‘Ally McBeal’ Stars, Led By Calista Flockhart, Recreate Series’ Bathroom Dance In Emmy Reunion

Four original Ally McBeal cast members, star Calista Flockhart as well as Greg Germann, Peter MacNicol and Gil Bellows, reunited Monday night during the Emmy broadcast on Fox more than 26 years after the debut of the legal dramedy, which aired on the network for five seasons, from September 1997 to May 2002.

The bit started with Flockhart standing in front of a mirror in a replica of the show’s famous unisex bathroom to the Ally McBeal theme.

“I knew I drank too much water; I had to take my Spanx off, I had to put my dress back on,” Flockhart is head “thinking” in a voiceover before she takes a look in the mirror and tells herslef, “Girl, you look good.”

That is when there is a series of three toilet flushes, each followed by an Ally McBeal cast member, MacNicol, Bellows and Germann, coming out of a bathroom stall.

One of the signature songs from the show, Barry White’s “You’re the First, The Last, My Everything,” begins playing and the four start dancing, recreating one of the show’s most recognizable scenes. (Below you can watch two versions of the dance from Ally McBeal, including the one in the bathroom.)

“I loved working with Peter, Gil and Greg, and I still do,” Flockhart said as her husband, Harrison Ford, looked on. “The entire Ally McBeal cast was so talented, magical and the show created by the brilliant, 11-time Emmy winner David E. Kelley, groundbreaking, revolutionary, introducing us to a dancing baby and unisex bathrooms. Ally McBeal defied convention with humor and humanity.

Ally McBeal starred Flockhart as Ally, a lawyer working in the Boston law firm Cage and Fish along with her ex-lover and his wife, and followed Ally’s trials and tribulations through life as she looked for love and fulfillment. The main focus of the dramedy was the romantic and personal lives of the main characters, often using legal proceedings as plot device.

The series won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1999, one of seven Emmys and a slew of other major awards for its run. Ally McBeal‘s original cast also included Jane Krakowski, Courtney Thorne-Smith and Lisa Nicole Carson, who were subsequently joined by other actors, including Lucy Liu, Portia de Rossi, musician Vonda Shepard as well as Robert Downey Jr. in one of his first big roles following his 1990s legal troubles en route to his blockbuster career comeback in Iron Man.

Ally McBeal transcended television to become a pop culture phenom and generate memes before memes existed with its infamous dancing baby. It remains influential two decades after its end, with She-Hulk‘s creative team recently listing the dramedy as an inspiration for their Marvel series.

There have been multiple attempts to reboot the series, most recently by ABC in 2022.