The Practice / YMMV

Ass Pull: After spending most of Season 2 struggling to find opportunities for Lisa Gay Hamilton to stretch her acting muscles not portraying a lawyer, it is revealed at the beginning of Season 3 that Rebecca has passed the bar. She'd been taking night school classes, totally in secret... for the past five years.
Broken Base: The Retool in the final season caused this. While most seem to agree that it stemmed the declining plots that had marked the later seasons, there's still a lot of debate as to whether Alan Shore and the additional law firm was needed. Some enjoyed the fact that there were finally characters who embraced their roles as amoral attorneys and were fun to watch, while others thought Alan was a Smug Snake and didn't like the fact that the main cast were basically sidelined for the majority of it, in favor of Alan (and later, Denny's) antics.
Complete Monster: Gordon, from season 2's "Hide And Seek", rapes and murders two boys aged four and five respectively, before having sex with their corpses. While running from the police, he takes a woman hostage. After his arrest, he agrees to help the cops find the bodies solely so that he can be given a chance at parole in the future, and takes joy in seeing the mother of the boys break down in tears upon seeing their bodies. He later reacts with rage after being denied a possibility of parole.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Ellenor, in part for being a well-written overweight, female character on primetime television (something quite rare, unfortunately). The role earned actress Camryn Manheim both an Emmy and a Golden Globe.
- Alan Shore. James Spader was a shot in the arm for the series and the role earned him an Emmy, as well as a starring role in a very successful spin-off.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- In an intentionally botched closing, Jimmy questions why so many celebrities show their support for AIDS sufferers by wearing red ribbons, and asks why there is no ribbon for heart disease, which his father died of. Well, now there is a ribbon for heart disease... and it's red.
- Before Michael Emerson played Ben Linus, he played a serial killer on this show. In fact, The Practice probably has a lot more to do with the fact that he's typecast as a villain than anything else he's ever done.
Narm: When Bobby realises that Barry Wall (Christian Clemenson, better known for playing Jerry 'Hands' Espenson on Boston Legal) shot Jimmy, they fight and break a window, and then Bobby hangs him out the window until he confesses to shooting Jimmy. The way Bobby says 'Tell me you shot Jimmy, or you are out the window!' comes off more funny than serious.
Retroactive Recognition:
- Michael Emerson, who later became famous as Benjamin Linus on Lost, won an Emmy for his multi-episode run as Serial Killer William Hinks.
  - Daniel Dae Kim, also of Lost fame, plays a cop in the Ally McBeal crossover episode.
- Anna Gunn (Skyler White on Breaking Bad) has a recurring role as a prosecutor.
- Richard Schiff, who plays a homeless man in one episode, went on to play Toby Ziegler on The West Wing.
- A young Pablo Schreiber , now best known as George Pornstash Mendez from Orange Is the New Black , plays mentally handicapped client Darryl in Season 4 Episode 14.
Seasonal Rot: Season 7, in which the majority of the firm starts hitting its highest levels of unethical behavior, coupled with lead characters Bobby McDonnell (Dylan McDermott) and Lindsay (Kelli Williams) departing the firm via a plotline that saw both characters (stuck in a loveless marriage for several seasons) separating and pursuing careers outside the firm, along with other supporting characters. This, coupled with several ridiculous episodes (including a client who non-ironically believed he was Superman) led to the season garnering the lowest ratings of the series at that point, prompting the Retool that stripped the cast down to its bare essentials and integrated Alan Shore (James Spader) to inject new life into the series.
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: As the moral integrity of the firm and all the characters degraded in later seasons, it became clear that you wanted them to lose all their cases — a notion supported by declining ratings that put it in jeopardy of being canceled. The existence of this phenomenon has even been cited by some staff members in the eighth season (including James Spader himself, who has commented in interviews that he was expressly hired to "destroy" the show), which sees a character introduced who not only proves himself to be just as unethical as the main characters — albeit in a far more nuanced fashion, and with many redeeming qualities — but the entirety of the firm gets called out on their behavior when Alan tells a jury that it's pretty rich for a firm to claim ignorance and moral superiority when they've knowingly defended (and let free) rapists and murderers for years, repeatedly emphasizes this fact, and so thoroughly takes them to task that the firm is forced to disband (and its partners forced to seek other employment) in the hope of salvaging their reputations. It also helped that, unlike the other characters, Alan at least admits that he needs to be unethical to a degree (at least, in terms of everyday ethics as opposed to legal ethics) to effectively do his job.

YMMV / The Practice

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