‘NY Med’ takes real look at hospital work

By David Bauder

AP Television Writer

NEW YORK

Every day deadly serious things happen in a hospital. ABC opens its nonfiction summer series “NY Med” at 10 tonight on a lighter note, following an emergency-room patient who suffers a painful side effect to a drug designed to boost male sexual performance.

An attractive young nurse, Marina Dedivanovic, looks on with a little sympathy and a lot of bemusement.

The rich vein of characters mined in tonight’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.

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 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 & Brave” that 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 goal was “to take cinema verite and make it commercial,” he said.

For all the work involved, filming is often the easy part for Wrong and the two dozen people who work with him on a shoot. He must first convince insular organizations to give him free reign and trust he’ll deliver an accurate portrait. Even if the bureaucracy agrees, individual doctors, nurses or patients often resent the cameras or, conversely, can’t understand why Wrong doesn’t see them as stars along the lines of Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Every day Wrong’s team films 20 to 30 hours of tape on small, hand-held cameras. He keeps track of the work by asking each to identify the best five minutes of footage they captured each day. After four months of shooting, Wrong chooses the stories and characters to emphasize and fits them into hour-long episodes that will satisfy viewers who watch all eight or just one. He wants laughter and tears from his viewers, often in close proximity.

He lives for stories with odd or heartbreaking twists. In “NY Med,” a heart transplant fails because the organ is damaged during transit, and a surgeon treats an oddball patient who eats metal. Recurring characters such as the emergency room nurse are followed and their lives outside medicine explored.