"'Chicago Hope': Faltering Drama, Heal Thyself" By JAMES STERNGOLD August 25, 1999 LOS ANGELES -- If the producers of the loopy comedy "South Park" were to make a medical drama, it might go something like this: An attractive female surgeon, heading to work on her first day at a major hospital, cheerfully asks a woman on the street for directions but is warned: "Oh, I wouldn't go there. They'll kill you there!" Then the hospital's new president jogs into a staff meeting and, in a scene that takes precisely 25 seconds, fires most of the doctors. When they go to court to get their jobs back, the judge angrily instructs their lawyer to tell his clients he's a toad, then corrects himself, "a big toad." Oh, and the nine-hour operation to remove an inoperable brain tumor from a 9-week-old baby is a success. This is not "South Park." It is "Chicago Hope," or rather, the new "Chicago Hope." That was the plot line of the last episode of the spring, and it was, to put it mildly, a harbinger of changes to come in the direction of a fairly traditional and slowly dying one-hour drama that CBS is attempting to resurrect from last year's ratings slump. It is a highly unusual gamble, not unlike operating on an inoperable tumor. Prime-time television series are tinkered with all the time. This fall, for instance, the British comic Eric Idle, a "Monty Python" alumnus, is joining the cast of "Suddenly Susan," Heather Locklear is coming to "Spin City," and "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place" is being renamed "Two Guys" and moved out of its pizza parlor. But executives at CBS and the 20th-Century Fox studio, which produces "Chicago Hope," said that to the best of their recollection no major prime-time drama had been reinvented so suddenly. "Chicago Hope" is, in effect, being hit with a triple heart bypass, electroshock therapy, multiple organ transplants and a fashion makeover, in the form of new producers, a new writing staff, the replacement of nearly half the cast -- among the incoming actors are Barbara Hershey, Mandy Patinkin (who was on the show in its first couple of seasons), Carla Gugino and Lauren Holly -- and a new time slot, not to mention new opening titles and new theme music. These are desperate times in network television, with audiences and profits dwindling rapidly. The show's radical overhaul reflects the depth of the anxieties rippling through the industry. None of the major networks, CBS included, have produced a hit one-hour drama recently. (The most Emmy nominations for a drama this year were for "The Sopranos," which is on HBO, a cable channel.) But in CBS's view "Chicago Hope" has a few strong points that make the experiment worthwhile. The size of the show's audience has tumbled from a peak of an 11.9 rating and a 20 share in 1995-96 to a 7.5 rating and 13 share last season, according to Nielsen Media Research. (Each rating point represented 994,000 homes last season; share is the percentage of homes watching television tuned to that show.) But "Chicago Hope" has been on the air since the fall of 1994, and it is already being rerun on the Lifetime channel. Thus there is high name recognition and at least a modest base of viewer interest to build on, rather than starting from scratch in a glutted market in which new shows have been doing poorly. Perhaps more important, "Chicago Hope" has a star who is assuming a more active role: no, not one of the doctors in scrubs, but the show's creator, David E. Kelley, who is the hottest writer and producer in television. After Kelley started "Chicago Hope" in 1994 he moved on, as is common, and created his current successes, "Ally McBeal" and "The Practice." This fall he has two new shows, an edited-down half-hour version of the one-hour "Ally," and a show about private detectives, "Snoops." Seeing signs that "Chicago Hope" was headed toward cancellation, Kelley approached people at CBS early last spring and said he would become a hands-on producer again if they would give the show another chance. The network was initially lukewarm but finally agreed. The situation reflected another reality of network television: producers can earn much more money creating new shows than sticking with old ones. As an executive producer, a veteran can earn $1 million or so a year, but a producer who creates a new show that catches on can earn tens of millions of dollars, not to mention a multimillion-dollar deal with a studio to create more shows. The two executive producers who had run "Chicago Hope" for several seasons, John Tinker and Bill D'Elia, said they had begun to pull back from day-to-day involvement in the series last season because they wanted to concentrate on developing new shows. They said they were not unhappy about being replaced as executive producers this year, because it allowed them to put all their efforts into the three ideas they were pitching the networks. "The show needed some major changes, and we realized we weren't the guys to do that again," said D'Elia. "We had our development deal, and that was what John and I wanted to focus on." Kelley made the changes as he swept back in from the other shows he had developed. He wrote the jolting season-ending episode as well as a rather unconventional opening episode for this fall in which a Roman Catholic priest's sex organ is bitten off during a robbery then surgically reattached, and an elderly man dies in the recovery room after liposuction while