Bosom Buddies, Redefined

Buoyed by such viewer feedback, the writers began to pair up the two in other, off-balcony situations, taking the male-bonding relationship to unexpected but natural-feeling levels of closeness: a fishing trip that included a spooning scene in bed, dressing as matching flamingos at a party, and being tied together with a rope as Denny kept Alan from hurting himself while sleepwalking during an attack of night terrors.

Shatner's Denny is a lawyer-celebrity, a reflexive libertine five times married, a gun-toter (in the office) and quite possibly an Alzheimer's sufferer devoted to making money and the priapic rush of winning cases. Spader's Alan is a hedonist intellectual, always ready with a Wildean riposte, self-destructive and self-loathing, willing to hire thugs to rough up a foe and hating himself for doing it. They are both wounded, deeply flawed characters, at once lovable, pitiable and noble in their majestic ruin.

Yet, like many successful couples, they are opposites in some ways. Alan has a bleeding heart where Denny is a troglodyte right-winger. Alan lays open his weaknesses while Denny tries to suppress them. And there is a 30-year age gap between the two.

Perhaps it's not surprising that the person who pens most of Shatner and Spader's lines is a woman: Janet Leahy is the executive producer and a writer for "Boston Legal."

"I think of their relationship as [their] having sex with women, but they're married to each other," she says.

Indeed, the pair fit the archetype of many fictional husband-wife teams -- Ralph and Alice Kramden, Archie and Edith Bunker, George and Louise Jefferson, Rob and Laura Petrie -- bantering, picking at each other, being disappointed in each other, reveling in each other's accomplishments. The pair also draw on the lineage of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Oscar and Felix, Butch and Sundance and other teams that might as well have been married.

Denny Crane and Alan Shore, however, create intimacies never reached by their slapstick forebears. (HBO watchers will be familiar with this brand of dramatic man-love from last season's "Rome" and the soldier-suitors Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus.)

In interviews, Shatner and Spader talk about how the other actor smells, so close is their on-screen contact.

"It's a very funny friendship that Bill and I have and that Denny and Alan have; it really is," Spader says from California. "We go together."

Shatner and Spader had never worked together before the show. Because Spader's academic parents forbade most television watching, he had only a glancing awareness of Shatner's legendary "Star Trek" past. On the phone, between "Boston Legal" takes at a studio in Manhattan Beach, Spader sounds like a looser version of his controlled Alan Shore character, laughing easily and enthusiastically engaging in the conversation.

Like their characters, Shatner and Spader are quite different. Their "Boston Legal" co-star Rene Auberjonois says that if Shatner's approach to a scene doesn't work, he'll try something else, unfazed by failure. Spader prepares meticulously for each scene, Auberjonois says, and makes laserlike choices.

"I think that when two people are so different, they have an understanding of that and they tend to forgive everything" the other does, Spader says. "If you start from the premise that you're dichotomous in so many ways, you forgive. Bill and I are like that and Alan and Denny are like that."