‘Grey’s Anatomy’ meets ‘Ghost’ in mawkish Canadian import
You sit down to check out a TV show imported from Canada called “Saving Hope” and right away, you know it’s probably a dramatic series because it opens with footage of a city at night. Many shows open this way and most are dramas, thanks to Dick Wolf’s “Law & Order: SVU.” Some sitcoms open with urban aerial shots at night — “Friends” did, for example — but more often than not, dramas like to tell you there are a lot of stories in big cities and most are no laughing matter. Shows set in small towns open with scenery, because aerial shots of small towns at night wouldn’t communicate much. That’s why “The Middle” opens with corn, for example.
Soon enough, you realize that “Saving Hope” isn’t even a sitcom, much less anything like Fox’s “Raising Hope.” Instead, it’s about otherworldly things. You know this because the camera lens is greased up like an Easter ham so streaks of light regularly cross your screen and make you think your glasses need cleaning. Later, you try
not to think about why the EKG monitor next to the comatose patient is gleaming like the gates of heaven itself.
NBC, the network that just canceled the smart otherworldly show “Awake,” has imported the series set in a hospital called Hope Zion, premiering Thursday night. They could have called the show “Saving Zion,” but that probably wouldn’t fall quite so trippingly from the tongue.
The show is about young doctors in love, specifically chief of surgery Charlie Harris (Michael Shanks) and his fiancee, surgeon Alex Reid (Erica Durance). On their way to get hitched after a long day in the OR, the couple’s taxi gets broadsided and Charlie winds up in a coma.
Charlie’s spirit is now free to wander around the hospital where he routinely runs into spirits of patients who are completely dead while Alex and some other doctors, including her sexy-exie Joel Goran (Daniel Gillies), try to keep Charlie’s actual body alive. None of the spirits Charlie runs into seem to mind that he’s wearing a tuxedo, proving that, if nothing else, death apparently makes one indifferent to fashion. Plus, you don’t have to worry about copays anymore.
By the second episode, Charlie’s ex-wife shows up and, after an icy hug with Alex, complains that no one has considered coma arousal therapy, which involves intense sensual stimulation including giving old Charlie a helping hand, as it were. Anyway, if you’re keeping score, we have Charlie in a vegetative state, his ex-wife descending on a metaphorical broomstick, while Alex is left entirely on this mortal coil to cope with Charlie’s coma and the presence of her scruffy ex-boyfriend on the surgical staff. Wow. What a tinderbox of sexual tension. And that doesn’t even include the young resident who insists she doesn’t have a crush on Joel but would happily do him. In surgery to remove a patient’s spleen, suction is called for at one point and she turns to Joel and says, “That’s what SHE said.”
“Saving Hope” is kind of a lukewarm stew of ideas from other shows (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Touched by an Angel,” the finally out of its misery “A Gifted Man”) and films (“Ghost,” “The Sixth Sense”) with stock characters and situations that occasionally jerk a demi-tear or two, but with absolutely no authenticity. The sloppy sentimentality is cheap and unearned, greasy camera lenses notwithstanding. The flash may be willing, but the spirits are pretty weak.
I see dead series.