‘NY Med’ a strong dose of real hospital drama
IT’S MORE like a shot of adrenaline than a reality show.
After nearly two years in production, the latest season of ABC’s “NY Med” (Thursday, 10 p.m.) hits the air and it’s a high-octane roller-coaster ride through some of the New York area’s most intense emergency rooms, surgeries and whiteknuckled medical jams .
“There are certain things that t you just never see,” says executive e producer Terry Wrong. W “But somehow we were w there with cameras when these t things happened.”
Among the ripped-fromthe-headlines t moments is one from f the first episode, when a man m suffers a deadly tear of his aorta a — while chatting in the ER with w famed heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet M Oz at New York-Presbyterian b Hospital. Or there’s the pilot who survives a smallplane crash and is brought to Newark’s University Hospital.
“This guy says, ‘We were at 10,000 feet and we fell out of the sky and my co-pilot was killed,’” says Wrong. “In the normal scheme of things, you might hear that four days later when the guy emerges from the hospital in a wheelchair and has a press conference — but you don’t usually hear something like that in the moment.”
A more shocking case follows a couple who are the victims of a home invasion in which the wife was sexually assualted.
The couple asked Wrong and his producers to keep their cameras rolling even as the crime’s horrific details emerged, because there was a chance their situation could help others down the road.
“NY Med” is riveting and unique in many other ways.
While the show airs in a prime-time slot on a major network, it’s produced with a fraction of the budget of the programming it competes with and is a rare network program where producers are given as much time as they need to follow good story lines to their conclusion — even if it takes more than a year.
“To be given this much time to work on a project is unheard of,” says Wrong. “It’s amazing and appreciated that they give us this kind of freedom.”