his surgeon trades stocks on the Internet. Naturally the doctors also perform a near-miracle in saving a boy on the operating table whose damaged heart is spewing blood. "By design I wanted to send a wake-up call that the show will be very different," Kelley said. He is not planning to produce more scripts himself, he added, but will supervise the writing and offer suggestions on future scripts, giving "Chicago Hope" his continuing creative imprimatur, a major incentive for the network. "Perhaps the most important thing is his involvement," Leslie Moonves, the president of CBS Television, said of Kelley's new role. "I'm aware he has a lot on his plate. But it's a little bit of a promotional thing. If a talent like David Kelley comes in and pitches you a hospital show, how do you say no?" Sandy Grushow, the president of 20th-Century Fox Television, put it more directly: "If David Kelley were not in the mix and had not pledged to do what he said he would do, this wouldn't have happened." Even so, CBS has very modest expectations for the show. Moonves made it clear that he was hoping for, at best, a slight jump in "Chicago Hope's" share of the market. In other words, the networks, with the sharp declines in their share of the viewing audience, rarely expect the kind of 20- and 30-share hits that used to be common. They are now delighted with what in football terms would be called "three yards and a cloud of dust." "I'm not looking for a turnaround," Moonves said. "We specifically put it in a place where a 14 share will be good, very good. Our expectations are not big. With a point or two increase in share, we look great." He added, "It's a new era." The show is also going against a powerful trend of vying for a young audience, generally the 18-to-34-year-old age group. None of the changes this season are expected to focus on that fickle audience, and the show's new time slot -- Thursday nights at 9, starting on Sept. 23 -- puts it opposite NBC's blockbuster evening of sitcoms, which attract young, largely male viewers. "Part of our mandate is to attract more older viewers," said Henry Bromell, one of the new executive producers for "Chicago Hope" and the head of its writing team. The show has been star-crossed from its first broadcast, on Sept. 18, 1994. It was scheduled that fall on Thursday nights opposite another medical show, NBC's "E.R." That was unfortunate because "ER" went on to become one of the most celebrated and successful dramas on television, leaving "Chicago Hope" deep in its shadow. It then began a hapless peregrination around the CBS schedule. At one point it found what seemed a solid home on Monday nights but was bumped for a new drama, "Brooklyn South," in 1997. When that show failed, another new drama, "L.A. Doctors," took the Monday slot, leaving "Chicago Hope" on Wednesdays with no strong show in front of it to bring in an audience. Meanwhile the show's plot lines began to drift in odd directions. "Chicago Hope" had been conceived as a story of a hospital: the last, best hope, in the words of Kelley. The focus was intended to be the frontiers of medicine. But over the past couple of seasons the doctors themselves and their tangled personal lives took center stage. Dr. Kate Austin, played by Christine Lahti, wanted to become an astronaut until she damaged her knee in an accident. Dr. Dennis Hancock (Vondie Curtis-Hall) became a social activist and a politician. Dr. Billy Kronk (Peter Berg) went to Africa to do research. "It was almost bordering on a soap opera," said Michael Pressman, who directed the pilot episode in 1994 and has been brought back as one of the executive producers. All three of those characters, and a few others, were summarily let go in last spring's bloodletting, and Kelley said the show was careering back essentially to what it had been originally. While "Chicago Hope" will still seek to create compelling characters and stories, "my focus is on the field of medicine," said Kelley. "The hospital will be the biggest character on the show." Bromell said the doctors would rarely be seen out of their scrubs. "I want to see these characters only as they manifest themselves at work," he said. "The more you separate these characters from the workplace, the less interesting they become, not more." Patinkin played the brilliant, abrasively egotistical Dr. Jeffrey Geiger in the first several seasons before leaving to focus on his family and singing career. Dr. Geiger is now the hospital's president, the one who fired most of the old staff in last season's closer, but Patinkin said he would never have considered coming back were it not for Kelley's personal intervention. "He said he wanted to bring back the ensemble feeling to the show," Patinkin said. "Our old show got swept away. I feel like we're getting back to where it was before that happened." Some of the remaining actors said they suffered from survivor's guilt, as Adam Arkin, who plays the warmhearted Dr. Aaron Shutt, put it. Hector Elizondo, who plays the hospital's chief of staff, Dr. Phillip Watters, said he even considered quitting. But on a recent afternoon the team was on the set, bantering comfortably between shots and, Elizondo said, taking some comfort in the fact that at least the crew was the same. "This is not a secure moment," said Pressman. "It's a complete unknown how this show will do."

Thanks to Joanne Cochran

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