It’s health-care option week again here at the company, and each employee has to pick one of two hospitals as his primary-care facility.
Lucky for us, they’ve both prepared helpful videotapes.
University Hospital is a brand-new operation run by Aaron Spelling, the same gentleman who guides the rather unhealthy Melrose Place apartment complex. You can see its first-ever tape at 8 p.m. Sunday on WPWR-Ch. 50.
Chicago Hope has been treating patients since September, but since January its videotape has been available at a new time, Monday nights at 9 p.m. on WBBM-Ch. 2.
University Hospital is bright and very clean, perhaps because the practice of medicine is kept to a minimum. The tape focuses on four attractive female student nurses: an innocent, a sexual predator, a professional and a woman with a painful past. We watch them in the sumptuous apartment they use as a set piece to model small garments (I kept watching for an 800 number so I could call to order some things), and we trail along on their questing for hunky boys.
The hospital fits in their lives mostly as a place to meet hunky boys who happen to wear stethoscopes and as a prompt for jokes about enemas.
The only doctor whose name we learn turns out to be worse than a cad, asking out one of the quartet almost upon meeting her, then turning their date hellish. But-heh, heh-boy, does he get his.
A fifth student nurse is a pill popper whose cravings generate “Oh-that-Debra” smiles in her peers. It reminded me of the way people reacted to the habitual drunkenness of Nick and Nora Charles in the old “The Thin Man” movies. It would be nice to imagine that medical professionals are a little more concerned about drug abusers in their midst.
Two of the central student nurses attempt to treat a man who-viewers know instantly-is a hypochondriac. That they have so much to learn is not reassuring.
And when one of them says, “Maybe I should become an actress instead of a nurse,” it made me wonder about their dedication to medicine, not to mention whether I was watching something other than what it pretended to be. But the glossy script and synthesizer-lite music made it clear this could be nothing other than a corporate videotape-fun on its own unambitious terms.
The first thing you notice about Chicago Hope Hospital is that somebody ought to spring for a few light bulbs. Every scene seems to take place in shadows. Perhaps the dimness is meant to suggest serious doctoring happens here, but it makes me wonder if they don’t spend a lot of time treating stubbed toes and removing kidneys when they are aiming for appendixes.
The doctors are the focus here, and they devote a fair amount of their energy to actually cutting into patients. They also spend valuable minutes discussing things like marital and tax woes.
I’ve seen a number of Chicago Hope tapes-they recruit hard. While the literateness of the conversations, and the conviction with which they are conducted, make the tapes engrossing, I’m not sure this is the best place to be treated.
The building itself is in trouble-windows recently started popping out-and, until his dramatic heart attack, an elderly surgeon was being allowed to operate on patients past his physical competency. The head nurse dropped a heart. And the hospital attorney helps a teenage patient with her labor pains, to the point of showering with her, which is probably not ethical for doctors but may be OK for lawyers.
It reminds me, in a positive way, of the hectic hospital I used to go to back in the 1980s, the one nicknamed St. Elsewhere. It certainly comes across as more complex than that other hospital that’s advertising a lot now, the one with the busy emergency room.
What I like about Chicago Hope is that even when situations veer into the unbelievable, the doctors don’t. They bicker with each other. They have egos and ids along with professional dedication. One of them, who looks an awful lot like that Mandy Patinkin who sings so loud in all the musicals, is even sort of a jerk.
I suppose I’ll go with Chicago and hope nobody fumbles my vital organs. But on weekends, you’ll find me now and then at that dance club where the University Hospital nurses hang out, the one where the predator nurse can “smell the hormones.”
This whole health-care decision is probably only temporary, anyway. Within a year, I’m sure the company will have cut us back to something truly ridiculous, like reducing our first line of medical care to call-in phone services or television programs.
