[Raising the Bar]

I promised David Feige--and I more than owe this to him, given his many years of public service--that if the legal drama he co-wrote, Raising the Bar (TNT, Mondays 10PM) was even half of what it could be, I'd sing his praises everywhere I could.

I only caught the second half of this week's episode, but I'll say this: it's a real improvement over last week.

Kellerman, the main character and a public defender, is still insufferable and overacted, but Feige gets more "little things" right about the legal system (e.g., how a judge greets, in friendly fashion, a defense attorney whose cases he used to sit on; how a prosecutor reacts when her ethics are challenged by a defense attorney face-to-face; how a prosecutor views "cutting a kid a break" on sentencing; everything about plea-bargaining) than any other legal drama I've seen. And if you get enough little things right, eventually you tap into the Big Thing. Which has never before been seen on U.S. television, in my view.

If the show continues to improve at this pace, it'll be a hit, and a meaningful one at that. Meaning, it'll be a hit not just with lay viewers (as the danger of popularity is, I think, that it provides an incentive to entrench mistakes made in past episodes) but with critics as well. Even the harshest critics, like--I imagine--public defenders and other criminal attorneys will be. I've gone from cautiously pessimistic about the show to cautiously optimistic.

I just hope that Kellerman's final, true-to-life (and nicely understated) line from this week's episode ("Just happy to see him out of the cage...") is a preview of things to come. Mark-Paul has to play this character as though Kellerman goes into battle every single day--which, in fact, he does--and not like every day is D-Day, which ideally it would be (given that people's lives are at stake) but which it just can't be, if you're to do the job more than three or four months.