Rivers Doesn't Flow

The medical genre has seen more than its share of turkeys this year in HawthoRNe, Mercy, and Trauma, and CBS doesn’t do it any favors with its new entry Three Rivers (Sundays, 9pm). The network hasn’t had a successful medical drama since Chicago Hope closed its doors nine years ago (remember Presidio Med? L.A. Doctors? 3 lbs.? Exactly.), and Three Rivers won’t be the show to break that dry spell.

Focusing on the transplant wing of a Pittsburgh hospital, Rivers marks the return of Alex O’Loughlin, star of Moonlight, a cult vampire show that had the misfortune of premiering a year before bloodsuckers were de rigueur again. Here he plays Andy Yablonski, the rare hot shot surgeon without a God complex. Much of the time, though, O’Loughlin is pushed to the fringes in favor of the transplant team’s other members, including The L Word’s stern, strong Katherine Moennig (she should be the real star of the show) and newbie Christopher J. Hanke as the assistant to the transplant coordinator, a role that doesn’t merit nearly the amount of screen time that this green actor is given.

Three Rivers touches on all the scenes you’d expect to see: the ambivalence of the donor’s family, the doctors getting upset about said family’s ambivalence, team members having to make difficult life/death decisions. And then it shoves in a few scenes you don’t expect to see and that you wouldn’t miss if they weren’t there: an organ harvest is halted when the cops show up and announce that the donor is a murder suspect (this little nugget, seemingly inserted just to give the writer a wowzer of an act break, went absolutely nowhere); the team, rushing to get back to the hospital with a pair of lungs and a kidney, runs into traffic caused by a bomb threat (the timing of these things!).

After retooling the pilot, CBS then made the late decision to air it as the second episode, making for some strange introductions to characters we’d already met last week. But airing episodes out of order is the least of this show’s troubles. How about the producers bringing the wonderful Alfre Woodard on board and then giving her nothing of import to do? How about the nauseating NYPD Blue-style shaky cam that is awkwardly mixed with traditional camera setups for an uneasy aesthetic? How about the fact that CBS is now giving creator Carol Barbee her third chance following the failures of Jericho and Swingtown? How about I just tell you that hanging out in your local emergency room would probably be more exciting than watching this pedestrian, unspectacular show?