Mark-Paul Gosselaar Raises the Bar

Dressed in a dark khaki-ish grey suit and black dress shirt unbuttoned just a little too much (in all the right ways), Mark-Paul Gosselaar was minus the frosted golden locks that made him the object of every girl’s (and many boy’s) Saturday morning affection as Zach Morris on Saved by the Bell. Older, wiser and with a head of long, scraggly light brown locks, there's still the dazzling, boyish charm that had all the girlies wishing they could be his Kelly Kapowski as he and Steven Bochco sat down to discuss their new hit TNT drama, Raising the Bar.

The show’s success is something of a coup for both men. Bochco has been a Hollywood hit-maker for almost three decades but this town has a disastrously short memory which means LA Law, NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues are forgotten in favor of the failure of Over There. MPG, of course, has been hounded by the stigma of his child stardom since SBTB ended and went into endless reruns, sparking a cult following for generations to come.

“For three years after Saved by the Bell, I couldn’t pay people to hire me,” Gosselaar admits, good-naturedly. “I was your typical child star,” he says. “All the horror stories you hear where your parents are your managers; that happened to me. Except the drugs. I wasn’t ever caught smoking weed behind a dumpster in an alley…well,” he chuckles “I just didn’t get caught. But there wasn’t paparazzi then. I don’t know how these kids do it today."

During his acting dry spell, Gosselaar was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

“We didn’t make a lot of money on the show; it was a Saturday morning show. I couldn’t go out and get a regular job; my ego wouldn’t allow it. People were still recognizing me as ‘Zach’, actually they still do. ‘Hey, are you that guy from Saved by the Bell?’ ‘Yeeees’,” he says, sounding drained.

Bochco was the first director who dared to take him seriously when he cast Mark to replace another child star, Rick[y] Schroder, on NYPD Blue in 2001.

“I thought it was really brave of Steven,” Gosselaar offers, “casting two child stars back to back.”

“I would never have done it if I’d known you were a child star,” Bochco laughs, swearing he hadn't seen an episode of Saved by the Bell, nor realized its following.

Recalling their work together on NYPD Blue, Bochco is reminiscent about the level of innovation and provocation television once welcomed.

“It’s harder to make provocative TV today then in 1981. Because of vertical integration and the internet, there’s no incentive for a network to take any risk at all,” Bochco laments. “You couldn’t get NYPD Blue on the air today.”

Gosselaar remembers exactly when the shift came and censorship bit down.

“It was after the Janet Jackson-Super Bowl thing,” MPG says. “Before that we could say ‘Bullsh-t’ and ‘Bitch’ and show butts, but after we were allowed one [questionable] word a week. Me and Dennis [Franz] used to giggle over who got that word.”

When asked about their second endeavor, Commander in Chief, a short lived drama starring Geena Davis as the first female president of the United States that both men worked on, Gosselaar grimaces “We try not to remember that one. It was a baaaad one.”

Good or bad, it seems Bochco has found something of a muse in Gosselaar. Bochco says he never even considered another actor for the role of Jerry Kellerman on Raising the Bar, a show that is raising TNT’s ratings; debuting with almost eight million viewers, a record for an ad-supported cable network. Together they are raising the bar and rising for the ashes.