Women’s Issues Are the Pulse of ‘HeartBeat’

Male-minded TV has always demeaned females, mostly through omission--in effect portraying the majority gender as minor and insignificant.

Comedies are TV’s so-called femme ghetto, the chunk of prime time where females have their highest profile. Even here, however, male-centered series outnumber female-centered series roughly two to one.

And the percentage of drama series built around female characters, compared with males, is still smaller--a trifle. There simply are none beyond “Cagney & Lacey” and “Murder, She Wrote” on CBS and “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” NBC’s exhilarating half-hour about a charming but unfulfilled 35-year-old woman whose underlying melancholia is merely punctuated by comedy. “Molly Dodd” has been on a 10-month hiatus, but resumes at 9:30 p.m. Thursdays (on Channels 4, 36 and 39) starting this week.

The predominant 19th-Century mind-set among male programming executives seems to be that most viewers will accept series centering only on funny women--not serious women--on a weekly basis.

So on one level, at least, ABC’s strikingly candid medical series “HeartBeat”--premiering in two-hour form at 9 tonight on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42, hereafter to air Wednesdays at 10 p.m. in a six-episode trial--merits a standing ovation for its relative boldness. Far from presenting females as parenthetical appendages, it’s about women and, in large part, by women: executive producer Esther Shapiro and creator/head writer/co-producer Sara Davidson. And it sets marks for openness.

On another level, however, “HeartBeat” is so conventionally mounted--resurrecting the familiar revolving wheel of simultaneous plots that are mostly resolved within the allotted time period--that its dramatic appeal is stunted.

“HeartBeat” is not prime time’s first female-oriented medical series. It follows “The Nurses” (1962-65), 1981’s short-lived “Nurse” and 1986’s also short-lived “Kay O’Brien,” all on CBS. But at least it doesn’t have a sage patriarch looming in the background. (In fact, “The Nurses” later became “The Doctors and the Nurses,” the doctors naturally being male.) That’s a major step forward in a medium where male authority figures--from commercials to game shows to public-affairs series to network news anchors--still dominate.

The setting of “HeartBeat” is Women’s Medical Arts, a clinic founded by women, one that not only gives patients a role in choosing their treatment, but also encourages patient-doctor communications on a first-name basis.

There’s gynecologist Joanne Springsteen (Kate Mulgrew), an obsessive careerist trying to find room in her life for romance. There’s mini-skirted surgeon Eve Autry (Laura Johnson), who appears wary of men. There’s playful nurse-practitioner Marilyn McGrath (Gail Strickland). There’s Cory Banks (Lynn Whitfield), trying to balance her dual career as physician and mother.

On the male side, staff psychiatrist Stan Gorshalk (Ray Baker) has marital problems at home, fertility specialist Paul Jared (Carrell Larson) is the clinic’s whimsical relief, and pediatrician Leo Rosetti (Ben Masters) has a tenuous romance going with the up-tight Springsteen.

The doctors of Women’s Medical Arts set TV standards for approaching women’s medical issues straight on, as tonight’s crises range from the somber to the lighthearted.

A young woman with a malignant tumor must choose between a lumpectomy and breast removal. Dr. Autry favors saving the breast, differing with the woman’s family doctor, a man who fails to understand “the big deal” about a woman’s breast: “What is it? What’s it good for? It’s nothing more than a piece of fat.”

Meanwhile, an infertile couple chooses artificial insemination. Davidson’s script treats the subject humorously and frankly. After artificially inseminating the woman, nurse McGrath hints that the patient should immediately masturbate to help the process succeed, then discreetly leaves her alone in her room.

“HeartBeat” has a good cast. Yet the medical issues occupying Women’s Medical Arts often seem more realistic than the doctors, who spend a lot of time sitting around and talking about sex--awkwardly and fatuously.

The female doctors, moreover, are more than merely intelligent and skilled. When it comes to patient relations, they are saints--ever warm, sensitive, compassionate and understanding. Even if it’s true that female physicians are nicer to patients, “HeartBeat” carries bedside manner to the revolutionary extreme, raising the kind of high expectations for real-life doctors that will ruin things for the medical profession.