GENRE FOCUS MEDICAL DRAMAS
buoyancy and lightness that we strive for and the audience expects now, and that balance sets the show apart from a lot of the other medical shows that can be too serious or too heavy,” he says. To give a twist to the hospital-based drama, showrunners have added elements that allow them to mine new areas of human experience. Spanish series The Red Band Society, a coming-of-age drama set in a children’s cancer ward, was recently optioned for an American remake by ABC, with DreamWorks producing. Friendsco-creator Marta Kauffman will write and showrun. Set at a big city hospital, the show is unusual in that it focuses on the patients not the medical staff.
eOne Television’s Saving Hope UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: SAVING HOPE
Many TV critics and other observers complain that medical dramas tend to cover the same ground. “Whether the characters are dressed in blue or white, it’s always the same format,” says Bertrand Villegas of TV consultancy The Wit. For just that reason producers and broadcasters have been seek- ing out different characters and fresh storylines. One such show is Saving Hope, which will be launched at MIPTV by eOne Television. It is produced by Illana Frank, who has a first-look deal with eOne, fol- lowing the success of her cop drama Rookie Blue, which airs on ABC in the US. The show, which features a narrative delivered by the spirit of the hospital’s chief of surgery, Charlie Harris, who is in a coma, explores the relationship between spirituality and science in a medical context. “Part of what I thought was really interesting about this, and a dif-
ferent way into a medical drama, was this whole idea of faith,” says Noreen Halpern, the outgoing president of dramatic programming for eOne Television. The spark for this aspect of the show was when the child of writer-
creator Morwyn Brebner was critically ill and Brebner found herself praying, although she was not a woman of faith at all. “She was working on the idea of a medical drama at the time, and it just struck her that it’s so interesting that in the world of medicine that these very diametrically opposed philosophies can exist: Western medicine, which is very much about rules and principles and science, and the idea of faith, and how much does faith have to do with healing? And I think that’s what really has struck a chord for a lot of people,” Halpern says. “Medical shows have a history of succeeding. There are great life and death stakes built into the fabric of a medical show. But then you add this twist of faith and spirituality — Is it just about science? Is it just about medicine? — and I think that is a really interesting way into a very traditional franchise.”
66 TBI April/May 2012
The original Spanish series, which airs on Catalan channel TV3, was produced and is being sold at MIPTV, both as a scripted format and a fin- ished show, by Filmax. Then there’s Saving Hope, a Canadian series that eOne will launch at MIPTV (see sidebar). It centers on Dr. Harris, chief surgeon of a Toronto hospital, who has gone into a coma following a car accident, and walks the wards in spirit form, commenting on the ethical dilemmas that the staff face.
As the above examples suggest, there will not be a shortage of medical fiction series on sale at MIPTV.
ZDF Enterprises, for example, has classic medical dramas like The Black Forest Hospitaland The Country Doctor, as well as action-driven programmes like Alpine Rescue and Mountain Medic. Last year, it debuted medical daily Flickering Hearts, and it’ll launch the second sea- son at MIPTV.
“There is no other genre where blood, life, danger, hope, love, desper- ation and fate can all ‘shake hands,’ so to speak, as they do in medical fic- tion,” says Ralf Rueckauer, head of sales at ZDF Enterprises. “Medical dramas can help to build a bridge in the daily battle for the remote con- trol between women and men: it consists of both a world of machines, glamour, sports cars, and people who work hard and win or lose, and a world of emotion, tears, social life and love.” TBI
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