Background
Ally McBeal is an American television series created by David E. Kelley which ran on the Fox network from 1997 to 2002. Set in the fictional Boston law firm of Cage, Fish and Associates, the series explores the relationships among various lawyers working at the firm, often as they relate to gender specific issues raised in court cases. Ling Woo was a character written by Kelley specifically for actress Lucy Liu after she failed to secure the role of Nelle Porter in the show.
Woo appeared for the first time in the second season as a client suing a Howard Stern-like talk show host named Wick. She was suing Wick because his programs contributed to sexual harassment in her workplace. Wick claimed Ling brought suit because she had a "slutty little Asian thing going", and Ling said that she wanted to sleep with Wick because if she did, she would kill him. The character proved to be a hit, and Liu was signed on as a regular for the series.
Ling became a lawyer with the firm by pressuring Richard Fish, the firm's senior partner, to hire her services as counsel. She remained a regular on the show until 2001, when her role was reduced to four episodes in the upcoming season. Ling's employment history changes that season when the Governor of Massachusetts offers Ling a job as judge after Ling complimented her twin babies. Woo is a graduate of Cornell Law School where she was editor of Law Review.
In the 1990s, Asian women were rarely given prominent roles on television. For example, in 1994 Margaret Cho had a brief prime-time show called All American Girl, which was not popular with audiences and did not even last a full season. When the show aired, there had not been another Asian-American-centered show or an Asian main character at the time the Ling character was created. Unlike the 1970s depictions of docile East Asian women on TV, Ling's character was the opposite, the classic stereotype of the Dragon Lady. At the time, she was the only significant representative of Asian women on television in the United States (besides news anchors and reporters), leaving no one else to counteract this prominent stereotype. She remains the most memorable Asian TV character of the 1990s.
Read more about this topic: Ling Woo
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)