Bad medicine.

• Author: Rapping, Elayne
• Position: Television programs set in hospitals

After two decades of neglect, the hospital-based medical series is suddenly the hottest genre on the tube. NBC's ER, set in an emergency room in a Chicago hospital, has been topping the charts for months. And CBS's Chicago Hope, also set in a Chicago hospital, while not yet doing as well as its racier competition, is gradually picking up, too.

Like the failed Clinton health-care package, both these shows reek of the humanistic, caring, "I-feel-your-pain" cliches that Clinton and company love to wallow in.

Both offer up images of universal, personalized, easily accessed health care for the masses. But both, beneath their slick and schmaltz surfaces, turn out to be a hodgepodge of heart-warming platitudes covering over the less romantic truths about how, and in whose interests, our health-care system really operates.

Since at least 1976--the year both Marcus Welby, M.D. and Medical Center got canceled--it has been harder and harder to sell the idea of doctors as altruistic, compassionate out-to-save-lives-at-any-expense martyrs and healers. Most of us, after all, haven't seen that kind of "family doctor" in many a moon. Indeed, too many of us haven't seen much in the way of health care at all. And when we do, we've hardly found it personalized, accessible, or even reliable. But the networks dusted off the old genre, anyway. The dominant issues, diseases, and especially the technologies are different, of course. The contemporary issues of urban chaos and violence, of social and family disintegration are now present as backdrop. But the "men in white" (still mostly white men) are as dedicated, self-sacrificing, and compassionate as old Dr. Welby.

The styles, however, especially ER's, are different. Style probably accounts for ER's higher ratings. Chicago Hope, while clearly more thoughtful and dramatically developed, has a dated feel. Its propensity to delve more deeply into ethical and social issues may well be its problem. It's hard to like or believe in the show's Godlike heroes, who make life and death decisions and put the world to rights, week after week, by virtue of their brilliance and integrity.

They are arrogant, self-centered, and self-righteous.

Nor does the cultural ambience of the show quite make it. The aging yuppie doctors of Hope perform surgery to the sounds of country-and-western radio, and the head surgeon, played by Mandy Patinken, even sings, at any plausible opportunity, the Broadway tunes of his musical-comedy days. Small wonder this slow-paced, ponderous, vaguely retro style doesn't work for the MTV crowd.

Another problem for Chicago Hope is its grandiose idealization of the high-tech, big-budget hospital, and its Rolls-Royce-driving medical elite. The series blithely assumes--to the AMA's great joy, no doubt--that the top-heavy allocation of economic and medical resources portrayed here is justified because, as the heroes tell each other ad nauseam, "We are the...