As a 13-year-old, I was addicted to HBO’s “Sex and the City.” Perhaps intoxicated by the promise of illicit material or clothes I would never own, I trolled YouTube for illegal postings and stashed DVDs of the show under my bed. To the student at an all-girls middle school I was back then (and probably still am at heart), the lifestyle and dilemmas of Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha were what I had to look forward to as an adult woman. Seven years later, I’m by no means an adult, but I realize how sensationally limited the worldview of the fab four was.

Thanks to my friends at Netflix, I at last discovered a network show that preceded and was contemporaneous with “Sex and the City,” airing from 1997 to 2002: David E. Kelley’s seminal work, “Ally McBeal.” Stars such as Calista Flockhart, Jane Krakowski and Robert MacNicol have migrated to “Brothers and Sisters,” “30 Rock” and “Grey’s Anatomy” respectively, but they began together on this Fox legal dramedy about a young lawyer at a firm where her former high school sweetheart and his new wife also work. As much as this premise sounds like “Grey’s” or any contemporary workplace dramedy, the tone of the series is decidedly whimsical. Looking back on “Ally McBeal,” I can see that whimsy is something no longer present in American TV and that perhaps we need the exaggeration of whimsy to learn from television more than the dramatic exaggeration of reality.

By actively avoiding, or mocking, the domestic space of its characters, “Ally McBeal” affords its characters a base level of credibility. Love the women of “SATC” as we do, their general lack of professional ambition, save Miranda’s martyr-like home/work balance, painted a skewed portrait of female camaraderie and romantic desire. Ally (Calista Flockhart) goes from being the victim of sexual harassment as the workplace PYT (the series begins with a lawsuit against her boss for grabbing her tush and his counterargument that it’s a compulsion) to being entrenched in a network of powerful women, from her roommate Renee of the DA’s office to her boss’s girlfriend Judge Whipper. On “SATC,” at the end of the day, Carrie calls her friends; on “Ally McBeal,” Ally goes home alone. The social nature of the setting of “Ally McBeal,” the offices of Cage & Fish, allows for a consistent community of playfulness that doesn’t scorn weirdness (à la all the transitory men on SATC) but embraces it. The law firm sits atop a bar, where the lawyers have befriended the singer Vonda Shepard and turn to the dancing twins for comfort at the end of an episode. By stripping the apartment of its symbolic value as a physical representation of one’s true identity, “Ally McBeal” has the spirit of a sitcom in the suit of a legal drama.

Similarly, whimsy and insight shine through using the same mechanism on the show: thought, not action. Where legal shows like “Law & Order: SVU” churn out crazy cases for the shock value of their narrative events, the cases that Cage & Fish choose to take lead them to discussion. For example, Ally and Georgia (Ally’s ex-boyfriend’s wife) try a case challenging anti-polygamy laws in Massachusetts; at first, I was disappointed by the exploitation of such traditional television fodder (see “Big Love”), but the trial caused Georgia to question whether her relationship with Billy had been improved by Ally’s entrance into their lives. The courtroom is a literal freak show within the freak show that is “Ally McBeal,” and through those layers of freakiness, the characters learn that the law’s effort to mediate lives is misguided.

The hierarchy of the legal system and the workplace reinforces how helpless the characters are to the insanity occurring around and inside them. Richard Fish, for instance, has a fetish for “waddles,” the skin that hangs down from a woman’s neck; John Fish likes to “take a moment”; and Ally herself hallucinates to see the “dancing baby” of mid-90s fame. These failures to follow social cues enable viewers to enjoy the show’s action without fear of real-world consequences, because the characters are already so “damaged.” In current dramedies, symptoms such as these would be preludes to breakdowns and epiphanies; however, “Ally McBeal” argues that we must embrace our demons, not necessarily lay them to rest, and learn to communicate in spite of them.

The irreverent natures of the show’s characters make it a very enjoyable 45 minutes of television. Rather than bending over backward to represent the lives of its viewers, or the idealized future lives of the teenagers staying up late to watch it without their parents’ knowledge, “Ally McBeal” brandishes the individuality of its characters and the mind of its creator.