Strong Acting Energizes ‘Gideon’s Crossing’

ABC’s “Gideon’s Crossing” is two for the price of one.

On the surface, it’s just what prime time doesn’t need. That would be yet another hospital drama juggling universal themes of life, death and comedy, one advertising insights about the human condition as elite doctors, residents and interns coexist uneasily while treating an assembly line of quirky patients.

Very nice, but two or three of those a year are enough.

As chief of experimental medicine at a Boston teaching hospital, Benjamin Gideon himself is a stock character, in a sense. Brilliant and highly principled, of course. A steely exterior that terrifies rookie doctors, of course. Yet also caring and compassionate. And naturally, when self-doubts arise, there’s an understanding mentor to give him wise counsel.

So much for the routine, though.

This familiar package notwithstanding, the premiere of “Gideon’s Crossing” delivers a complex and challenging main story of moral ambiguity as well as stunning performances by Andre Braugher as Gideon, Bruce McGill as a despotic patient with seemingly untreatable cancer and Russell Hornsby as chief resident Aaron Boies.

In addition, the actors and viewers will have the hour largely to themselves, for ABC says Johnson & Johnson, the premiere’s sole network sponsor, is not running commercials.

You sense from the cinematic intensity of its opening encounter between doctor and patient that “Gideon’s Crossing” is hardly chump change. That has Kirk, the venture capitalist apparently facing death from cancer, giving Gideon a tongue lashing while trying to provoke and bully him into granting him risky experimental treatment for which he is not a good candidate.

The rapid dialogue, editing and extreme close-ups of the superb actors give these and other sequences a tone of urgency that extends even through the inevitable subplots, a couple inanely goofy, that touch other doctors. The best of these has Boies in a seething clash with a mother who has been neglecting her sick child.

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The transfixing characters of McGill and Braugher (one of the most commanding actors anywhere) own most of this hour, though, as widower Gideon’s curious alliance with the dark, mysterious, distasteful Kirk evokes painful memories of his own wife’s death from cancer a year earlier.

The story is a journey, one whose provocative ending has you wondering long after the final credits what it all meant and how you would have responded to Kirk were you his doctor. Enigma--another welcome departure for “Gideon’s Crossing.”

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* “Gideon’s Crossing” premieres tonight at 10 on ABC. The network has rated it TV-14-L (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with special advisories for coarse language).