Since Chicago Hope got stomped by ER early on in the season, CBS has done everything for it but hold a bake sale. They’ve run episodes all over the program grid, as though they were giving away free samples; now they’ve shouldered aside Northern Exposure (granted, a show long overdue for the phasers) just so Chicago Hope can bask in a sunnier time slot. If you called them up and told them you were going to be out Monday night, they’d have a truck over at your house inside of an hour to help you set your VCR.
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The setting is the world’s greatest hospital, which happens to be located somewhere in Chicago — I don’t know where, but I’m positive it’s not affiliated with my HMO. Our two heroes are the world’s greatest heart surgeon (Mandy Patinkin) and the world’s greatest brain surgeon (Adam Arkin). One wholly typical episode went as follows. Patinkin, like all true superheroes, has a secret sorrow: his beloved wife is in a mental hospital. He learns of a fantastically risky new form of lobotomy that may restore her to sanity. Arkin, who is Patinkin’s best friend, volunteers to perform the procedure–shrugging off any silly qualms about a surgeon taking on a case in which he’s personally involved. Then comes the plot twist: the wife has acquired a new boyfriend in the hospital. This fellow patient just happens to be a brilliant attorney–I don’t think this was supposed to be a joke, but read on–and he files suit to stop the operation.
I’ve rarely seen anything on TV more self-defeating than that grotesque swerve from melodrama to vaudeville and back again. After the whole Red Sox issue was mooted, it was impossible to take the rest of the episode as anything other than a joke, and it retrospectively trashed the fierce and somber sincerity the actors had succeeded in building up before then. But what was most strange about it was that it was so typical. It’s the way Chicago Hope tells every story: a deeply dramatic buildup, a freakishly unlikely joke, and a pretense of poignancy at the end. One week a soap-opera plot about a rabbi needing a heart transplant suddenly turned into a splatter version of the Three Stooges when the new heart was accidentally drop-kicked behind the refrigerator; another week the hospital psychiatrist persuaded the head nurse to dress up as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz to reach a particularly disturbed patient. Surely, you say to yourself, that has to be this week’s comic subplot. But then what do you make of what followed: the governing board threatening to fire the shrink for this stupid stunt, the shrink making a speech of Socratic passion before his accusers, the patient cured, and the shrink fired?
The trick is an underlying conservatism: beneath the warp-speed approach to story, the scripts consist wholly of ancient TV cliches, and the only demand made by them is simple pattern recognition. Just like Chicago Hope, they’ve made a big deal out of the hero’s unhappy marriage. But not for them any slow, brooding melancholy suggestive of Jane Eyre; their version was like a perfume commercial edited by Subliminal Man. The nerdy hero, played by Anthony Edwards, has somehow married a fabulously chic babe who looks like she’s straying in from Red Shoe Diaries–and, oddly enough, she’s only listed in the credits as a guest star. If that doesn’t spell out Trouble Ahead, you’re just not cut out to watch TV. One week he’s offered the job he most wants in the world: attending physician in the ER. “I had a good day today,” he says to her later that episode–and right then his good day and his marriage are over. It’s like the scene in any detective show when the friend calls up to say he’s solved the murder, but can’t go into it over the phone: even the dullest viewer knows the man has just signed his own death warrant.
This is what I find most depressing about the duel between Chicago Hope and ER. The hospital in Chicago Hope is rich, well staffed, and free to do whatever it chooses in order to solve the problems that confront it; the hospital in ER is overloaded, understaffed, and barely able to do triage on the unending, incomprehensible crises flooding through its doors. Guess which image of our society America is currently most comfortable watching. Evidently it’s easy to view contemporary life the way ER does: as the implacable expression on a black child’s face as he points a gun at somebody else. There’s nothing more to be said about it, nothing to be understood, nothing to be done–and anyway we’re already late getting on to the hopeless case in the next stretcher. Wallace Stevens 50 years ago called the conviction that you will someday understand the world “the last nostalgia.” The incoherent failure of Chicago Hope, and the surging success of ER, tells us that America is no longer in a nostalgic mood.
