Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
All Rights Reserved
By ROBERT LLOYD
Los Angeles Times
“Saved,” which begins tonight on TNT, is a rather too insistently intense medical drama that marries Martin Scorsese’s paramedics film “Bringing Out the Dead” to the FX firefighters series “Rescue Me” in a story of a young emergency worker who is only truly balanced on the job. I understand, of course, that neither of those previous works may have actually influenced “Saved"; it’s even possible, if barely, that its creators were ignorant of them completely. But the similarities are there, down to the titles of the two TV shows, and a hand-me-down air permeates tonight’s pilot.
Given that it wants to seem edgy and quirky, “Saved” is remarkably rich in cliche — or perhaps not so remarkably, given that edginess has itself become a kind of cliche. Though the things that occur between its opening and closing credits may all have conceivably happened in our own unscripted world of chaos and harm, the show still plays as a parade of stock situations and characters that seem imposed from without rather than alive from within.
There is something in a script whose first spoken words are “There are two kinds of people in this world” that sets off sirens in my head, and we are treated before its end to such unsurprising surprise moments as the apparently dead person who springs back to life. Still, it’s no worse than average and has Tom Everett Scott in it, which is a nice thing for TV viewers.
Scott, who was charming as a Tom Hanks knockoff in the Hanks-directed “That Thing You Do!,” is also charming here, though pointedly less adorable, as a risk-addicted, semi-self-destructive med-school dropout whose life ping-pongs between his job as a paramedic and his compulsive gambling. He is one of those characters whose need to feel includes the need to feel bad — we saw a lot of his sort back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when Jack Nicholson was young — and, like the alcoholic Denis Leary character in “Rescue Me,” this includes getting beaten up once in a while. TNT programming veep Michael Wright sees him as “a tough-but-charming, flawed, three-dimensional central character who uses the adrenaline rush of the job as a retreat from the complications of a personal life,” and you are free to agree with this assessment.
The show is awash in style, its off-center, time-altered, slightly hallucinogenic look and feel either taken from or remarkably akin to that of “Bringing Out the Dead.” It is set in Portland, Ore., a picturesque city whose visual charms are never fully exploited because the series is actually shot in Vancouver. Through faux-Oregonian Canadian streets, our antiheroes careen from crisis to crisis, and in each case we get a quick photo-book resume of an endangered life flashing before our eyes — a “Six Feet Under” kind of conceit, corny but not ineffective.
Alongside Scott are partner Omari Hardwick, a divorced dad out of touch with the young son he loves, and fellow paramedics Tracy Vilar and Michael McMillian (the inevitable rookie). They have something of the variety-pack quality of a WWII movie platoon. Elizabeth Reaser is Scott’s ex-girlfriend, an ER doctor who, in the way of countless other works of moving-picture fiction, is about to move in with her successful, respectable new boyfriend. He is everything that Scott is not — mathematically, we are not supposed to like him.
The executive producers have the excellent “Nothing Sacred,” “Thief” and “Arrested Development” on their combined resumes. This one isn’t as good.