Raising the Bar is the latest legal drama from Stephen Bochco. I gave up on television legal dramas years ago, and I probably would have skipped this one entirely if it hadn’t been for the involvement of David Feige, whose Indefensible blog is on my daily reading list.
The long review will have spoilers, so here’s the short review: I didn’t like it much, but I’m willing to give it a chance on the strength of David Feige’s involvement.
Spoiler Alert for the pilot episode of Raising the Bar.
Spoiler Alert for the pilot episode of Raising the Bar.
Let me just get this out of the way: I know it’s a Stephen Bochco production, but could they please scale back the sexual escapades? It’s just not that interesting until we get to know the characters. If I want to see people I don’t know having sex, that’s what the internet is for.
When I watch a legal drama, I want it to crackle with authenticity. I want it to teach me things about the law and the world. Raising the Bar didn’t do that for me. I’m not sure why.
Some public defenders have had problems with the level of realism in the show. Check out, for example, Seth Abramson’s ten questions for David Feige. Amusingly, you can tell from the URL that he originally had only five questions, but he must have thought of more as he was writing.
Those things are bound to bother public defenders and defense lawyers a lot more than they do me. I don’t care, for example, that Michelle’s clothing is unrealistic in a courtroom, or that a prosecutor wouldn’t make himself a witness in a case by sitting in on the interrogation. The latter is just a way to simplify the story, and the former is just showbiz.
(I can understand where the PDs are coming from, however. It’s taken me quite a while to learn to enjoy movies and television shows that feature computer technology because the mistakes in the details kept breaking my willing suspension of disbelief.)
I guess my basic problem with the pilot for Raising the Bar is that we’ve seen this plot before: A young and idealistic public defender fights so hard for his innocent client that the judge jails him for contempt.
I’ll admit that the way it happens is more interesting than usual. The PD, Jerry Kellerman, has a client charged with rape and (something like) possession of a weapon with intent to harm. Jerry believes, correctly we later find out, that his client is truly innocent.
Jerry goes to trial and beats the rape charge because the victim’s ID of the defendant is weak and there’s no other evidence. However, the jury convicts on the weapon charge. As is explained later, without the rape, the “intent to harm” part of the weapon charge should go away. The jury has apparently misunderstood the law.
The judge, however, is having none of it. She apparently believes the client is getting away with rape, so instead of throwing out the weapon conviction, she promises to sentence the client to the maximum penalty for the knife—3.5 to 7 years. Jerry could appeal, we find out, but that could take so long that even if he wins, the client will serve most of his time anyway.
(I wish the show had explained why it’s such a serious crime to possess a small pocket knife in New York. Is that for real?)
Anyway, at this point Jerry goes ballistic and tells off the judge, so she jails him for contempt. However, through a manipulative clerk and a cooperative DA, she is eventually convinced that her career will be harmed by a reversal or by the bad publicity of jailing a PD with an innocent client.
Somehow all this misses what I enjoy most about legal fiction. The facts of the case are uninteresting, unexplored, and unchallenged. There’s no talk about trial strategy, no thrilling witness examination, no interesting physical evidence. Instead of showing us how the lawyer prepares for the case and tells a good story to the jury, we see him win through obstinacy and back-channel influence in the judge’s chambers.
For all I know, that’s realistic, but it’s not what I was hoping to see.
All I can think of is that maybe this was David Feige’s point. Maybe a defense lawyer can have both the facts and the law in his favor and still lose the case if the judge is a jerk. Maybe the law and the facts don’t matter because the system is broken.
I should add that the show has an awkward feel to it. The mood is inconsistent, and some of the dialog seems forced. Shows like House and The Closer can mix gripping drama with tons of exposition and moments of humor and do it well, but Raising the Bar doesn’t quite pull it off.
I’m still planning to give the show a chance. Many shows have uneven pilots that are bloated and distorted by the need to introduce the characters and the premise. And a lot of new shows don’t really come together until maybe four to eight episodes into the season. I think it’s because the writers are working without any good feedback for the first few episodes. Not until they start seeing actual produced episodes can they begin shaping their writing to the strengths of the show.
David Feige has been answering some of his critics in the blawgosphere, including Seth and Gideon. If he happens to notice my blog, there’s a question I’d like to ask: Why an innocent client?
I guess it’s supposed to make us viewers care about his plight, but from what I know of the public defender breed, it feels like a betrayal to imply that having an innocent client will make them try harder to win, because that implies that they won’t try very hard for their other clients.
I hope that future episodes will introduce us to some of the less pristine clients. Show us the frequent fliers and hapless losers. Show us the client whose case can be fought without ever knowing if he did it. Show us the plight of the guilty client who’s been overcharged, or the petty criminal who’s stepped on a habitual offender landmine and is now facing more time in prison than he’s been alive. Show us the parade of corner kids all walking the same path through the justice system because they don’t know any other life.
People as talented as David Feige and Stephen Bochco should be able to make a dramatic legal series without the crutch of an innocent client.
