TV is the New Reading

New medical dramas 'Three Rivers,' 'Trauma' both fall short

‘Three Rivers,’ ‘Trauma’ both fall short

“Grey’s Anatomy,” of course, is a mess.

Two Seattle-based medical care facilities on the show -- Seattle Grace and Mercy West -- are merging services. Some 75 percent of the interns are being dropped from the Seattle Grace surgical program and along with them they’re losing my longtime “Grey’s” crush, the adorable Nurse Olivia. Everyone is running scared and the situation isn’t helped at all by Chief Webber, who seems to have contracted some sort of personality disorder.

Cutbacks and understaffing are par for the course in Newark’s underfunded Mercy Hospital in NBC’s “Mercy,” another hospital where if you’re missing any of the beautiful young care providers, you can probably find them making out in the storage closet.

‘Three Rivers’

These shenanigans would never fly in CBS’s “Three Rivers,” airing Sundays at 8 p.m. At the Three Rivers hospital in Pittsburgh, Penn., the stunningly gorgeous Alex O’Loughlin (”Moonlight”) strides about as a figure of worship as an organ transplant surgeon, heading a team of brilliant yet flawed health care providers.

Among high-tech viewscreens and sumptuously jewel-toned sets, doctors complain about having to computerize everything. At nearly that moment, a nearby hospital enters a heart on the donor list. A pregnant woman with an unusual blood type could be saved! But only if the transplant team can wrestle the heart away from a family whose patriarch -- while brain dead -- is still using it.

The rookie surgeon on the team pleads with the grieving daughter -- “We have a woman who needs that heart!” He is smacked down by his associate -- “It has to be a gift.” And the daughter got all suspicious that no one tried to save her father so that his organs could be harvested.

O’Loughlin played a vampire in his last CBS production and focused as he is on saving lives, it’s hard to ignore that yes, transplanting an organ into one patient means first yanking it out of someone else who might still be using it.

And while overall I’m not pleased with this show I should highlight the things I think it’s doing correctly. In the opening scenes, the camera spends a few minutes with the donor in the last moments of their lives. This has a grim quality to it -- one grimly anticipates the inevitable tragedy, and in that way it’s a little like HBO’s “Six Feet Under.”

But it avoids the structural problem of Alex as Dr. Andy Yablonski, organ transplant surgeon, hovering over the sympathetic transplant recipients just waiting for some anonymous spare part. The donors had lives, too, and  in giving the gift of their life, you get a deeper story of promise fulfilled or lives redeemed.

By precisely that same token, the show can easily get a little fatuous, glowing amber lighting effects and maudlin strings as the transplant is completed and the hesitant EKG monitor stubbornly refuses to record any activity and then -- because this is what nearly always happens these days -- it beeps! Once, at first, and then more steadily as lives are saved, or concerned violins tell us there’s nothing to be done. Oh, what a tragedy.

In the case of the series premiere, the woman lived, as did her premature baby, and there was no fussing about organ rejection or the long, painful recuperative process or any of that. It was magical!

This show could use a medical consult or two.

‘Trauma’

As for the team in NBC’s “Trauma,” airing Mondays at 8 p.m., the hotshot emergency medical responders are as screwed up as their patients.

One EMT, fresh from combat, deals better with sick cars than sick people but she’s an adrenaline junkie. Rabbit and Tyler are raw dedication and demand the best of themselves and others in the field, haunted by past disasters. Nancy is a doctor who chose to become a paramedic and her dad is none too pleased about this, and Glenn, the probie, is young and full of idealistic notions about this thing called life.

The show itself is as random as anything. In the epi-sode I saw, someone hits their head, someone is faking an emergency to get the painkillers, there’s a gang-related shooting of some sort, and a car plows through a downtown street fair leaving mayhem in its wake.

It’s a busy day for the EMTs in the City by the Bay, but while there’s an  attempt to develop some characters among these hot actors and actresses, there’s no narrative thread.

This show is the ideal show for people who just want to see injuries, explosions and disasters. It claims to celebrate the people who swoop in to save the day and save our lives, but at the same time it confines them to trite caricature.

I suppose there could be an episode of “Trauma” that spends the entire day with these characters on their day off, and in which the most bone-jarring thing that happens is someone has to figure out how to balance child-support and further demands from their ex or to have a breakthrough about her daddy issues, but I doubt it. The show is called “Trauma” because this is the only aspect of these people we’re prepared to care about.