Mergers, Doctors and Unhealthy Situations

It wasn’t that long ago that CNN and Time magazine were rival news organizations. Now they are close kin, collaborating instead of competing, brought together by the 1996 merger of their parent corporations, Turner Broadcasting Inc. and Time Warner Inc., respectively, in a further narrowing of independent news sources.

Not a healthy trend.

The narrowing occurs most profoundly on “Impact,” Sunday’s new CNN newsmagazine that bills itself as “CNN & Time on Special Assignment” while combining the 24-hour news network’s resources with those of the venerable weekly magazine, family style.

In fact, this seems to be a week for TV partnerships, with ABC Entertainment nuzzling up to the medical establishment in its new prime-time hour, “Vital Signs,” a quasi-reality series whose Thursday night premiere had the feel of “ER” and “Chicago Hope” minus the healing crowd’s human failings.

Just as heroic as the real-life doctors of “Vital Signs,” meanwhile, are the fictional do-gooders of another new series, tonight’s “Crisis Center,” a wearisome hour of relentless urgency on NBC.

Anchored by Bernard Shaw in Washington and Stephen Frazier in Atlanta, “Impact” supplants another CNN magazine show, the oft-enterprising “CNN Presents,” and is headed by the veteran producer Pamela Hill, who was a top executive with that canceled series. In fact, the only visible major difference between the old and new CNN magazine series is that the latter provides Time and some of its reporters space and a spotlight.

The premiere that CNN presents Sunday is not especially distinctive, but does include well-reported pieces about the pervasiveness of the drug trade in Tijuana, the plight of female employees at a Minnesota mining company and the birth of the feisty stage show “Rent” and the death of its creator, Jonathan Larson. A fourth segment was unavailable for review.

CNN and Time were not strangers prior to 1996, having done joint political polling since 1989. But that was mere foreplay. They worked together on several news projects last year that included a profile of Time’s Man of the Year, and this year produced a “Time/CNN Investigation” on O.J. Simpson’s finances for the magazine’s Feb. 3 issue. That’s right: CNN, in effect, is now writing for Time.

You wonder where all this coziness will lead. In any case, we now know the identity of Time’s TV Network of the Year.

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For doctors of the year, tune to ABC.

History suggests that viewers like their medicine in rosy doses. Thus the swift exit of NBC’s “Medical Story”--an opinionated drama anthology that focused largely on flaws in medical treatment--only a half season after its 1975 premiere. Nor did NBC’s candid medical anthology “Lifestories” last much longer after a 1990 debut.

But shows celebrating the medical community are not surer bets, given the brief life in 1978 of another NBC series, “Lifeline,” whose camera crews followed actual doctors for months to monitor their noble deeds all the way into the operating room.

So the worshipful tone of “Vital Signs” hardly assures longevity.

It’s virtually a commercial for the American Medical Assn. Not that its real-life subjects don’t deserve the praise they receive here for their medical achievements. On one level, in fact, these heroes are a refreshing counterpoint to frequent negative views of major institutions that predominate in newscasts.

Yet there is a one-note repetitiousness throughout these stories, one super-doctor after another who will look as alien as Plutonians to viewers whose own medical experiences have been less positive.

Even pumped by up-tempo tingly music, “Vital Signs” never seems all that vital.

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“Crisis Center,” meanwhile, is set at the fictional San Francisco Assistance Center, whose young staff offers psychological, legal and medical services to community residents. Based on initial episodes, the staff members might need more help than their clients.

Physician Rick Buckley (Matt Roth) and social worker Lily Gannon (Nia Peeples) are the romantically involved co-directors. Their colleagues include an attorney (Tina Lifford) and drug counselor (Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez).

All of the above are in the series to support Kellie Martin as intern Kathy Goodman, an amazingly sage and composed college student who never loses her halo or her cool while insinuating herself into the lives of everyone she encounters. As a result, she is really irritating.

The performances by the good cast far exceed the pat and predictable scripts that shackle them, which tonight features a distraught, out-of-control father (Dan Lauria) illogically blaming Kathy and the center for his son’s suicide. The contrived rousing climax is really something, a simultaneous emergency childbirth and hostage crisis that endangers everyone at the center, including a group of little girls who have lost their clothes (don’t ask).

And you want crises? Try the angst-burdened staff itself. It turns out that the lawyer has a severely disturbed brother who lives at home, the drug counselor has a recovering addict friend whose fiance appears to abandon her when she’s hospitalized, Lily is looking for her birth parents and Kathy’s grades are plummeting because she’s so obsessed with the center. But what’s a girl to do?

So many crises to confront, so many to resolve before the final credits.

* “Impact” premieres at 6 p.m. Sunday on CNN. “Vital Signs” airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. on ABC (Channels 7 and 3). “Crisis Center” premieres at 10 tonight on NBC (Channel 4).