On Thursday nights this summer, CBS has been airing "Swingtown" and NBC has been pushing a horror show called "Fear Itself." Both are scripted network dramas. Both have gotten a fair amount of ink.
And both shows are getting whupped in the ratings by a documentary series on ABC.
That show is "Hopkins" (10 p.m. ET), the second coming of a real-life medical drama filmed at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore. The show last aired eight years ago on ABC, when it was titled "Hopkins 24/7."
"Three years ago I proposed that we go and do 'Hopkins' again," said Terence Wrong, the show's executive producer. "A lot of things had changed at the hospital. Seven years ago I was told that women didn't have the stamina to do surgery. And the chief of surgery who told me that was subsequently replaced by a woman."
A lot of things changed on the TV landscape as well. Wrong, a documentary student of the old school, is a fan of the "cinema verite" style that uses no narration. Since "Hopkins 24/7" aired in 2000, that style has been co-opted — he calls it "the theft of cinema verite" — by reality TV. Shows like "The Hills" trick their viewers, he says, "into thinking that what they're watching is real documentary when (in fact) it's choreographed and directed and the only thing that is improvised is dialogue."
When I point out that all documentary film is edited, and therefore to some degree, "choreographed and directed," Wrong responds by pretending to direct me in a scene from a modern-day reality show. "OK, Aaron, I know this conflict you're having with your girlfriend. You're going to break up with her on the roof deck tonight in front of the nine VeriCams and the mics we're positioning in the flowerpots. And make sure your buddy is there so you can download to him. And don't download to him out by the railing, go over by the bathroom where we have another camera."
OK, point taken.
It took ABC's entertainment executives a while to figure out that "Hopkins" would make a nice companion piece to reruns of "Grey's Anatomy." But I doubt they thought "Hopkins" would improve its ratings by 65 percent over its "Grey's" lead-in, or that its young-adult audience would build throughout the hour to more than double that of "Grey's." But that's what it did last week. (And this week, CBS announced it would be moving "Swingtown" to Friday, out of harm's and "Hopkins" way.)
Wrong says "Hopkins" is succeeding because he essentially took up the challenge of the reality shows to make his series as entertaining as theirs, even though he couldn't order doctors around the way reality producers order around their "TMZ" bait.
"I believe that people overdosed on reality shows and were ready for some real life-and-death documentaries," he says. "And the thing about 'Hopkins' is -- it really is life-and-death! They are not wannabe actors who left the beach in Santa Monica to be on that show."
Wrong says "Hopkins" was two years from start to finish. He spent months "casting" the show, identifying the doctors who would be ideal to put on camera and re-familiarizing himself with the Hopkins environment. Then his crew — six young photographers, "young, lean, who want to be documentary filmmakers" -- spent much of 2007 shooting. Eleven months of editing later, and "Hopkins" was a reality, so to speak.
Last week's episode was a fast-paced tour of several medical storylines mixed in with glimpses into the lives of the doctors at Johns Hopkins, from overwhelmed students to seasoned vets.
A third-year medical student from India, Sneha Dehai, describes with great relish getting to drain an abcess from a patient's head her first day on the job -- "that was real cool, he had this huge red abcess" -- and counsels a first-year student, "You don't stop what you're doing just because the patient screams in pain," then laughs.
The mood gets heavier, as one surgeon removes a brain tumor from a boy, while another treats an 8-year-old who's missing the soft tissue in his jaw.
Meanwhile, back at the ER, Dr. Michael Londner is briskly working through a wide variety of human hurts -- "Is this the jumped-out-the-window person? What's up with that?" "What's the handcuffs for?" "Did you take any alcohol or drugs tonight?" -- stopping only to quiz the med students that surround him at this inner-city teaching hospital.
"People who think they understand how to practice medicine should understand one thing: that they clearly don't," Londner says. "Any monkey can be taught to put a stitch in. But not any monkey can be taught when to put a stitch in and when not to."
I'll spare you a description of the video that accompanies this quote, except to say you may want to think twice before watching "Hopkins" in HD.
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