|
'Hope' stays on twisted path
By ERIC DEGGANS © St. Petersburg Times, published October 28, 1998 This time, it was new mother Dr. Diane Grad (Jayne Brook) -- who has morphed over the years from an overly earnest research doctor into a overly earnest emergency room physician -- admonishing another mother who brought a dead baby into the hospital. Turns out this woman, participating in a program at the hospital encouraging mothers to breast feed, mistakenly allowed her baby to die of dehydration because her breast milk didn't contain enough nutrients. Instead of sympathizing, Grad launches into a trademark Chicago Hope tirade -- demanding the woman be prosecuted for the baby's death until an incident in her own life shows how a distracted mother can miss her own child's diseases. Members of the Pinellas County Breast Feeding Task Force, a group of nurses that work to educate new parents about breast feeding, feared the episode (which aired last week) would discourage breast feeding and regular contact with hospitals. It was a concern echoed by advocacy groups nationwide that mobilized complaints about the show. "That show made it look like parents were on their own," says Pat Kautz, a lactation consultant at Bayfront Medical Center and task force member who screened the episode during the group's regular meeting Thursday. "It was not a realistic portrayal." Co-executive producer Nicole Yorkin says the point of the episode is to show that Dr. Grad's intense reaction was wrong. "All the doctors around her are saying she's out of control. People may be missing the point, here." But for this TV critic, the point isn't necessarily that Chicago Hope twisted a realistic situation into pretzel knots to serve its own dramatic needs. It's that the show constantly takes such liberties with its material, sacrificing credibility and quality in an era where viewers are demanding more realism on TV dramas than ever. Case in point: the saga of Christine Lahti's Dr. Kathryn Austin. It's not enough that Lahti somehow won an Emmy award playing a Chief of Surgery who illegally took custody of her daughter and departed the country, only to return and later leave a clamp inside a patient that eventually died. Now, she's become an astronaut training to travel, John Glenn-style, as a payload specialist on the space shuttle. Really. In tonight's show -- the series' 100th episode -- bedrock character Phillip Watters (Hector Elizondo) gets sick and begins hallucinating, imagining a conversation with long-dead attorney Alan Birch (Ally McBeal's Peter MacNicol, who left the series in 1997, after creator David E. Kelley stopped writing episodes). Sound familiar? That's because Adam Arkin's Aaron Shutt did the same thing last year, during a hideously painful musical episode in which he imagined all the docs singing and dancing to classics such a Luck Be a Lady (let's just say Mark Harmon shouldn't quit his day job). As tonight's show unfolds, the hospital's 20th anniversary becomes as excuse to dredge up a number of characters previously jettisoned from the series -- including Dharma and Greg's Thomas Gibson and perennial comeback guy Mandy Patinkin. Unfortunately, this device only serves to remind viewers why these characters got booted in the first place. Fellow co-executive producer Dawn Prestwich says such exaggeration comes courtesy of creator Kelley, who now writes or co-writes every episode of the quirky dramedy Ally McBeal. "He goes to the ultimate "What if?' place," she says of Kelley. "It's about taking these characters to the furthest extreme." But Kelley's talent for avoiding soap opera-style dramatics isn't easily duplicated. Why do you think he writes so many Ally McBeal episodes in the first place? And in a TV landscape dominated by the in-your-face reality of NBC's ER, a medical drama that forces its characters into the overblown situations regularly found on Chicago Hope seems destined for also-ran status.
Business |
Citrus |
Commentary |
Entertainment
|
t started, as many Chicago Hope episodes do, with an overreaction.
