• Raising the Bar, 10-11 Monday, TNT

Watching Raising the Bar will be more fun if you think of it not as a TV show but as an attempt to drive a stake through Perry Mason's heart. Witnesses aren't reduced to stammering, drooling bags of pudding by epic cross examinations, and spectators don't leap to their feet to scream confessions to ax murders.

In fact, hardly anybody even makes it into a courtroom. Raising the Bar is the first legal drama that shows America's criminal court system for what it is: a creaky, overburdened bureaucracy where prosecutors and defense attorney swap pleas and jail time like flea-market hustlers. Typical ''strategy conference'' between Raising the Bar attorneys: ''Adjourn the hookers, plead the DWI to the minimum, get me four years on the burglary.'' And hold the pickles.

Raising the Bar follows a collection of young lawyers who work against each another, as prosecutors and public defenders.

But in Raising the Bar, as in real-life courts, most of their ''work'' consists of a minuet to avoid the mutually assured destruction of an actual trial, which nobody on either side has the time or resources to deal with. The prosecutors threaten draconian prison sentences, the defenders bluster about scorched-earth battles over pre-trial motions, and eventually a bargain is struck.

When a judge rejects an agreement over a rape case, snapping that ''I will not put a dangerous criminal back on the streets just to avoid a trial -- this isn't Let's Make a Deal,'' both attorneys stare at her in disbelief: That's exactly what it is. Nobody, including the public defenders, is under any delusions about a presumption of innocence. ''You stabbed the guy 36 times and cut his penis off,'' a defense attorney warns one of his clients. ``Self-defense is a tough sell here.''

This is all very earnest and intelligent, no surprise since Raising the Bar was created by veteran producer Steven Bochco and writer David Feige, who drew heavily from Indefensible, his memoir of a pre-television career as a public defender. But what it isn't is very dramatic. If watching attorneys haggle like rug traders was all that interesting, Feige probably would still be doing it.

Nonetheless, there are worse ways to spend an hour than watching Raising the Bar, especially since the cast members are all quite pretty, especially Mark-Paul Gosselaar (NYPD Blue) as a kind of Al Pacino-lite public defender who's developing a conscience and Melissa Sagemiller (Sleeper Cell) as a cute but fierce prosecutor. And Jane Kaczmarek is happily on hand as a tyrannically bureaucratic judge who insists that ''Process creates truth.'' Maybe, but it's sure no Perry Mason.

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