I am looking forward to this new summer series and i hope that it will do well in the ratings.
This series stars 2 of my favorites--Erica Durance and Michael Shanks so I hope they will bring their fans from Smallsville and Stargate SG1 the previous series they both were in,
Medical dramas do not do well except for Grey's Anatomy so I am hoping that this one will pull it's own weight as a summer series.
By Brian Gorman
June 7, 2012 4:00 PM
ET
Medical procedurals usually deal with the hospital staff,
the patients and their friends, enemies and relatives.
The one group that has always been left out is the dead and dying -- until
now.
On
"Saving Hope,"
debuting Thursday, June 7, on NBC, one of the main characters is a doctor in
a coma. Originally produced for CTV, the series is the latest Canadian network
show to be sold to a U.S. broadcaster.
Dr. Charlie Harris is doomed to lurk around the hospital where he used to
work, talking to other coma patients and the recently dead.
The situation is almost as creepy and lonely for the actor playing the role
as it is for the character, says
Michael Shanks, who
plays Harris, the alpha-dog chief of surgery at the fictional Toronto Hope-Zion
hospital.
"You do feel like you're off in your own little world," he tells
Zap2it. "You start to find yourself as an
actor feeling the same kinds of things the character feels: isolation and
frustration and things like that.
"You watch all the consultation and surgery, and you start to think, 'I
want to do that, too.' It's a very strange thing."
A native of Vancouver, Canada, Shanks has carved out a place for himself as
a regular in the subgenre of science-fiction series that are made in his
hometown, such as
"Stargate
Atlantis," "Stargate
SG-1" and
"Smallville"
(in which he was Hawkman/Carter Hall).
Now he's playing a doctor in a medical procedural -- with one catch. His
character fell victim to blunt-force trauma after a car accident on his wedding
day.
So he hangs around the hospital in a tuxedo, occasionally talking to other
disembodied spirits. Mostly, though, he delivers monologues on his situation,
like a morose comic playing for an audience who can't hear him.
The one person he wants to reach, though, is his fiancee, fellow surgeon
Alex Reid (
Erica
Durance), who struggles, with the help of new star surgeon Joel Goran
(
Daniel
Gillies), to save Charlie's life.
As Durance says, the situation drives the two doctors to reconsider their
attitudes toward science and spirituality.
"With my character, its science first, Western medicine" she says. "I'm
choosing to believe in only what I can see, what I can touch.
"But when her fiance goes into this coma, she's forced to question those
things about herself."
Like Shanks, the Alberta-born and raised Durance is a veteran of
Vancouver-produced sci-fi shows and is best known for playing comic book icon
Lois Lane on "Smallville."
Unlike her character in "Saving Hope," Durance says she's inclined toward
things spiritual.
"I grew up evangelical with a very fundamentalist
upbringing," she says. "As I get older, I don't know that I buy into the idea of
organized religion, but I'm always seeking, and believe in -- whatever you want
to call it, God or Allah -- that there's something making the universe
happen."
"Saving Hope" grew out of an idea one of the co-creators had when she was
waiting at a hospital emergency room and began to wonder about whatever
spiritual presences might be hanging around a place where people live or die on
a momentary basis.
"It's a balancing act between delivering a medical procedural and an
exploration of what it means to be alive," says show runner
Aaron Martin.
"That's what we're doing every week."
Unlike Shanks, who just has to hang around and critique the medical work,
Durance had to learn to act like a real surgeon.
So she shadowed one for a while and had to deal with some fairly graphic
surgical re-enactments.
"I went to some surgeries and saw some of the real deal there," she says.
"I seem to be fine with it. I haven't found myself feeling nauseous, but I do
have colleagues who see the fake blood and -- I'm kind of the weirdo at the
other end, where they're like, 'You're enjoying yourself a little too
much.'
"I don't know where that came from. My sister likes to say it's because we
grew up on a farm."
As for Charlie, "his whole life has been about fixing the body, and now, on
the spiritual plane, he has to worry about fixing the mind and fixing the
spirit," Martin says.
As Shanks says, this means Charlie learns not only to heal himself but
falls into a role of counselor to the life-challenged.
"I think what's unique about our show is that we don't just explore the
aspects of medicine," he says. "We explore the realm of spirituality, too.
"What's interesting for me is that I get to play a character who is a
devout atheist. And now he's in this between-ground.
"And he has to start questioning everything he's ever believed in --
including his own sanity
