Though I don't have a television…

I was in Las Vegas recently and got to watch a preview of a show called Trauma. If you hit the link and scroll down, you can watch a clip. NBC has picked the show up for its new line-up.

I’ll be very interested to see how well the show does.

I watched the pilot episode and thought it was a complete Dog. The two female characters are the only vaguely sympathetic characters. One is a feminist-struggling-against-the-male-dominated-world-of-pilots character and, oh by the way she’s Hispanic (just to hit that demographic). The other is a paramedic with a heart of gold, who ought to be a doctor, who used to be a slut before a tragic accident a year before in which some fellow workers were killed, including a guy she’d been doing in the back of the ambulance twenty minutes earlier. And she would have been on the crashed helicopter, save for Rabbit refusing to let her in the aircraft.

Rabbit is the male lead. I hated this guy. He had the Val Kilmeresque attitude from Top Gun, but all he does is sit in a helicopter and perform unauthorized procedures in the air. And we know he’s tortured because he survived the crash (proving that only the good die young). In the pilot he is a pure asshole, except when he’s drunk and tells a friend he’ll be there for him, in the most incredibly insincere and shallow scene on TV—the kind that makes Sham-wow ads look like they were written by Shakespeare. To be quite honest, when the crash happened at the start of the pilot, and it looked as if Rabbit had been killed, I was thinking the show had potential.

So Rabbit now thinks he can’t be killed, which means he, a paramedic who has to piece folks back together after horrible car accidents, drives like a freaking maniac, while drunk. In the streets of San Francisco, he takes the open door off a parked car—and one of the fingers of the guy opening the door. They get paramedics and the police there, and Rabbit talks them not into pressing charges, since the guy who lost his finger was drunk and thinks it’s all his fault anyway.

Other characters: a Yoda-esque older doctor, a rock-a-billy guy and an African-American paramedic who is wracked with survivor guilt, which he copes with by having multiple affairs and hitting on cute women he’s helped with minor injuries.

Production values bit on the show I saw, but will probably be refined in the final.

I don’t know if this show will make it. If it does, either they’ll be recasting or rewriting. A. LOT.