ABC injects hospital reality series with dose of melodrama
It's hard to re-create a happy accident - especially when it comes to reality TV.
Eight years ago, ABC News produced "Hopkins 24/7," a wonderful true-to-life look at life at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore that made for an engaging, involving summer replacement series. Now it's back for "Hopkins," a six-week series that's just as round-the-clock, if not quite as spontaneous.
Once again we see surgeons, residents and emergency-room doctors dealing with the stress of their demanding jobs. Once again it draws a viewer in with real-life drama that puts "ER" to shame.
Yet this time the strings show a little in the way "Hopkins" has been shot and edited for maximum appeal. In today's second episode, airing at 9 p.m. on WLS Channel 7, the marital woes of a surgeon are contrasted with the impending nuptials of an emergency-room doctor. A woman who needs a lung transplant tugs at the heartstrings, but that's nothing compared with the pediatric patients to come in the weeks ahead.
Kids and puppy dogs might be a sure way to attract viewers, especially in advertising, but when it comes to hospital drama nothing beats a sick kid.
"Hopkins" is still a very good series, and it even managed to shave CBS' "Swingtown" and NBC's "Fear Itself" in the national Nielsen ratings in last week's debut. Yet this time around it seems more contrived, not the revelation "Hopkins 24/7" was.
Last week's premiere focused on Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinjosa, a former illegal immigrant and migrant worker who had made himself a leading heart surgeon. He seemed a character out of some daring new TV drama, as he insisted, "I'm the same person. Nothing has changed. I'm the same crazy son of a (gun) I was 20 years ago."
If that's true, he must have been the most cocksure migrant worker on the planet, as he went on to say, "The same hands that were picking tomatoes a few years ago now are picking brain tumors," and "I have to believe in myself, that I can do this better than anybody else in the world." A viewer can easily imagine Hector Elizondo if not Jimmy Smits in the role.
Yet this week's follow-up gets a little more formulaic, focusing on the plight of Brenda Thompson as she awaits a lung transplant. One of the surgeons going to "harvest" a prospective set of lungs is Brian Bethea, whom we met last week, when his demanding work schedule was threatening his marriage. It also seems to threaten his work, as "Bounceback Brian" is renowned for having patients sent back to the intensive-care unit when they relapse in recovery.
Bethea's turbulent home life - he says he identifies with Rancid's song "Born Frustrated" - is contrasted with that of emergency-room doctor Mustapha Saheed, who's planning a wedding. Sure, doctors have pleasures and problems just like anyone else, but at that point a viewer can't help feeling a little played.
This "Hopkins" series was shot over four months, apparently last winter (one of Bethea's patients says he has to go home before the New York Giants play in the Super Bowl), and it was edited down to six hours from 1,500 hours of footage. So of course it still finds some sparkling nuggets of truth. Tonight, pediatric transport nurse Megan Quick says her job is "like you're Superman. You go in the closet, you put your flight suit on and you're out," soaring off in a helicopter to save some child.
Next week, Anne Czarnik, a West Virginia country girl now living in the big city, admits of working in the ER that "sometimes it's like drowning" - and not, apparently, in a good way.
On the whole, however, this reality series begins to feel a little too much like "ER," with its soap-opera melodrama and heart-tugging sentimentality.
Real as it undeniably is, it makes me wonder most of all what a talented writer like Darin Morgan would do with the story of Dr. Quinones-Hinjosa if it were turned into a TV series. So nurse, get me a Jimmy Smits, stat!