Raising The Bar
I was a child of the seventies. If the movies were considered the silver screen in the fifties and sixties then in the seventies television was golden. It was the decade of Mash, All in the Family, the Jeffersons, and really funny game shows that make me wish that the regulars of Match Game and Password were still around. That was reality TV at its best, not the crap that the kids are allowed to watch today.
I grew up knowing the TV Guide backwards and foreward and would have loved getting a job watching television because I loved it so much. So maybe it’s because I am so biased and so tired of crappy shows that I’m the worst kind of critic. It’s not as if I’ve worked in the industry and yet watching so closely and teaching my sons how to really watch and appreciate the old shows makes me just another backseat driver, the fan that thinks they know what’s best for the show because they stake their emotions to gauge their responses.
I saw a show the other night and it’s by one of my favorites, Steven Bochco. See, dad’s a retired Homicide Detective in NYC and all of the cop shows were especially dear to me. I was jazzed because the title gave me a sense that this was going to be cutting edge.
So here’s the thing, by the third episode I was exhausted and frustrated. Was this the intent? I will say that I was also insulted and offended at least once in each of the episodes. Again I find myself hesitating. Who am I to say but then if I were to get a chance to be heard by the people who made this would they even care what one woman in her forties thought? Then I looked at my boys and I figure that they care about what I think and how would they react to this show if I let them watch it and would I? No, I guess I wouldn’t.
Here are my two cents. The only characters that came across as genuine and fully faceted were the fabulous Jane Kaczmarek, Gloria Reuben and Nick Balco. I can actually think of a few people who are very much like them. The others are just so cartoonish and one dimensional.
The lead character blows up into a rage, usually at the Judge Kessler character, in every episode that I got tired by the second one. No lawyer would survive this craziness and no boss would allow such a loose cannon. The Rubens character seems too levelheaded to allow it. I guess I expected him to be more of a “Stormy Weathers” (From the Hip with Judd Hirsh and John Hurt) character. Now that attorney knew how to manipulate the system without looking as if he was going to have a coronary every five minutes. I can’t imagine any judge tolerating it or even enjoying sparring with such a hot head. There is one thing in a courtroom that isn’t captured here and that is a respect for it so even his appearance turned me off. The long hair is one thing but never changing out of the same suit? Hey, the attorneys in Brooklyn may look mussed up but never like this guy and he didn’t have any reason to, unless he had disdain for himself as well – therefore not a role model for my kids.
Ok, I’m getting too into this thing right but hey, it’s my one chance to do what I wanted to do as as a kid – and for free. Tell you what – I know I won’t be quitting my day job. The biggest problem that hit me immediately was the Charlie Sagansky character. Guess what everyone, my sons are gay and the cardboard cut out of a 1980s gay man was offensive. Trolling out in public at night but looking embarassed in the courthouse hallways during the day? NOT! It was not believable and it is not how the majority of the gay men that I know really are. Ok, he’s doing whoever he has to, be it female, because he’s ambitious and yet he goes into really public gay places? If he were hiding it or trying to he wouldn’t hang out in a gay bar, he’d go to a lawschool library or teach at night and know which students were gay or not but a gay coffeehouse? Hmmm, don’t think so. By the way my son loves Wilson Cruz and I can see why! He made me wish I was a dude he was so hot.
The others just seem cookie cutter characters with the ballsy girl but she got tired quickly and while I liked “Brooklyn” for obvious reasons I wondered why everyone was asking her to help as if they’d never had those connections in Manhattan before. The least believable is the rich dude. Living in NYC I’ve come across so many people who are affluent who do believe in doing their part but they won’t wear it so as to allienate their co-workers or worse, their clients. By the way, any rich dude that can have access to a jet would never walk the halls of a courthouse and its daily dose of reality and not want to jet out of there. I just couldn’t believe him ever.
I left the hardest one for last. The young black ADA. On the one hand he’s the only one that is straight forward about his convictions but during one episode I almost felt as if he was a self hating black man and it really pissed me off. If he is, then is he going to be seen with a white girlfriend or rejecting his less achieving family members? I really hate that. Why can’t he just be straight forward and still respect other black people?
Look, I’m the divorced mother of three Black/Latino boys of which two are gay. I hit the trifecta but we are blessed in that we love watching TV together, we love each other and enjoy who and what we are. Watching TV is a host of things for us and if “Raising the Bar” wants to do just that then I hope they portray blacks and gay people more appropriately. I wanted to like it, I really really did but in the end I knew I couldn’t let the boys watch it and think that people are like that because they’re just not, at least not in my New York. And hell, I live in Bed Stuy not on the Upper West Side.
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