TVScope/Grey's Anatomy, RTÉ One, Sundays, 9.25pm: How very pragmatic of RTÉ to replace one medical drama with another in the prime-time Sunday slot.
After all, Grey's Anatomy and ER should appeal to the same audience. They're both slick, contemporary US dramas which use medical situations to explore relationships among a group of interns and senior doctors, garnering sometimes chuckles, sometimes tears. So far, so sensible.
Enter Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) and her troupe of fellow interns at Seattle Grace Hospital for an altogether inferior version of ER. Yes, inferior. It's cheesier, less realistic, and the storylines are patently contrived solely as vehicles for the sexual exploits and romcom japes of its central characters, with the odd poignant moment and an overlying moral tale thrown in. Maybe not so sensible, after all.
The characters are cardboard cut-outs: there's the super-ambitious Christina; the self-conscious social bumbler, George; the pretty, soft-hearted Izzy; and the uber-cocky alpha male, Alex. Then there's Meredith, sketched with just a tincture more depth and no shortage of skeletons in her locker, including the tiresome secret that her mother, a famous surgeon, is now in a home with early onset Alzheimer's disease.
Meredith has a problem identifying sexual prey and generally keeping her paws in her scrubs. She appears destined to find herself sandwiched between a male and a hospital prop at least once every episode, poor lamb.
The cliches don't end with the characters; most of the storylines are banal and the dialogue is peppered with platitudes. Take, for example, the preface to every show, an excruciating voice-over, courtesy of our heroine.
This week's was: "After a while, the rules of residency become the rules of life. Rule number one: always keep score. Rule number two: do whatever you can to outsmart the other guy. Rule number three: don't make friends with the enemy."
Fierce competition between the interns is the running theme, prompting desperate machinations to get ahead. The one-upmanship is probably intended as a springboard for humour, but our interns are all so pathetically eager that it's hard to want anyone to "win".
Some of the dialogue is bizarre. This week's episode had the interns dealing with the fallout from a dangerous bike race. As they clamber over each other to bag the most "interesting" and bloody injuries, Christina is heard to remark of the chaotic scene: "It's like candy, but with blood, which is so much better."
Christina ends up, along with Izzy, overseeing the last hours of a brain dead John Doe and organising a harvest of his organs for donation. In case we missed the former's hard-nosed attitude earlier, she mutters: "I wish he'd just go into the light already so I could get on with another case."
In stark and laboured contrast, sentimental Izzy naively wants the man to live. Her eyes brimming, she says: "He could wake up. What about a miracle? There are medical miracles, you know." But the victim isn't to be a medical miracle and Izzy learns something about happy endings while Christina learns a little humanity. This is, after all, a moral tale.
Meredith and George, meanwhile, seem to spend most of the show fending off the advances of patients or colleagues, while it emerges that George, too, has a crush on Meredith.
Maybe the characters will, in time, develop and become more complex. Maybe the scriptwriters will learn the art of subtlety and the storylines will become more original. And maybe the endless moralising cliches will be left behind. We live in hope.
For the moment, the last word must go to the voice-over, which concluded this episode with: "Victories are counted by the number of lives saved." As the student docs themselves might say, "Oh, please".
