September 2nd, 2008

Season 1 Episode 1

Mark-Paul Gosselaar, better known as Zack Morris from Saved By The Bell, plays a scruffy public defender who cares so much about his clients that he cries before the court case begins. Why wait for injustice? Who needs a dramatic climax for an excuse to sob? Not lawyer Jerry Kellerman. So here at last we have a protagonist we can root for: a trampy little cry baby.

At first I thought the tears were a joke, that this Manhattan legal drama was actually a comedy. But no, they’re serious. The overbearing soundtrack tries to browbeat viewers into emotional submission -CRY! EMPATHISE! -but the intrusiveness of it makes the show seem like a parody. You’ll start out like a visitor in an art gallery, cackling just in case it’s all a clever joke, but soon you’ll be silent in disbelief at just how clichéd and earnest these twerps are.

Jane Kaczmarek, a.k.a. Malcolm Indamidel’s mother, is billed as “Crazy” Judge Kessler who holds up proceedings to water her plants. But if only her antics were always this benign. Episode One sees her sentence a man to seven years jailtime for carrying a Swiss Army Knife. Then a gay man kisses her neck and she lets him off. And here was me thinking that by “crazy” they meant eccentric. She’s fucking crackers. Mentally ill, irrational, and certainly not fit to preside over legal matters. Neither is Tiny Tears, if you can’t dress yourself and find yourself crying all the time for no reason you should be under psychiatric care.

Raising the Bar and Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s character and performance is so bad that former Saved By The Bell colleague Dustin ‘Screech’ Diamond -a man who filmed himself drawing a mustache with his shit-caked knob on a girl’s face and then leaked the tape to get publicity -seems more likable, more dignified and less embarrassing. And who would have thought that Steven Bochco, the man who brought you Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and Hooperman could be capable of something so completely irredeemable? Most disheartening is the news that this pilot got 7.7 millon viewers, a record for basic cable. This means it’ll take that much longer before it’s cancelled. Now who’s sobbing?

Posted on September 2nd, 2008 by Truphtooph
Filed under: Television