Every day deadly serious things happen in a hospital. ABC opens its nonfiction summer series “NY Med” this week on a lighter note, following an emergency room patient who suffers a painful side effect to a drug designed to boost male sexual performance. There’s only one way out, and it involves a needle.
An attractive young nurse, Marina Dedivanovic, looks on with a little sympathy and a lot of bemusement.
The rich vein of characters mined in Tuesday’s debut — the famous heart surgeon, the young mother who must stay awake during her brain surgery, the cancer patient whose risky surgery fails, the resident with an angelic singing voice — marks “NY Med” with the signature of Terence Wrong, a producer whose work is unique today in broadcast television news.
The eight-episode “NY Med” takes narrative devices and character-building techniques from fiction, but is completely true, filmed by a team that immersed itself for four months in life at the Columbia and Weill Cornell Medical Centers of New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.
| Watch this |
| ‘NY Med’ |
| » When: 10 p.m. Tuesday |
| » Channel: ABC |
| » Info: abc.go.com |
It’s Wrong’s seventh limited-run summer series since 2000. Four have featured hospitals, opening with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, with others focused on dating, civil service workers in Boston and the New York City Police Department.
“This is easily my best series,” said Wrong, 55, pleased with the pace and weaving of stories in “NY Med.”
A Princeton-educated journalist who speaks Arabic, Wrong spent much of the 1980s working in the Middle East for NBC and ABC. He got into long-form TV journalism upon returning to the United States, and the award-winning 1994 documentary “They Were Young and Brave,” which revisited a major Vietnam War battle, proved a career turning point. He began his first hospital series at the urging of ABC News executive Phyllis McGrady.
The first episode of “NY Med” seems vulnerable to questions about sensationalism, especially with an opening segment on an erection that lasts several hours. The next segment is about Dr. Oz, the talk show host who is also a heart surgeon at New York-Presbyterian; Wrong said Oz was selected for more than his fame.
“I would never have done that if it wasn’t as strong a story,” he said. “You can justify putting him in the show editorially, and also justify it strategically.”
With “NY Med” ready to air, Wrong is talking to ABC management about future series ideas.
“The ultimate joy of any editor or documentarian is to work and shape narratives out of raw footage and to find the story in the raw material,” he said. “We never get tired of that. If you get tired of that, move to fiction. I want to do that forever — until they kick me out.”
