An Exhausting, Breathless Visit to ‘Wonderland’

Whew!

Is it over yet? Why is my head still aching? Why is my stomach still churning? Why are my eyes still crossed?

If you want an hour of light entertainment, skip “Wonderland,” ABC’s loud rumble of a medical drama about a New York hospital’s psychiatric wards. What anger. What rage. What paranoia.

Yup, and that’s just from watching it.

Initial episodes of “Wonderland” are well made and interesting in spots but exhausting. Facing the champion healers of NBC’s muscular “ER” at 10 p.m., “Wonderland” makes you feel like you’ve been through a car wash without the car. It’s “ER” in a rubber room.

The setting is chaotic Rivervue (think Bellevue) Hospital, which is topsier and turvier than usual when a wild man shoots down cops and pedestrians in Times Square and later commits another heinous act in the emergency room that deeply affects two of the psychiatrists.

Forget about him, though. By the time he arrives, you’ve already been introduced to a rising drum roll of intensity. It swells to general bedlam as embattled doctors appear overmatched by incoherently rambling patients in continuous overlapping dialogues that have everyone appearing to speak at once. And more is coming.

It’s here where Dr. Robert Banger (Ted Levine) is head of forensic psychiatry, where Dr. Neil Harrison (Martin Donovan) specializes in forensics too and where his pregnant wife, Dr. Lyla Garrity (Michelle Forbes), runs the Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program.

“Wonderland” has some nice things going for it, including Garrity’s display of fallibility when fearing that her failure to diagnose a shooter when he appeared at Rivervue days earlier may have cost lives. Meanwhile, Episode 2 persuasively examines whether the gunman is legally sane, and the performances throughout are uniformly good.

For all anyone knows, “Wonderland” may be nailing it regarding accuracy. What it needs most, though, is a little tea break to catch its breath. It turns out, instead, that the doctors’ private lives are nearly as turbulent as their duty on the psychiatric assembly line.

Things appear to go badly for the divorced Banger at a custody hearing for his kids when he allows them to all but undress him as he’s being interviewed, and then uproar from Rivervue intrudes. And Dr. Abe Matthews (Billy Burke), a womanizing psychiatrist, learns from a phone call that his berserk girlfriend is . . .

TRASHING HIS APARTMENT!!!

By this time, you’re more a wreck than some of the patients. What one man tells doctors about his seemingly loopy wife also applies to this series: “It’s all noise, all the time.”

*

* “Wonderland” can be seen Thursdays at 10 p.m. on ABC. The network has not yet rated it.