Yes, But Why Isn’t the Doctor Hot?

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The New York Sun

The new medical series “Hopkins” features telegenic surgical residents and attending physicians with complicated personal histories, and it comes in a Thursday night time slot on ABC. It’s a prescription that sounds suspiciously similar to that of “Grey’s Anatomy,” the network’s most successful drama since 2005.

But what distinguishes “Hopkins,” first and foremost, is that everything unfolding on-screen has actually happened. The six-part reality series, produced by ABC News, was filmed inside Johns Hopkins Hospital over the course of four months. Its premiere, Thursday at 10 p.m., comes nearly eight years after the network aired “Hopkins 24/7,” a documentary series shot at the same Baltimore medical center.

It is not surprising that executive producer Terence Wrong, who also worked on “Hopkins 24/7,” chose this moment to return to the hospital. “Hopkins” is likely to benefit from a newfound fascination with the lives of surgeons and the inner workings of Baltimore, thanks to the popularity of “Grey’s Anatomy” and also of HBO’s hugely successful series “The Wire.”

For a network looking to draw an audience during the summer months, when its biggest hits are in reruns, “Hopkins” seems like a safe bet.

Medical programs have a long track record across genres. Classic prime-time series (“Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “St. Elsewhere”) have been set in hospitals, as have more recent hits (“ER,” “House”). ABC’s longest-running and highest-rated daytime drama, “General Hospital,” revolves around the lives of doctors and nurses. And medical-themed reality and documentary series (“Dr. 90210,” “Big Medicine,” “Mystery Diagnosis”) fill hundreds of hours of cable airtime each week.

Such shows have generally proved successful not only because medical mysteries and rarities supply endless plotlines, but also because they humanize the doctors and the patients they portray. Viewers can take comfort in the notion that their caregivers really do care, and they can empathize with a cancer patient who doesn’t look like a TV actor picking up a paycheck.

But the formula is not foolproof: Shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy” and “House” owe their ratings, in part, to their compelling, complex characters.

In “Hopkins,” we are offered the empathic Brian Bethea, a father of three in his ninth and final year of postgraduate training to become a cardiothoracic surgeon. His dreadfully long workweeks take a tremendous toll on his wife and children — who, incidentally, look like they walked off the pages of a J. Crew catalog — and push his marriage to the breaking point.

There’s the affable Karen Boyle, a stiletto-wearing urological surgeon who is pregnant with her third child. Dr. Boyle, who sometimes wishes she was a stay-at-home mother, talks with her patients — many of whom find her through vasectomy.com — about hernias, groin pain, sperm production, and all kinds of sexual dysfunction “like we’re talking about the weather.”

There’s the demanding, Mexican-born Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, who jumped a border fence two decades ago to work as a farmhand, and went on to become an elite brain surgeon. “The same hands that were picking tomatoes are now picking brain tumors,” Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa says.

An irreverent vascular surgeon who provides comic relief in the operating room and a winsome resident who compares Baltimore to a “war zone” are also among the dozens of mostly young, mostly good-looking doctors featured in the series.

These real-life physicians appear to maintain professional boundaries that their fictitious counterparts on medical dramas do not. Unlike the characters on “Grey’s Anatomy,” the “Hopkins” doctors aren’t — as far as viewers can see — dating their supervisors, having sex in the on-call room, or fantasizing aloud about threesomes with their co-workers. “The residents don’t sleep with attendings; the residents don’t sleep with nurses,” one resident explains.

“Hopkins” physicians treat myriad patients, who come from near and far to the renowned teaching hospital and transplant center. Some of the series’ most suspenseful and heartrending stories involve Earl, a spirited teenager who needs a heart transplant; Brenda, a middle-age mother awaiting a new set of lungs; Thomas, a little boy who is going blind, and Mya, a 9-year-old who suffers irreversible brain damage after an accident in a friend’s pool.

The diverse menu of patients and illnesses adds to the sense of reality, which, one would think, would add to the drama. But, unsurprisingly, it also serves to dilute our understanding of the main players and their environment. “Hopkins” crams too many stories into a single hour, which in turn necessitates the presence of too many people with whom to keep up. Each hour-long show introduces a new set of “characters,” with only a few of the doctors, and none of the patients, showing up in more than one episode. In the first episode alone, viewers are introduced to two patients with brain tumors, a young man who wants his vasectomy reversed, an elderly man suffering from shock, a teenage girl with a brain injury, and an older woman with a collapsed lung.

“Hopkins,” which was culled from more than 1,500 hours of footage, would be better served with more airtime and recurring roles given to fewer doctors and patients. The show has its share of accessible characters, but it moves too quickly among them, precluding viewers from forming the kinds of attachments that will stop them from channel surfing, let alone bring them back week after week.


The New York Sun

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