| 75 |
Newsday Verne Gay
Good show with fine cast, but it all still feels a little too familiar and old-fashioned. |
| 70 |
LA Weekly Robert Abele
The 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. |
| 63 |
USA Today Robert Bianco
Bar 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. |
| 60 |
New York Daily News David Hinckley
Bochco delivers instead a solid lawyer show that fits comfortably into the mold formed by dozens of lawyer shows before it. |
| 60 |
Miami Herald Glenn Garvin
What 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. |
| 58 |
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Armstrong
Charge this one with trying too hard. |
| 50 |
Hollywood Reporter Barry Garron
Too 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. |
| 50 |
Wall Street Journal Nancy DeWolf Smith
Despite its updated gloss and cast, in fact, Raising the Bar doesn't really break a mold. |
| 50 |
Washington Post Tom Shales
Seriously, 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. |
| 50 |
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Rob Owen
Bar still feels like an attempt at a '90s-era edgy prime-time drama whose time has past. |
| 50 |
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
While 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.” |
| 50 |
New York Magazine John Leonard
Raising the Bar is professional television, but no more than that. Passion and purpose are among the missing. |
| 50 |
Los Angeles Times Robert Lloyd
It'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. |
| 50 |
San Francisco Chronicle Tim Goodman
Although 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. |
| 40 |
Philadelphia Inquirer David Hiltbrand
All the characters appear to have emerged from the stockroom. |
| 40 |
Philadelphia Daily News Ellen Gray
So why would TNT settle for warmed-over Bochco? Because that's what they're getting. |
| 40 |
The New York Times Ginia Bellafante
Part 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. |
| 40 |
Variety Brian Lowry
There's no escaping a nagging sense that the series springs from a well-worn playbook. |
| 38 |
New York Post Linda Stasi
The second episode is 30 percent better than the first. Maybe by episode six, it will actually be watchable. |
| 30 |
Boston Globe Matthew Gilbert
These 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. |
| 30 |
Chicago Tribune Maureen Ryan
Bochco has made the most cutting-edge drama--of 1994. These thinly drawn characters aren't compelling, and the entire production feels dated and stagey. |
| 30 |
Newark Star-Ledger Alan Sepinwall
It's not just familiar, but lazy. |
| 30 |
TV Guide Matt Roush
This 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. |
