TV GUIDE: Review: Thursday TV in the Silly Season
Jun 7, 2012
by Matt Roush
With new summer programming like what's on display tonight, it's enough to make you miss reruns. (Well, hello, CBS! We can always count on you to do things the traditional way — at least until Big Brother returns next month.)
You could do worse than re-watching Leonard's date with Penny on The Big Bang Theory, or Person of Interest's Reese protecting Astro from last season's The X Factor or Cho's first meeting with Samaire Armstrong on The Mentalist. You could do far worse...
... Tonight's new scripted option isn't operating on a much higher plane. NBC's Saving Hope (9/8c), the latest Canadian wannabe to find its way cheaply onto a network's schedule, feels like CBS' defunct A Gifted Man with a side of lesser Grey's Anatomy. In other words, another uneasy mix of the spiritual and the medical. Not since Denny's ghost haunted Seattle Grace has there been a more irritating out-of-body gimmick than what fuels this hokey import. A cocky chief surgeon (Stargate's Michael Shanks, his affable charm thoroughly wasted here) goes into a coma after a car accident en route to wed with his fellow surgeon bride (Smallville's Erica Durance), and his spirit wanders the hospital's halls in a new state of preachy enlightenment: "What if we did get to know our patients? ... Would it help us? Would it help them?" Would a script doctor help? You can't accuse the cast, including The Vampire Diaries' Daniel Gillies (Elijah) as Durance's hotshot ex, of being hard to look at. It's what they're given to do that makes you lose hope...
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