"No Hope for most of show's doctors " USA Today, May 19, 1999 by J. Graham MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. - David E. Kelley faced a life-or-death decision about his ailing drama, Chicago Hope. He created the series but left as executive producer during the second season to focus on his new shows, ABC's The Practice and Fox's Ally McBeal along the way. In his absence, Hope got sick. CBS said it would cancel the show unless Kelley did something drastic. So he returned to write Wednesday night's fifth-season finale. The episode sets up a new direction for Hope next season, as half the hospital staff is fired to make way for new doctors. "I agreed to be a more active consultant next year in exchange for another year of life," Kelley says in an interview at his production office. "I felt there is so much more left in the show." Mandy Patinkin, who quit Hope after a season of playing high-strung Dr. Jeffrey Geiger, saying the demands of series television cut into his time with his family, returns in a more active role. (He has made guest appearances.) Geiger is named the chairman of the hospital board Wednesday night and fires doctors right and left. Given their walking papers are Christine Lahti (Austin), Peter Berg (Kronk) Eric Stoltz (Yeats), Vondie Curtis-Hall (Hancock) and Stacy Edwards (Catera). Jayne Brook's Dr. Grad quits in protest. Only Hector Elizondo (Watters) himself and Adam Arkin (Shutt), cast members since the start, and later additions Mark Harmon (McNeil) and Rocky Carroll (Wilkes) survive the purge. Patinkin will be seen in 13 of next season's 22 episodes. Two other doctors, played by Carla Gugino and Natasha Gregson Wagner, are introduced Wednesday night. "The show needed to be changed," Kelley says. "Choosing which actors had to go was not easy, and very arbitrary. But when corporations are taken over with a mandate for a change, people are fired for no good reason, and I had to follow that line of thinking." Kelley wrote Hope's entire first season while writing all of CBS' Picket Fences. Feeling exhausted in Year 2, he handed the show over to executive producer John Tinker and later Bill D'Elia. In the years since, he hasn't read scripts or even watched episodes before they aired. But for next season, he'll write Hope's season-opener, and he promises to be more involved as a creative consultant, offering input on scripts. He has hired Michael Pressman (Picket Fences) as the executive producer; Tinker and D'Elia have left to develop a drama for CBS. For The Practice, Kelley has something he never had before: a writing staff, though he still wrote 17 episodes this season. He wrote all of Ally's season "because the show is so idiosyncratic. It's still easier for me to write it than to describe it." He also wrote the pilot episode for Snoops, an ABC series for the fall about private detectives in Los Angeles. Kelley isn't worried about being stretched too thin (though he acknowledges a large callus on his thumb from so much writing) and says his workday ends at 6 p.m., in time to have dinner with his actress wife, Michelle Pfeiffer, and their two children, Claudia Rose and John Henry. With two movies planned for release this year, Kelley says he won't be writing films during his summer hiatus. Lake Placid, about a man-eating alligator, stars Bridget Fonda and Bill Pullman, and Mystery, Alaska, with Burt Reynolds, follows an amateur hockey team that winds up playing the New York Rangers on national television.

Navigation Menu