he wants to), in another episode, a high school student is her client and she engineers a plan to boost his confidence by being his prom date. I was seriously wondering considering shows wouldn’t be cancelled back then for that, if she and the prom date would (thankfully they don’t).

Ally is a prime example of the Hollywood homely trope, wherein a star is so conventionally attractive that it's difficult to buy that her character wouldn't get dates. The in-universe excuse is that Ally is too busy to have anyone outside of fellow lawyers outside of her circle. That might make sense, but in the same way that Seinfeld feels dated because a number of their scenarios would have played out differently had the internet existed, I wonder if online dating might have cured her man problem. Ally's problem (from the sample that I saw) wasn't retainng or developing relationships. It was meeting guys. Sure, she would have had to sort out the losers from the winners from the hundreds of messages she would have received, BUT on the show she seemed willing to go out with losers because it was too much of a time investment to find the winners.