- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
75Good show with fine cast, but it all still feels a little too familiar and old-fashioned.
-
70The series seems to always eschew Hollywood-style courtroom theatrics and gotcha moments for resolutions that seem truer because they involve mistakes, bad timing, compromises, dubious ethics and sweated-out smarts.
-
63Bar is so slow to start, it might as well be in reverse. The first episode is, simply, flat-out terrible. Which is why, if you're a Bochco fan, you'd be wise to wait for the fourth episode, when Bar moves to mediocre.
-
60Bochco delivers instead a solid lawyer show that fits comfortably into the mold formed by dozens of lawyer shows before it.
-
60What it isn't is very dramatic. If watching attorneys haggle like rug traders was all that interesting, Feige probably would still be doing it. Nonetheless, there are worse ways to spend an hour than watching Raising the Bar, especially since the cast members are all quite pretty.
-
Charge this one with trying too hard.
-
50Although the cases in Raising the Bar are apparently influenced by real-life cases, they tend to be either predictable or predictably unpredictable, however you want to look at it. In combination with the characters, this makes Raising the Bar about an average law series. That's pretty good for TNT, but less than expected from Bochco - fair or not.
-
50While the particulars of these cases are not uninteresting, they are mostly lost amid the swirl of Jerry and Michelle's careening between romance and competition, betrayal and "crossing the line."
-
50Raising the Bar is professional television, but no more than that. Passion and purpose are among the missing.
-
50It's not all bad, but nothing in it argues that it needed to be made other than to give the people who made it something to do. It's a mediocre misfire in which the odd good parts beg for a better home.
-
50Despite its updated gloss and cast, in fact, Raising the Bar doesn't really break a mold.
-
50Seriously, it is hard to take the show very seriously. It does traffic in issues and hot topics--and protests, in its way, the general corruption of the legal system--but not in particularly fresh or original terms.
-
50Too often, though, plots are contrived and coincidental (how many times can Kellerman defend clients against the same prosecutor, who just happens to be his girlfriend?) and lack the wonderful surprises that are trademarks of a Bochco production.
-
50Bar still feels like an attempt at a '90s-era edgy prime-time drama whose time has past.
-
40Part of what makes Raising the Bar so loopy is its commitment to this peculiar politics of personal responsibility and to a sappy liberalism that means none of the accused represented by Jerry Kellerman (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and his compatriots in the public defender's office are ever all that bad. They are just mentally ill, or poor and struggling, or innocent.
-
All the characters appear to have emerged from the stockroom.
-
40There's no escaping a nagging sense that the series springs from a well-worn playbook.
-
40So why would TNT settle for warmed-over Bochco? Because that's what they're getting.
-
38The second episode is 30 percent better than the first. Maybe by episode six, it will actually be watchable.
-
30Bochco has made the most cutting-edge drama--of 1994. These thinly drawn characters aren't compelling, and the entire production feels dated and stagey.
-
30This shockingly ordinary new legal drama from Steven Bochco should seem right at home amid TNT's ubiquitous Law & Order reruns. It feels like something you've seen before, maybe from way back when L&O was new.
-
30These are some of the most lackluster, unimaginative trials brought to TV in years, as every defendant's guilt or innocence is written all over his or her face from the get-go.
-
30It's not just familiar, but lazy.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 9 out of 19
-
Mixed: 1 out of 19
-
Negative: 9 out of 19
-
seanb10One of the best shows that I have watched ever.
-
Yaele10After the first few episodes this show bloomed into one of the best drams on TV and a sobering look at the American judiciary system.
-
MattQ.0