Saving Hope: The Complete First Season

Much like cop dramas, I imagine that there are only so many ways to create a new medical drama. Thanks to shows like ER, Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice, TV audiences have been exposed to a lot of different medical stories and a lot of different storytelling techniques. So anything that comes after shows like these will inevitably be viewed, not only on its own merits, but in the shadows that these other shows cast. Which brings us to Saving Hope...

Imagine the interpersonal drama of Grey's Anatomy mixed with the supernatural elements of the Sixth Sense and you've got a good picture of what Saving Hope is like. To be fair, the supernatural is mostly kept to a minimum, or rather, centered on a small group of people, but the Sixth Sense comparison is the one that makes the most, uh, sense. The show focuses on the relationship between surgeon Alex Reid and her fiance, Chief of Surgery Charlie Harris. In the pilot, the two of them are on their way in a taxi to get married and they end up getting hit at an intersection. As a result of the accident, Charlie goes into a coma...and starts wandering the halls of their hospital, Hope Zion. Meanwhile Alex is left to try to care for him, while maintaining the burdens and responsibilities of her fulltime gig.

And that's about it. There's other interpersonal drama with other members of the hospital staff, but that's the show in a nutshell: Charlie wonders when/if he's going to wake up, Alex wonders when/if he's going to wake up and both of them try to go on about their lives. Granted, of the two of them Alex is the only one who's technically in the land of the living. Charlie is stuck in the netherworld between this life and the next, the limbo of being in a coma. So he interacts with other people in limbo who come into the hospital for treatment.

Kudos to the creators of the show for trying something a little different, but unfortunately the rest of the show is fairly standard. There's really not enough here to differentiate it from its predecessors. To their credit, the cast does the best they can with the story lines, even if they aren't completely original. If you can't get enough of your medical dramas, this might be worth a shot. For everyone else, you're not missing much if you decide to skip Saving Hope.