Stop me if you’ve seen this one before… too late

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/06/2011 (5577 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last year, Global achieved a middling sort of success with its homegrown drama Rookie Blue, which was picked up by ABC as a summer fill-in during TV’s fallow months.

Its airing in the U.S. prompted the Canadian network to trumpet this shade of cop-show Blue as a singular success, despite the fact ABC had no interest in continuing to carry the Canuck production during the ultra-competitive fall-to-spring regular season.

Despite being an average-at-best drama filled with stock characters and predictable storylines, Rookie Blue was considered such a winner that Global not only decided to make another season of it, they also decided to make another version of it.

That’s why next week includes the premières of two Canadian-made Global dramas — Combat Hospital and Rookie Blue — both of which are being simulcast in the U.S. on ABC.

Combat Hospital is essentially to wartime medical dramas what Rookie Blue is to cop shows — a tale of young, ambitious and initially overwhelmed newcomers trying to make their way in a very difficult environment.

In Combat Hospital, the setting is Kandahar, circa 2006, in the only military hospital providing advanced surgical care to the international forces fighting in southern Afghanistan. As the series opens, two newcomers — Canadian surgeon Maj. Rebecca Gordon (Michelle Borth) and American trauma-team leader Capt. Bobby Trang (Terry Chen) — have just arrived in-country and are shuffling about in the dusty heat, looking for their commanding officer.

Of course, there’s little time for confused wandering — faster than Radar O’Reilly could yell, “Chopper!” the newbies are herded into the camp’s OR, where an officious nurse hands them a couple of mops and orders them to clean the bloody floor.

Before things get too custodial, however, their actual boss, head surgeon Col. Xavier Marks (Elias Koteas), introduces himself and orders them to drop the mops and change into scrubs. With more casualties coming in from the field, every hand capable of grasping a scalpel is needed.

What follows is a chaotic but completely predictable series of MD-drama events, in which one rookie’s confidence is shaken while another’s overzealous behaviour results in a humbling reprimand, one patient is saved by a surgeon’s bold move and another dies unexpectedly despite the doctors’ best efforts.

And of course, as all such dramas must, this one has an irascible, brilliant, cocky Brit (Luke Mably) on staff who’s eager to add the winsome new lady doctor to his list of conquests.

Like Rookie Blue did in its first set of episodes, Combat Hospital shows little inclination to stretch beyond the basics of its genre — the crises are familiar, the solutions are standard, and all the running about that takes place on the way from the former to the latter looks like it could easily have been lifted from an old episode of M*A*S*H (if that show had been shot on location in the wilds of Toronto).

In other words, it’s very ordinary. Which, combined with the fact it’s being shown as a low-budget summer filler on a U.S. network, should guarantee a declaration from Global next week that Combat Hospital is a huge homegrown hit.

— — —

Rookie Blue returns for its sophomore season next Thursday, and it’s pretty much business as usual.

Seven months into their police careers, the titular rookies — led by Andy McNally (Missy Peregrym), Dov Epstein (Gregory Smith), Gail Peck (Charlotte Sullivan) and Traci Nash (Enuka Okuma) — have gained enough experience to feel confident on the job, but clearly still have lots to learn.

The season opener finds the newcomers of 15 Division assigned to keep the peace at a crowded downtown concert venue. At first, it’s about checking wristbands and ushering away inebriated troublemakers, but then… gunfire. A college kid is talking to Andy one moment and lying on the ground with a bullet in her head the next.

The unfolding storyline shows evidence of slight maturation on the part of the rookie cops but not much evolution in the show’s scripts. Rookie Blue remains a thin oversimplification in a genre whose best offerings are complex, layered and dark.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

 

TV PREVIEW

Combat Hospital

Starring Elias Koteas, Michelle Borth, Terry Chen, Luke Mably and Arnold Pinnock

Tuesdays

Global and ABC

 

Rookie Blue

Starring Missy Peregrym, Gregory Smith, Travis Milne, Enuka Okuma and Charlotte Sullivan

June 23

Global and ABC