‘Hopkins’ a ray of light shining through dreary reality rollout

It seems like another case of somebody being asleep at the wheel. Like whoever's in charge of managing Hulk Hogan's family. Or pretty much everybody at Fox News. (Seriously, baby mamas and terrorist fist jabs? At this rate, there's a better-than-average chance that by November, one of the channel's personality-free robo-blondes will do a segment in blackface.)

How else can you explain something as classy and compelling as "Hopkins" (10 p.m. Thursday, KTNV-TV, Channel 13) being swept up in this week's massive, otherwise lowest-common-denominator reality rollout by ABC?

To get a sense of just how out of place this uplifting, six-part look inside Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital is, consider it's being launched the same week as the network's:

• "Wipeout" (8 p.m. Tuesday), which promises "wildly hilarious obstacle courses" and challenges such as the "Dirty Balls."

• "I Survived a Japanese Game Show" (9 p.m. Tuesday), which will send 10 Americans to Japan to compete in games such as "Chicken Butt Scramble."

• "Dance Machine" (8 p.m. Friday), which asks you to "imagine a 70-year-old grandmother in a dance-off with a 25-year-old gravedigger to the tune of Michael Jackson's 'Thriller.' "

That ABC News was able to get time in the middle of all that ridiculousness to present an intimate look at the state of surgery today is nothing short of a miracle.

The documentary series -- whenever "The Brady Bunch's" Christopher Knight setting his crotch on fire on NBC's "Celebrity Circus" is considered "reality," that term pretty much loses all meaning -- is a sequel of sorts to 2000's "Hopkins 24/7."

Culled from nearly 1,500 hours of footage, "Hopkins" not only follows the doctors as they save or improve countless lives, but as they play hooky, worry about gossip and hit the bars to unwind.

Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa is among the "Hopkins" standouts. Two decades ago, he entered the country illegally from Mexico. Today, the Harvard-trained former migrant worker is one of the nation's top neurosurgeons. And Lou Dobbs' worst nightmare.

Ann Czarnik, the cute emergency medicine resident from West Virginia who's appalled by the "social nightmare" of Baltimore, ruins the backbone of most medical dramas by saying there's really no romance at work.

And Brian Bethea, the golden boy cardiothoracic surgery resident, tearfully realizes his 13-year marriage to his childhood sweetheart may be over.

But the most entertaining moments belong to urologist Karen Boyle.

She's introduced while giving an older patient the old "turn your head and cough" before bending him over a table for a prostate exam. When he seems a little shaken that his new urologist is "an attractive young lady," Boyle quickly tries to ease his concerns. "The only thing I've found that makes a difference is, I have smaller fingers."

And after performing a vasectomy on a 25-year-old whose piercing was in the way -- a piercing he did himself, mind you -- she tells him her only concern is that his scrotum might start to swell. She then makes the I-once-caught-a-fish-this-big gesture.

Boyle's constant conversations about sperm should have younger viewers, if there are any, "tee-hee"-ing, but she'd fit right in on "Grey's Anatomy." Which is appropriate, because at times, "Hopkins" starts to feel like a drama, albeit one whose participants are a little less camera-ready.

The major difference between it and a scripted series, though, is simple: See a toddler-sized lump of latex on an operating table on "ER," and you can turn the channel. But see a real toddler, one who'd just been smiling and laughing, undergoing a heart transplant, and I dare you not to tear up a little. (And, yes, after rhapsodizing about swingers, drug dealers and prostitutes so far this month, it's nice to know that I may, in fact, still have a soul.)

But be forewarned: Not all the cases end well. And only then, when you're front and center for the grieving process, does "Hopkins" feel a little exploitative.

Some of the dozen or more doctors and nurses wander in and out of the action, and it would have been nice if the producers had focused on fewer of them and kept up with them throughout the six episodes.

And "Hopkins" does go a little heavy on transplants. Four of them to be exact: two hearts, a double-lung and a history-making "three couple, bi-coastal, three-way kidney swap." But it makes sense. The travel to procure the organ, the excitement of the rush home, it's the "Hopkins" equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer car chase.

But the biggest problem, once again, is its time slot. Thursdays at 10 already saw CBS' "Swingtown" squaring off against NBC's "Fear Itself." Now with "Hopkins" in the mix, each of the networks is airing its best offering of the summer at the same time.

Somebody, somewhere is definitely asleep at the wheel.

Christopher Lawrence's Life on the Couch column appears on Mondays. E-mail him at clawrence@reviewjournal.com.