'Three Rivers' premieres: It may need another operation
Despite fits and starts and many changes along the way (and then changes to those changes), CBS’s “Three Rivers” is fine.
It’s not great, it’s not awful. It’s an adequate, conventional CBS-y medical drama about transplant surgeons set at Pittsburgh’s fictional Three Rivers Regional Medical Center.
What makes it CBS-y? “Three Rivers” (9 p.m. Sunday, KDKA) is a procedural medical drama, which means character development comes second to plots-of-the-week. It’s also a very safe show that’s generally uplifting with characters that evince a bland camaraderie.
Knowing it’s set in Pittsburgh, local viewers may be chagrined to see the show’s first images are of Cleveland. The premiere episode’s teaser is set at a Cleveland construction site where an accident impacts a medical emergency involving a pregnant woman in Pittsburgh.
The show’s intent is to tell stories about organ transplantation from three points of view: Donor, patient and doctor. Sunday’s premiere tells those stories as well as a nontransplant subplot about a boy whose condition causes him to vomit blood.
Alex O’Loughlin (“Moonlight”) stars in “Three Rivers” as Dr. Andy Yablonski, who viewers are told is a top transplant surgeon. Viewers also get some sense of the daddy issues that envelop Dr. Miranda Foster (Katherine Moennig, “The L Word”), whose now-deceased father founded the transplant program at the hospital and worked alongside current head of surgery Dr. Sophia Jordan (Alfre Woodard, “St. Elsewhere”).
Other characters include mildly arrogant Dr. David Lee (Daniel Henney); pretty, unremarkable ER doc Lisa Reed (Amber Clayton); chipper operating assistant Pam Acosta (Justina Machado, “Six Feet Under”) and newbie, occasionally clueless transplant coordinator Ryan Abbott (winning newcomer Christopher J. Hanke).
Ryan is intended to be the audience’s window into the transplant world, but in the show’s blah writing he’s less a character and more a vessel for the dissemination of facts. He frequently spouts talking points that get across a pro-social message about organ donation in a clunky, heavy-handed way. Ryan also makes an embarrassing-to-watch blunder when he almost hysterically confronts a donor family. That awkward moment is redeemed by a scene of reconciliation later in the episode that Hanke underplays with admirable subtlety.
No scenes with actors were filmed in Pittsburgh for Sunday’s episode but the show uses many exterior establishing shots of the city skyline, an ambulance rushing over one of our bridges and another shot that comes through the Fort Pitt Tunnel.
The hospital exterior is the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles but through the magic of special effects, you can see One Oxford Centre and PPG Place rising behind it in at least one establishing shot (look quick or pause the picture on your DVR/VCR). This is also confusing because it makes the hospital appear to be in the middle of the Golden Triangle even though a backdrop through windows in the hospital conference room shows a view of the Point from somewhere near Heinz Field.
Sunday’s episode also includes a shout-out to Oram’s Donuts in Beaver Falls.
Compared to the fall’s other medical dramas — NBC’s “Mercy” and “Trauma” — “Three Rivers” is an improvement over the painfully bad “Mercy.” “Trauma” is a grittier program with more nuanced characters but no one in the “Trauma” pilot came across as particularly likable.
All the “Three Rivers” characters are pleasant in a vanilla way — a lot like this humdrum new show.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette. 10/2/09
