Note: Three Rivers airs tonight at 9 p.m. eastern. This review discusses plot details in tonight's episode, including the outcome of one of the cases. Those would prefer to remain unspoiled should skip the fifth and sixth paragraphs.
So why all the medical series all of a sudden? It’s not unusual for the success of one show to spawn a wave of shows in a similar style or genre—witness the boom in serialized mysteries in the wake of Lost—but given the relatively quick turnaround time of television, the copycats usually start popping up within about a year. The last big hit medical series was Grey’s Anatomy, which debuted over four years ago. So what’s up with all the Mercy and Trauma and HawthoRNe action? Is it because ER is off the air? Is everyone just slapping a medical show together in hopes of filling whatever emptiness old ER fans might be feeling?
If that’s the case, then CBS’ Three Rivers may stand the best chance of picking up what’s left of the ER audience. It has a larger cast than the other shows, and judging by the first episode the writers plan to wedge in more stories per week. Three Rivers even follows ER's lead by using a single part of a Pittsburgh hospital—the transplant department—as a gateway to the hospital as a whole, and to the varied kinds of patients and staff that pass through. The major difference between Three Rivers and ER is that the new show is on CBS, and thus has that slick, thick approach to genre storytelling that dominates all the network’s crime-and-punishment procedurals. Which is also why Three Rivers is probably bound to be a hit. (That and the fact that it’s on a well-watched network on a well-watched night.)
“Place Of Life” establishes the premise of Three Rivers fairly quickly, by showing the audience both sides of the transplant process. On the “need it” side, we meet a comatose, pregnant woman with a faulty heart, and we meet her husband, who’s told by Three Rivers’ heroic surgeon Dr. Andy Yablonski (played by Alex O’Loughlin) that he needs to sign off on a combination transplant-and-C-section right away or he risks losing his wife and his baby. This is a pretty standard TV medical crisis, but I found it involving, perhaps because both my kids were born with some amount of drama: the first had an elevated heart rate that led to a caesarean and an extended stay in the ICU (followed by a return visit to the hospital a week later because he wasn’t gaining weight); the second was born a week ahead of schedule, before our families arrived to help take care of the firstborn. So I could identify with the dad-to-be in this episode when he reflected on how the scariest day of his life had begun, muttering, “We were going to paint the nursery and watch the Steelers.”