Physicians Heal Themselves

HAVING SURVIVED A HEAD-ON COLLISION WITH 'ER' AND THE AMPUTATION OF KEY CAST MEMBERS, CHICAGO HOPE READIES ITSELF FOR AN END-OF-SEASON SHAKE-UP

    On a mild early-spring morning in a very small corner of one of the three very big Hollywood soundstages that house Chicago Hope, Adam Arkin and Mandy Patinkin are, once again, getting on each other's nerves. Patinkin is clowning around, literally: For reasons too distracting to mention in an opening paragraph, his face is masked with clown-white makeup. He's wearing a red ball on his nose. And he's urging Arkin to catch the wacky spirit.

  Arkin, in more businesslike attire, has little patience for Patinkin's manic enthusiasms. Although he has often served as a sounding board for his voluble partner, Arkin appears to be worn out by the guy's unrelenting intensity. The words fly faster and tenser; the air is acrid with annoyance. "Cut!" calls director Arvin Brown. "Well," snaps Patinkin to Arkin, bringing his argument to its natural conclusion, "f--- you!"

The cast and crew crack up--for many reasons. There is, for starters, the clean thrill of the vulgar. There's the verbalization of what one could easily imagine actors Arkin and Patinkin, as longtime friends and hospital colleagues Drs. Aaron Shutt and Jeffrey Geiger, actually saying to one another in a world freed from FCC regulations. There's the memory that Patinkin--who was first among an ensemble cast of equals throughout the premiere season of Hope--really did display a kind of f--- you attitude toward his colleagues and series creator David E. Kelley when he left eight episodes into the second season, citing exhaustion and a pressing need to spend more time with his family in New York (his presence in this episode is one of his infrequent guest appearances).

  But at its most profound, Patinkin's ad-lib retort resonates with the same tough attitude everyone involved with Chicago Hope has had to adopt to survive so much, so far, so well. Hobbled by the cocky, let's-see-who-blinks initial decision of CBS to run the program on NBC-dominated Thursday night, opposite the equally new ER, Hope had to swallow the humiliation of losing precipitously (with much press fanfare) to that other medical drama. Since Hope was moved to Mondays at 10 p.m. in the middle of last season, it has attracted a large, loyal audience that finds Arkin as hunky as George Clooney, and it ranks 23rd for this season to date, holding its own against powerhouse Monday Night Football and regularly beating ABC's Murder One. (For struggling CBS, that constitutes a huge, healthy hit.)

The show has also survived producer turnover. Although Hope is the child of L.A. Law wizard and Picket Fences creator Kelley, ongoing creative supervision was gradually transferred from Kelley to executive producer John Tinker (St. Elsewhere), who came on board in November 1994. Envisioned as a large ensemble drama, the show and its cast have suffered morale slumps, first as Patinkin's role expanded like yeast and later as energy was in danger of deflating after he decamped.

  At the end of the second season, only three of the original pilot-episode cast members remain: Arkin, Hector Elizondo as hospital chief of staff Dr. Phillip Watters, and Roxanne Hart as charge nurse Camille Shutt. On the other hand, newer additions, especially Christine Lahti as cardiothoracic surgeon Kathryn Austin and Peter Berg as cowboy surgeon Billy Kronk, have palpably juiced up the show. Ensemble equality continues to be a tender subject--Hart, Thomas Gibson, Jayne Brook, Vondie Curtis-Hall, and, especially, late addition Jamey Sheridan are still impatient for their characters to have more to do. But as Chicago Hope concludes its second season, everyone involved enthusiastically professes new optimism--and freely picks at sores.

  "I came onto the show about halfway into last year, and it had really become the Mandy Patinkin Variety Hour," says Berg, 32, with the same blunt practicality Kronk displayed using a buzz saw to perform an emergency amputation. "Which I thought was kind of cool, because Mandy is so good. But there were a lot of actors who were sort of wondering what we were all doing here."

