Times have really changed for TV medical shows, and if you doubted it, the proof is “Medical Center.”
Chad Everett and James Daly (father of Tyne and Tim) starred in the 1969-76 drama, which came after “Ben Casey” and before “Trapper John, M.D.”–and way before “St. Elsewhere” worked major changes on the genre.
Mindful of the success of “ER” and “Chicago Hope,” and adopting a “what goes around comes around” philosophy, TNT is exhuming “Medical Center” for a marathon beginning at 7 p.m. Sunday, followed by regular airings at noon weekdays.
(The cable channel’s “Lunchbox Lineup” begins at 10 a.m. weekdays with “Knots Landing” and continues with “C.H.i.P.s,” “How the West Was Won” and the immortal “Wild Wild West,” with Robert Conrad and Ross Martin.)
Compared with “ER” (or even, for that matter, to “Diagnosis Murder”), “Medical Center” is stunningly slow-paced, with a single case most often filling the full hour.
The hospital is tranquil, filled with nurses in starched white and doctors in loud sport coats. (Everyone’s clothes look too tight, and in one scene where Everett wears scrubs, they’re form-fitting, and his top is tucked in.) In the operating room, there’s no music, only the crisp call for “scalpel–forceps.”
Everyone ponders, emotes and endlessly discusses, but no one runs or shouts or even seems to bleed. You could do several other things (possibly even perform surgery) while watching this show.
A thoughtful pace isn’t a bad thing, but that was then, this is now. Only the most nostalgic are likely to find “Medical Center” still hale and hearty after almost two decades.
And surely no one would tune in just to snicker at the clothes, or giggle guiltily at Robert Reed (later to be the “Brady Bunch” dad) as a surgeon seeking “sexual reassignment,” or gawk at a very young O.J. Simpson, playing a football star with troubles.