Never lose Hope

"Urge and urge and urge," Walt Whitman wrote. "Always the procreant urge of the world." A truism, perhaps but Whitman was artful about it. Patrick Dempsey and friends are not.

This show is at that most unfortunate point when scripts begin to mark time: when writers believe they have developed the characters to a point where audiences should be happy simply looking into their world. It is lazy and we deserve better.

Good medical dramas use the ensemble to make you feel for the rotating patients, to put flesh on the relationship between disease and treatment. This cast all but ignores the daily-raters, too busy preening each other and pretending their most recent sex scene provides some greater comprehension of the plot.

The boy without ears, the father forced to take his dead daughter's heart, the man who cuts off his foot to pursue independence: all could make good television but for the selfishness of stardom and the sloth of cardboard scripts. The idle contempt for viewers makes you wish the writers' strike had not ended.