Fox Prescribes ‘Medicine Ball’ for Youth

It had to happen. And if it did have to happen, it had to happen on Fox.

“ER” meets “Melrose Place.”

There’s a “young” component in nearly everything Fox creates for prime time. What’s ahead, “The Young Mafia”? “The Young Hit Men”? “The Young Vampires”? “The Young Spot Welders”?

For now, it’s the junior lab coats of “Medicine Ball,” tonight’s new Fox series about residents at Bayview Medical Center, where humor and heartache coexist subtly. Sure, like getting a medicine ball in the head.

You pulsate, you vibrate, you oscillate, you palpitate, you fibrillate. Why? Because the action at Bayview is hot, hot, hot.

It’s where a 42-year-old patient, having just learned that his biological parents are Jewish, gets an erection when examined by a female resident with Farrah Fawcett hair (Jensen Daggett) in preparation for being circumcised. (And, hey, what a bris.) It’s where a neurotic resident (Donal Logue) goes to pieces when ordered to inform a woman that her husband unexpectedly died after being brought in with a hernia. It’s where a boy-next-door resident (Harrison Pruett) acts boldly to stop the spread of . . . THE PLAGUE!!!

There’s the beautiful young resident who thoroughly enjoys life. The resident whose warm bedside manner and dry wit mask his shyness. The long-haired hunk of a senior resident who plays sax in a jazz club. The stern-but-sensitive single-father senior resident. The program chief who must balance his compassion for his young doctors with his need to enforce hospital policy. Look, somebody’s gotta do it.

The residents suffer, they serve and, when high camp is called for, they walk as a group in slow motion. And what do Bayview’s gal residents talk about on their break?

GUYS!!!

Enjoy.

* “Medicine Ball” premieres at 9 tonight on Fox (Channels 11 and 6).