A Healing Environment

Lifetime’s new medical drama, “Strong Medicine,” was born a few years ago from executive producer Whoopi Goldberg’s experience in the hospital delivery room where she witnessed the arrival of her grandson.

“She was just blown away by all the incredible technology, and women doctors,” relates the series’ other executive producer, Tammy Ader (“Party of Five”).

“The story goes that she called her agent from the delivery room saying, ‘This is a story we have to do.’*”

When Goldberg and Ader, who built a reputation on “Northern Exposure,” “Sisters” and “thirtysomething” as someone who excelled in writing strong women, sat down to talk, the idea for the series took shape. “We are breaking new ground here,” says Ader, “[with] the first women’s medical drama from a women’s point of view.”

Cable’s Lifetime channel, with its programming mandate of television for women, seemed like a good fit.

“Strong Medicine” stars Janine Turner (“Northern Exposure”) as Dr. Dana Stowe, a brilliant Harvard-educated surgeon who heads up research at a prestigious Philadelphia hospital; and Rosa Blasi (“Noreiga: God’s Favorite”) as Dr. Luisa “Lu” Delgado, a passionate young Latina doctor who runs an inner-city clinic. Philip Casnoff is also featured.

The premiere episode finds these two driven women--with polar opposite opinions on the practice of medicine--thrown together in an effort to keep the clinic afloat. Goldberg appears in the first episode as a highly regarded physician--and the catalyst forcing the two doctors to work together. Her character is currently written into about four more episodes.

The series will look at the lives of these highly intense doctors, as well as explore the ethical issues of modern medicine. The second episode, for example, deals with a wealthy infertile couple who decide they don’t want the child that a surrogate mother is carrying for them because the fetus has brain damage.

“It is something that could only happen in the year 2000 because of the incredible technology,” Ader says. “This is a child, due to technology, who has three parents, but, in truth, this child has no parents. What does our doctor do?”

Despite much critical acclaim during her “Northern Exposure” stint, Turner had no desire to return to hourlong series TV. “[My agents] were kind of forbidden to send me anything that was an hour,” says Turner, who lives on a 300-acre ranch in Texas. But she found the script was irresistible.

Though in the first episode, Turner’s Dr. Stowe is a terse and distant doctor, she “has a lot of colors,” the actress says. “In the script she had sensuality and romance and humor and banter ... it’s going to manifest itself in the other episodes.’

Turner’s Dr. Stowe is based on the doctor who delivered the actress’ daughter, Juliette, now a toddler. “She’s very classy, very intelligent and she has a lot of spunk,” Turner says. “My mother said, ‘Don’t you remember when you gave birth she showed up in scrubs and red high-heeled shoes?’ So I wear red pumps now whenever [my character] goes into surgery.”

Blasi’s character represents the flip-side, a doctor who is driven but passionate and accessible to her patients. But it was Dr. Delgado’s flaws that Blasi relished. “She mostly has flaws,” she says, laughing. To get a feel for a walk-in women’s clinic, the Chicago-born actress visited one in the San Fernando Valley. But Blasi credits the emergency room nurse and paramedic who are advisors on the set for helping her gain insight into Dr. Delgado.

As the episodes unfold, the tension between the two doctors will continue. It’s also a convenient dramatic device allowing the writers to use the characters’ opposing points of view to analyze issues from both sides.

“My favorite episodes are where Dr. Stowe says something and you go, ‘Well, that is absolutely right. Drug abusers make lousy mothers,’*” says Ader. “And then Dr. Delgado says, ‘But if I report every drug abusing mother to social services, they won’t come to me to get any prenatal care at all.’ You then say, ‘She’s right.’

“We are going to keep that conflict completely alive. They are not going to like each other, but they are going to come to respect and learn from and affect each other.”

*

“Strong Medicine” premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on Lifetime. The network has rated it TV-PG-DL (may be unsuitable for younger children with special advisories for coarse dialogue and suggestive language).