  "I was welcomed by the actors, but the writers didn't know where they wanted to go," reports Sheridan, 44, who plays OB-GYN John Sutton. "I was pretty confused about it. But I'm in a good place now."

  "We're entering our third season still finding ourselves," observes Arkin, 39. "I think we started out as an ensemble piece, then went through a period of being focused on Geiger. My character became a reactor. I wanted to make sure that when Mandy departed, [Shutt] didn't become identityless. I think we've avoided that, but it's been an ongoing struggle for the writers and me to figure out who this guy is."

"We're doing well," says Tinker, 37, "but it's been tough. Mandy's departure, Christine's arrival, the death of Alan Birch [played by Peter MacNicol], and the Jamey Sheridan arrival all threw story lines out of whack. To that end, I almost feel like this is the first season--and I find myself extremely excited about the next one."

Chicago Hope is not a set that coos together, pals together, poses together to show off new haircuts. Aside from Arkin and Elizondo, who hang out beating bongos during downtime, the cast--some single, some married, some parents, some not, most of them with substantial theater credits--go separate ways on their own time. "That's kind of healthy," says Elizondo, 59, a movie veteran who often serves as unofficial company "uncle." "There's a mix in ages. That's cool. We're not just about high cheekbones." Adds Berg, who costars with Damon Wayans in the new boxing comedy The Great White Hype, "We're not a bunch of soul mates. You probably couldn't find a group of nine more eclectic personalities."

On the day of Patinkin's bleeper, during a lunch break, the crew kicks around a Hacky Sack, cast members withdraw to their trailers, and in his pleasant office with its cozy conversation pit, Tinker considers: How about shaking everything up again next season? The cliff-hanger finale he has concocted puts just about everyone--and the hospital itself--in limbo: The research lab run by Dr. Diane Grad (Jayne Brook) is shut down; Dr. Daniel Nyland (Thomas Gibson) is in ethical hot water; Hancock (Curtis-Hall) is caught in the middle of a family crisis; Sutton has reconnected with an ex-wife; Austin is considering fleeing the country with her daughter so her ex-husband (Ron Silver), who has custody, can't move away and take the child with him. Meanwhile, that same ex is putting together a consortium--to buy Chicago Hope.

All of which leaves room to eliminate characters--and add new ones. Who won't be coming back? No answers yet, although smart bets are on some combination of Brook, Hart, Curtis-Hall, and Gibson. "I've always felt there are too many people to service. Nine [ensemble] characters is a lot," Tinker says. "I'd hate to put it to a number, but I think I'd like to have six. But for all I know, when we come back, it will be larger. I know that sounds contradictory, but I would like to add some young residents."

Don't start envisioning cute ER-type stories involving Noah Wyle look-alikes, however. Hope has always distinguished itself from its faster-paced, cut-'em-open-and-let's-have-sex cousin by its willingness to slow down. "Tinker grew up in that action-adventure school of St. Elsewhere, but Hope was always about the relationships, and ethical issues were a way to explore that," says Kelley, 40, who is now working on The Practice, a law drama he's developing for ABC. And even the St. Elsewhere adventurer wants to rebalance the mix. "I think we'll do more issues than we did this season--the pendulum may have swung just a bit too far," Tinker admits. "But that doesn't mean disease-of-the-week stuff. By and large, people tune in to see personal struggles."

  It used to be that people tuned in to see Jeffrey Geiger fall apart, with much emoting and occasional singing as his part got bigger and bigger. "That had to do with the relationship that David Kelley and I had developed," explains Patinkin, 43. Even as a guest star, the high-energy performer pirouettes around backstage, free-associating and humming. (It is Patinkin who, during a scene shot on location at an old Jewish cemetery, shows a visitor the graves of two of the six Three Stooges, then leaves a Tootsie Roll pop as an offering for Shemp.) "We clicked. The character was [Kelley's] conduit to say a lot of things. I loved saying his words. But I did not love learning that amount of lines that fast. I couldn't do it. Anyhow, I always felt the other characters weren't mined anywhere near their worth, which was frustrating internally and story-ally. So I think my leaving did a wonderful thing for the show in that regard."

