The realism of Hopkins 24/7, the six-part follow up to a 2000 documentary chronicling days in the life of Johns Hopkins University's inner-city Baltimore hospital, goes beyond the numerous and graphic scenes of bleeding chest cavities and open skulls and throbbing hearts. These images initially disturb us, and may make us throw our hands over our eyes in horror, but it's Hopkins 24/7's resonant portrait of the American family that's the most revealing close-up.
Unlike most medical documentaries, Hopkins 24/7 is not about patients and procedures, but about doctors -- two major players include Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, an illegal immigrant-turned-neurosurgeon, and Brian Bethea, a rakish surgical resident facing impending marital doom. Unlike shows like E.R. that struck a balance between glamour and grit, where nary a messy ponytail or dark-circle under an eye was seen, the doctors of Hopkins -- and the patients -- appear as they are: like anyone you'd see on a regular basis, except more tired. The only misstep in the direction of melodrama is the genuinely distracting soundtrack; heartbroken love ballads (with lyrics that instruct you how to feel about a given plot development) are queued at the end of nearly every emotional scene.
While the plot of each episode is very much centered on the hospital's daily onslaught of emergencies, the show betrays its true motives in its editing, as the camera frequently cuts away from the patient on the operating table to show Bethea composing an email, calling his wife, or announcing his divorce. Once, we jump from Quinones-Hinojosa getting a piece of human brain caught in his eye during brain surgery to his going home to make dinner for the wife and kids. In this respect, the pacing of Hopkins 24/7 resembles E.R. more than it does any medical emergencies or medical marvels show, in which the individual doctor is just a surrogate for "the cure."
That said, for the operating room voyeurs who can manage to watch the surgery scenes with their eyes open, Hopkins 24/7 rewards lavishly: tubes fly in and out of every crevice of the human body, lungs are inflated like a helium balloon, a surgeon proudly holds up a brain tumor in his fingers as he stands beside a patient's open skull. Just your average day at the office.
What our rare look into the secret lives of surgeons -- historically reputed as a rather detached bunch -- reveals is the humanness of heroism. We see another young doctor itching to perform a rare procedure, and a female urological surgeon longing to take time off to raise her child, but it is the doctors' superhuman ability to detach themselves from their own lives in order to devote themselves fully to the lives of others that makes the glimpse into their ids so remarkable.
The surgeons' ability to compartmentalize their insecurities is striking. "No one flips a switch like Brian Bethea," one of the doctor's drinking buddies observes. In one scene, Quinones-Hinojosa worries about the public perception of Mexican-Americans, while later in that same episode announcing, "There's no one more qualified than I am to do this case." The camera catches him raising his fists in triumph following a successful surgery.
Why Quinones-Hinojosa is able to balance family life and surgery and Bethea cannot lends itself to about as much rigid logical analysis as why one lung transplant patient will survive five years and one will survive ten. In divorce and in disease, the series' subjects are shown grasping for comfort in statistics; the family of a women receiving a lung transplant is informed about post-op recovery rates, and minutes later, Bethea's young daughter explains through tears that there's a "50-50 chance" of her parents getting a divorce. When Bethea says in a voice over, "I think it's a risky move and I'm not sure it's going to be the right move," it's unclear whether he's referring to the lung transplant or the trial separation.
Through tears, sweat, and lots of blood, the juxtaposition of the doctors' family troubles and the solidarity exhibited by patients' families huddled in sweatshirts in the waiting room should resonate with anyone who's ever been in a family (so presumably most of you). It's not that the patients' families aren't plagued by the same emotional warfare and relationship troubles as the doctors'; but Hopkins 24/7 most succeeds when it shows the starkness with which the weight of the everyday is shed in the face of emergency.
Hopkins 24/7 premieres tonight at 10 PM on ABC.