Which Boston-centric shows are better than the rest?

After the second episode of TNT’s new Boston-based Rizzoli & Isles focused more on the city, Entertainment Weekly blasted the show – where Angie Harmon’s Rizzoli is a jaded, salt-of-the-earth, Red Sox fan cop — by proclaiming that it offers up “perhaps the most inauthentic portrayal of Boston ever.” Ever.

That criticism got me thinking about TV shows set in Boston, and which ones have done a reasonably okay job of depicting the character of the city and its residents.

TV shows that immediately leaped to my mind are the most popular ones, like Cheers, which centered on folks who worked at a bar run by an alcoholic former Red Sox player and patronized by customers ranging from Harvard intellectuals, like psychiatrist Frasier Crane, to non-intellectuals, like Cliff Clavin, the loud-mouthed postal worker with a believable accent.

Aside from Cheers, two other notable dramas seemed to veer away from Hollywood’s stereotypical vision of Boston: The David E. Kelley legal shows Ally McBeal and The Practice. The Practice stood out for me largely because of its lead character, Bobby Donnell, who didn’t have a god-awful Julianne Moore/30 Rock manner of speaking, came from a blue collar background and got married in Fenway Park.

Kelley, a native New Englander and former Boston attorney himself, actually has a lock on Boston-centric TV dramas, as he was also the guy behind two other shows my fellow CliqueClack TV bloggers mentioned as their favorite Hub-based shows: Boston Legal and Boston Public. I must confess that I never watched Boston Legal (am not a fan of James Spader) but I did regularly watch Boston Public, at least in its first few seasons.

Shows that got props for their portrayals of Boston included: Spenser: For Hire (actually shot in the city), Crossing Jordan (Jill Hennessey played a medical examiner, like Isles from the TNT show) and Leverage (although the mispronunciation of the city of Worcester, which is west of Boston, really irritated at least one of my colleagues.)

What shows do — or did — a good job of representing Boston and its inhabitants in a way other than one which resembles a bad made-for-TV movie about the Kennedys?

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Jul 23, 2010 @ 14:00 EST5EDT