  His fellow cast members don't disagree. (Here's Gibson in an antic mood, possibly because he's also wearing gigantic, flapping clown shoes at the moment: "I'm happy that Mandy is with his family in New York and is running around serenading the world!") And even Kelley, who removed himself from regular involvement with Hope around the time of Patinkin's departure, was "surprised but not shocked" when his leading man left. "The workload was tough on him. There was not politics or ego involved. It was about family. Although maybe you should think of that before you sign on for five years..."

The Hope ensemble is not a shy one. "When we cast the show, we knew it would be a pot of tumult," Kelley insists. "That's healthy." Still, Kelley's relative inaccessibility frustrated many of the players ("I think Michelle Pfeiffer requires a bit of time also!" suggests Berg, referring to the writer's movie-star wife). And they were thrown into a deeper funk by the sudden departure of popular colleague Peter MacNicol, who was dissatisfied with the stories available to his character, hospital counsel Alan Birch. (Rumors that MacNicol might return to the series as another character entirely are dismissed by his manager, but reports that informal conversations about the possibility have taken place continue to surface from other cast members.) The last thing anyone wanted was another Patinkin-size character grabbing the spotlight.

  What they got was a Christine Lahti-size infusion of reinvigorating energy. The stage and film actress hadn't watched any Hope before she saw "The Quarantine," one of the standout episodes of the first season, directed by her husband, Thomas Schlamme. "Throughout my career I was a snob about TV," says the 46-year-old actress in her trailer, as Wilson, her 7-year-old son, watches The Andy Griffith Show. (She also has twins who will turn 3 in August.) "But when I saw that episode, I thought it was like a brilliant one-act play, better than the writing in 90 percent of the film scripts I'm reading." When she heard that Patinkin was leaving, she says, she "planted a seed" with Kelley and Tinker. In subsequent meetings, she made her pitch for a character who would be tough, sexy, funny, outspoken, and unpredictable. Lahti liked the idea of playing someone who is "a feminist who also treats other women in a sexist way." She didn't want to "replace" Patinkin, and she didn't want to carry the show herself, but she wanted her character to have heft. "I wanted Kate to come in with a kind of bravura, seemingly all together, and then slowly we see what her bravura is covering up. I said to the guys, Use me." They did: Kate Austin is now the most fascinating, complex, believable female character on the air today. And her vertiginous downward spiral toward the end of this season has only made her more compelling.

Does this leave Lahti--who recently won an Oscar for her first directing project, a live-action short film called Lieberman in Love--in danger of being perceived by her acting colleagues as a story hog, i.e., the next Patinkin? "I wouldn't be surprised if the cast was initially wary," she admits, "saying 'Oh, no, this is not gonna only be about Kate Austin.' I'm also happy to be very light on the show, as long as I feel I am one of the centers." (Credit scholars take note: Lahti and Arkin alternate top billing every other week.)

  With the official go-ahead for a third season announced by CBS last week, Tinker and coexecutive producer Bill D'Elia (who joined the show in March) survey the health of their medical corporation. And Tinker, finding it in satisfactory condition, considers further improvements. "On ER, you're in a hospital where you have first-rate people working at a second-rate institution, and you're doing nothing but trying to stem the tide," he explains by way of contrast. "[On Hope] you have first-rate people working in a first-rate institution. So you have to make a difference." Already there's this big difference in the mood on the set: Hope has a sense of hope. Or as Curtis-Hall puts it, with measured Dr. Hancock-like calmness, "This show has overcome a bunch of obstacles. And now I think our main concerns are (a) Will this show get picked up? (b) Am I still gonna be on the show? and (c) How many words do I get to say?"  

Those are facts, for any actor, that make the difference between life and death.