Between all the medical dramas on network television — “House,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Nip/Tuck,” “ER,” etc. — and the commercials for mysterious, sinister, and possibly useless new drugs, our small screens are awash in medical mishaps and dire health warnings guaranteed to put you off your dinner. Which is why I got such pleasure recently reading something written by an actual doctor, Anthony Daniels, better known by his pen name, Theodore Dalrymple. Observing a group of travelers cheerfully devouring mountains of greasy food, Dr. Daniels remarked:

“As a doctor, I have handed out the conventional advice about a healthy lifestyle a thousand times, though always with the knowledge that it was unlikely to be taken (since I don’t really take it myself), and that therefore the proffering of such advice was more a religious ceremony than anything else.”

The parenthetical admission that the good doctor rarely follows his own recommendations suggests one reason why FOX’s “House” is such a popular program: The doctor, Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), is a drug addict. Or why CBS’s now defunct sitcom “Becker,” in which Ted Danson played an irascible G.P. who rarely seemed concerned by the state of his own health (he smoked), can still be seen in syndication. And of course it’s a well-known fact — or is it an urban myth? — that autopsies reveal physicians have higher levels of opiates in their systems than any other segment of the population.

One of the most memorable bits of dialogue I’ve heard on television lately came in A&E’s “Detroit SWAT,” which showed a real-life raid on a crack house. Caught up was an emaciated 52-year-old black man who claimed to have been using cocaine since 1970. “I didn’t start shooting dope until I was 19 years old,” he stated, as if having held off for so long constituted some sort of achievement. “Are you ever going to stop using drugs?” a masked SWAT-team member asked him.”Yeah — when I’m dead,”the man replied cheerfully. In the meantime, he said he would continue to use cocaine because — an expression I was unfamiliar with but warmed to instantly — “it gets my tweak on.”

As Mr. Daniels writes, in words directed at life in the EU but which will strike a chord with residents of Mayor Bloomberg’s New York, “We live in so highly regulated a way — officially prevented from doing this, officially enjoined to do that, all in the name of our own health and safety — that it comes as a kind of relief, a balm to the soul, to see people doing what they want to do rather than what they are told to do.”

All of which is an inappropriately lengthy preamble to announcing the arrival of yet another television show about doctors, “3 lbs.,” which debuts on CBS tonight.(The title refers to the average weight of the human brain.) Stanley Tucci stars as Dr. Douglas Hanson, a brilliant brain surgeon with the bedside manners of a serial killer to whom the cerebellum is nothing but “wires in a box.”He has no interest in his patients as people, but like the egomaniacal lawyer played by James Woods in “Shark,” he’s already started to change his tune halfway through the pilot.

One reason is the presence of an earnest new colleague, Dr. Jonathan Seger (Mark Feuerstein), who tries to impress upon him the importance of knowing, or at least caring about, the person whose brain you happen to be cutting into. Another is the fact that the brain he’s currently occupied with belongs to a concert violinist who looks a bit like the violinist played by Emmanuelle Béart in the great Claude Sautet film, “Un Coeur en Hiver.” Then there’s the fact that Dr. Hanson is starting to realize something may be going seriously awry with his own brain. All of this would be enough to soften anyone up.

Is “3 lbs.” a good show? I think it’s too early to tell. But the high-tech brain scans on display, as well as the nuggets of medical information imparted amid the usual reams of technical gibberish, exert the customary fascination, even if the characters seem largely pro-forma. On the other hand, most of them are unusually good-looking — hello, Indira Varma — and their sex-drives seem very much intact. Expect them to interact.

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“Day Break,” a new series beginning on ABC tomorrow, is not about doctors. It’s (surprise!) about cops. Taye Diggs stars as Brett Hooper, an L.A. detective who is suffering a double misfortune: He keeps living the same day over and over again, and he seems never to have seen or heard of the movie “Groundhog Day,” which would be a useful reference point in trying to explain his dilemma to girlfriend Rita Shelten (Moon Bloodgood) and partner Andrea Battle (Victoria Pratt).

For reasons it will presumably take many episodes to find out, Hooper has been accused of killing an assistant D.A., and an awful lot of people seem very keen to make sure he’s found guilty. Hooper is utterly baffled by his predicament, and so, frankly, are we. But since this one horrible day keeps repeating itself, he also gets to try and work against his situation in various ways while figuring out why and how he’s being framed.

What’s most interesting about “Day Break” is how people’s behavior is shaped by changing circumstances. A friend who’s loyal one day turns fickle the next, simply because a more or less identical dilemma is presented in a different light. It’s hard to say what it all adds up to, but the woefully flat characters make it seem more like a video game than a television show.

bbernhard@nysun.com