BOTCH KOd TV
by Daren Foster

Steven Bochco's NEW show Raising the Bar

Boxing lore has it that after heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano delivered the right hand that literally knocked over-the-hill former champ Joe Louis out of the ring, Marciano turned contemptuously away and headed for his corner without so much as a backward glance. Marciano later claimed there was no slight intended toward Louis. He just couldn’t bring himself to watch the sad spectacle of what had become of his idol.

These thoughts and images sprang to mind as I sat watching the first couple episodes of Steven Bochco’s latest television entry, Raising the Bar. For those of you too young to remember (or the Americans out there wondering why I’m writing about this now, months after the show ran on TNT last fall -- it just appeared up here on Canadian television a few weeks ago with no accompanying fanfare), Bochco was a true television innovator back in the `80s and 90s. After cutting his chops on such formulaic cheese as Ironside, Colombo and McMillan and Wife, he transformed the landscape with his Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue. Even failures like Hooperman, Cop Rock and Murder One had an elevated quality to them. While not perfect, each felt slightly ahead of their time for network TV.

That is certainly not the case for Raising the Bar. If anything, the show feels like a throwback, not to Bochco’s heyday but to his earlier days before he’d changed television for the better. Stylistically the show’s an awkward cross between two of his more successful outings (you can just hear the pitch: it’s got lawyers just like L.A. Law but it’s set in New York like NYPD Blue!) but content-wise, the thing stinks like a decades old episode of Owen Marshall awkwardly spiced up for racier times. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. An uncompromisingly idealistic public defender butts heads with friend and foe alike who aren’t as principled as he deems himself to be. A slightly crazy judge driven by the legal process doesn’t like the public defender or his long hair. A sexy, cleavage-showing district attorney struggles to keep dangerous criminals behind bars while fending off lewd advances from her boss. She is sleeping with the uncompromisingly idealistic public defender even though she sits across the aisle from him, battling cases in court.So, you’re getting the feel of the thing. A mishmash of characters and storylines from across the lawyer genre, some stolen straight from Bochco’s own pen, thrown together with jagged, quick cut interstitials a la NYPD Blue, and presto magico, another Steven Bochco hit! (In the second episode of Raising the Bar, a lawyer keels over and dies in the courtroom. In the pilot episode of L.A. Law, one of the firm’s partners dies at his desk in the office. Bochco, it seems, likes to kill lawyers. Might it have something to do with his two divorces?) According to the show’s website, Raising the Bar will be returning for a second season. Its pilot show broke the ratings record for ad supported cable networks. The very precise distinction of that record says more about the state of television nowadays than it does the quality of the show. Yet, regardless of how subpar the product, Bochco has scored big enough with Raising the Bar to merrily continue clogging up the airwaves with this dreck.

More mysteriously is why TNT, one of those American “ad supported cable networks”, went to someone like Steven Bochco to help establish itself as an original series provider, competing with the likes of AMC and its Mad Men. The man hasn’t had a hit since NYPD Blue and while that show ended only 3 years ago, it had ceased being a creative enterprise at least 5 years before that. Raising the Bar shows the once innovative creator not only falling desperately short of his most vital, groundbreaking work but as someone who seems to have stopped watching television altogether sometime in the mid-90s. Times, they have a-changed, Steven (and TNT), and sexually tinged double entendres are no longer considered edgy. HBO has happened, and Showtime. The Sopranos, The Wire and Dexter. Bochco seems to think that a gay character playing both sides of the law, if you know what I’m saying, still has the power to shock. I’ve got three words for him. Will and Grace.

Perhaps TNT wasn’t eying AMC or HBO or Showtime. In a promotional ditty the network sent out for Raising the Bar, it stated that the broadcast networks were the real targets, which these days, seems to be setting the bar pitifully low. Broadcast networks are dying a slow, self-inflicted death all on their own, emitting a baleful waft of decaying product as they go. How difficult is it to surpass that? You’re simply inheritors of dust. If power abhors a vacuum, evidently upstart “ad supported cable networks” embrace it. TNT is seeking to fill the content-devoid hole of original dramatic programming left so gapingly wide open by broadcast networks.

TNT’s siren call of “there’s money to be made in them thar hills” has been heard and picked up by the likes of Steven Bochco. Having once redefined the nature of network television back in the day, he is now content to spread its life-taking contagion further up the channel listings. He is able to continue plying his trade without even having to be as good as he once was. Instead, he is as bad as he never was and as a one-time big fan, I have to turn away because it’s a bit sad to watch.