I've been catching up on this show in repeats and it was a real gem, but it seems to me that with season 4, when they added Larroquette, the show lost a lot of its manic drive and became a flat out drama. Am I wrong?

Yeah, totally wrong.

The show never lost it's humor or outlandishness. And I'd say it was one of the best TV shows of the last 25 years...

Well I have to say I'm a few episodes into S4 and there are far fewer laughs and much more serious cases.

As typical with DEK shows, they fall off dramatically after a few years. I loved the first 2 seasons, but not so much the rest.

The show that this spun off of, the Practice, was the drama. And quite good in it's earlier seasons. I enjoyed Bostone Legal as well, but definitely saw a drop in quality as it progressed. It almost seemed like they were oftentimes being quite outlandish just because they felt they needed to.

Yeah, imo it fell off pretty badly in Season 4.

Season 3 had some lackluster parts, but it was still a fun show. Season 4 it just got bland.

Aside from Spader and Bill Shatner, the cast changed practically every season. I watched every episode of this whacky series, but I think that hurt the show. There was really no consistent chemistry with the cast since it changed so often.

IIRC, when the ratings started dropping in season 4 and they decided to make season 5 the last one, that season you could tell they had big budget cuts. DEK really mailed it in during that final season.

When the Alan Shore character was introduced in the final season of The Practice, I actually thought Spader did superior work in the more serious and darker cases.