One last thought struck me as I was reading David’s various defenses of Raising the Bar: We can’t tell if he really means what he says about the show. He has to stand by it. In a sense, he’s in almost exactly the same situation defending the show as he would be defending a client. And the penalty for betrayal is the same too: Disbarment. If he says bad things about his own show, he’ll never get to do another show again.
I was actually glad that they used an innocent client in the first episode. The average juror that I face tends to assume that my client is guilty of SOMETHING simply because the cops arrested him. Which is why I think inconsistent verdicts and/or convictions on the lesser included, happen with the frequency that they do in my area.
So for me, I was glad that so many people got the exposure to that type of problem and could see why there is something wrong with holding on to preconceived notions of guilt. To me, that was actually some real stuff that I was hoping to see on the show.
I think the point would have been a bit sharper if they had showed a part of the jury deliberations. What tends to happen is the jury gets into the deliberation room, looks at those crazy jury instructions (full of legal mumbo jumbo) that make absolutely NO sense to anyone in the room and they go with their gut reaction. “Guilty of something”
So…this PD liked that aspect of the pilot.
I can see where you’d be glad to have an episode that shows an innocent person being convicted not because the evidence was misleading—it wasn’t, really—but because the jury made a mistake and the system broke down.
I can also see how a guilty client might make the first episode a little too much to handle. (Although now that I think about it, didn’t they imply that he was actually guilty of some misdemeanor weapon charge?)
In the last few years of reading blawgs, I’ve learned a bit about the passion that defense lawyers bring to their craft, and what I wanted from this show was the answer the perennial question, “How can you defend those people?”
I didn’t want it answered with speeches by the characters, but with stories about “those people” and the lawyers who defend them. Certainly an innocent client is one reason for defending those people, but it’s not the only reason.
Ahh…..the age old question that we all get over & over & over & over again.LOL! I wasn’t quite expecting that to be answered in the pilot. Actually, I was HOPING that they didn’t address that in the pilot.
Personnally, I think you have to develop your main characters to the point that your followers can relate to them somehow…. first. Then it becomes an easier question to approach and answer. Right now, all that you see on the RTB message boards are common folks repulsed by Jerry’s hair and all of the sex scenes (I can see the hairstyle being David’s idea, but not all the sleazy sex).
I’m thinkin that maybe when Jerry has a major jury trial, he’ll wash up pretty nice, like we all do, people will suddenly see him in a different light and they will focus more on those things that are actually relevant. That’s when I’d get into the issue if I were writing the script.
But what do I know, I’m just a PD, not a writer. I’m looking forward to the next installment to see how things start to roll out…..
Hopefully, David will stop by and address your question from his perspective.
You have a GREAT blog by the way!!
I do not want Jerry to give some impassioned speech about why he defends people, and I certainly don’t want something like that in the first episode, but I hope that showing people the answer to that question will be one of the themes of the show.
For the record, I grew up in the 70s, so I don’t see why everybody’s so upset about Jerry’s hair.
Thank you for your kind words about my blog.
Hi All,
Thanks for your patience. It’s been a busy few weeks with the show and trying to get my life at the law school back in order.
First of all, thanks for giving the show a chance. If you stick with it, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed, and I’ll look forward to your thoughts as the season progresses.
So, several things go into answering your questions: First, is the structure of pilots and their function in the larger television world and the production cycle. There’s a ton of heavy lifting to be done in a pilot. Since most of them are only seen by some test audiences and studio execs, they are really a showcase for the engine that’ll drive a series. What that implies is that the action in many pilots is quite overblown, that there’s more exposition than there might be in a subsequent episode when the characters are better developed. Because, there is a predisposition to play your strongest card in the pilot, it won’t surprise you to know that the general “innocent client screwed by an unresponsive bankrupt system” plays better than “”guilty client screwed by an unresponsive bankrupt system.” even though there is, at least arguably, more nuance in the latter position. Similarly, in terms of your concerns about the sex etc, in order to explore relationships, you need to establish them. Thus there is a ton of stuff packed into the pilot which serves the function of just winding the springs that will uncoil over the season. It’s perfectly reasonable to find the winding less enthralling than the unspooling.
Finally, in terms of the dialogue: Just blame me. It was the first script I ever wrote, and Steven, though he spent ages trying to improve my writing and teach me the form, had the courage to let me keep flailing away at it. I’m no David Kelley. But I invite you to join me in climbing up the learning curve.
In terms of the last thought: There is no way to convince you, so I’ll just say: Look at my life, my book etc. I’m a pretty candid guy. Watch the series. By the end, if you don’t think I have good cause to be proud of what we’ve accomplished, I’ll ask for no more courtesy and will surrender my feeling that at least right now, I deserve the benefit of the doubt.
And last but not least. If you think I’m commenting at length or responding in any real way to anyone outside the PD community, I’m not. I write here because I have always believed in the work, and I’ve done this show to do the best I can to portray a broken system, a heroic public defender and to show clients as they actually are–in all their very human glory. I believe we’ve succeeded at that. I hope, in time you’ll agree.
Best,
David Feige.