Hot Sheet: Ditto Knocking 'Em Dead

BY Advocate.com Editors

October 30 2009 5:05 PM ET

1 PIXEL GIF | ADVOCATE.COM

DVDs

Here's Lucy: Season II
— Not as good as I Love Lucy or even The Lucy Show but infinitely better than Life With Lucy (yes, we know —she played Lucy a lot), Here’s Lucy— Lucille Ball’s early ’70s sitcom with kids Lucie and Desi — is now on DVD, with season 2 hitting stores this week. In it, Lucy Carter (Ball, now in her late 50s, early 60s) is a widow who heads back to the workplace to put food on the table. Ball is crazy as ever, and the show is surprisingly sophisticated for its time.

Ally McBeal: The Complete Series— Back when those anorexic jokes about Calista Flockhart were still funny, she was on a show that was actually quite funny, created by comic mastermind David E. Kelly, which served as the precursor for all of his successful legal dramas to follow (The Practice, Boston Legal). The show — which prompted a Time magazine cover asking, "Is Feminism Dead?" — stars Flockhart as McBeal, a man-hungry lawyer as a highly sexualized law firm (she even locks lips with Lucy Liu in one episode). The show brought us many a huge star (Flockhart, Liu, Portia de Rossi, Jane Krakowski, Robert Downey Jr., James Marsden) and now lives on packaged as a complete series.