Every week this season that I've turned on Raising the Bar – and that's been all of them – I've wondered why I didn't like the show anywhere near as much last season. Last year, I watched several episodes of the series and found that it was no more or less than your average legal drama, and that Mark-Paul Gosselaar did just a little too much crying.
Well, he still is tilting at windmills this season (no matter what he said last night), but at least his crying has abated. But, that doesn't really seem like all that was missing last season, the show was just very by the numbers and I was never terribly interested in any of the characters.
Okay, so I'm not quite sure that I'm interested in them now all that much either, at least not beyond all of them. The show has a lot of characters running around… a lot of characters. It's impossible for the series to develop full plots for all of them, and that really shows this year. Just look at Richard Woolsley (Teddy Sears), he finally got more than 30 seconds of screen time last night, but his plot, which involved him pleading out a case without figuring out what it was about first, felt very familiar. I don't remember last season well enough to know if they did that exact plot then, but I know that I've seen something 
similar before (even if it was on a different show).
The big character – Jerry Kellerman (Gosselaar) – is obviously the focus of every episode, but they do seem to have trouble bringing in the other characters regularly. Certainly this season we've learned very, very little about our prosecutors, save that Michelle Ernhardt (Melissa Sagemiller) is dating a cop who helped kill one of the women Kellerman has defended. That has to be headed somewhere, I'll be sorely disappointed in the series if it doesn't, but I have the sense that it may not come back for weeks on end. The show did appear to drop a hint in last night about her dating the cop – she left drinks with everyone saying she had plans – but that was it, nothing specific.
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