Entertainment

Doctors on the hot seat

He’s not in an operating room removing someone’s brain tumor, or sitting in as the guest anchor on CNN. He’s not covering a battle in Afghanistan, or trekking to Newtown to report on the children assassinated by a madman’s fusillade of bullets.

Sanjay Gupta is on a Hollywood red carpet.

“Sanjay, Sanjay, look here!” The way the paparazzi shout his name you’d think they were clamoring for Brad or Angie. Instead, they are clamoring for a doctor.

But Gupta is no ordinary doctor.

He’s a handsome, Emmy award-winning chief medical correspondent for CNN, a special correspondent to CBS’ “60 Minutes,” a graduate of the University of Michigan Medical School, a practicing neurosurgeon, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Emory University School of Medicine and an associate chief of the neurosurgery service at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital.

And if you’re not impressed, today he’s in Pasadena, Calif. to talk to television critics about how his first novel, “Monday Mornings,” has been turned into a TV series by David E. Kelley (“LA Law”; “Ally McBeal” and “Boston Legal”).

“Monday Mornings” is puts doctors on the hot seat. The drama centers on a secret meeting among surgeons and a hospital’s top doc administrator, to evaluate and criticize — sometimes in the most brutal terms — the decisions doctors face during life and death crises. Alfred Molina plays Harding Hooten, the doctor who convenes the weekly M&M’s or “Morbidity and Mortality” meetings, with Jamie Bamber, Ving Rhames, Jennifer Finnigan and her real-life husband Jonathan Silverman as well as newcomers Sarayu Rao and Keong Sim as surgeons.

Gupta, 43, based the book on his experiences working at such hospitals as the University of Michigan, W. A. Foote Memorial Hospital, Chelsea Community Hospital and the Semmses Clinic. He says the meetings do exist and that they can have a life-altering effect.

“I have seen some doctors completely paralyzed and never practice medicine again,” he says.

Wearing a blue shirt and suit jacket thrown over one shoulder, Gupta, who was born in Livonia, Mich., looks extremely fit, and, unexpectedly rejuvenated even after doing hours of TV interviews.

“I promise you,” he says with a smile, “I have definitely not gone Hollywood.”

And yet he has been knee-deep in the Hollywood process, helping Kelley bring his book to the screen. Gupta participated in casting sessions, worked on script ideas and even scrubbed in during an operation. During the making of the pilot he even asked the cast to reshoot a surgery scene.

“I told them they had killed the patient by going into one part of the brain too early in the surgery,” he says. “I was sorry I had to make them add another hour to their day, but it couldn’t be fixed in editing.”

It took Gupta 10 years to write “Monday Mornings” because he couldn’t maintain the same cohesive schedule he’d used for writing his two previous non-fiction bestsellers, “Chasing Life” and “Cheating Death.” So he wrote when the spirit moved him — on planes, in hotel rooms, or after being inspired by a certain piece of literature such as “A Confederacy of Dunces.” And he would often read parts of the book to his friends and wife, Rebecca Olson Gupta, the lawyer he married in a traditional Hindu wedding ceremony in 2004. They have three daughters.

Like most Hollywood fairy-tales, “Monday Mornings” began in the office of a Hollywood agent, William Morris Endeavor top TV honcho Rick Rosen.

“If you are both represented by the same agency you are required by law to get in a room together,” laughs Kelley, 56. “But I’d done a medical show before” —the long-running CBS drama “Chicago Hope” — “and wasn’t sure I wanted to get back into the arena. Then I read the book and I was hooked. This was about doctors holding each other accountable. These doctors had the ability to be punched in the face and say ‘Thank you’ to the guy who threw the haymaker. In our business when they reject you, you take it personally.”

Kelley was right about the punch: One cast member who shadowed a doctor at LA County Hospital told me she’d heard stories of surgeons coming to blows at these meetings.

Gupta himself has been on the hot seat half dozen times in the last 20 years, mostly over issues of infection or proper sterilization techniques. “But I’ve never been called up for one of those headline-blaring problems like operating on the wrong side of somebody’s head,” he says.

The meetings that still haunt him are those where a doctor was reckless, or let his own priorities or problems — like a fight with a family member — distract him during surgery.

“Those burn,” Gupta says. “Those are the ones that make your cheeks hot. You never forget them.”

As he pulls back the curtain on the sacrosanct world of doctors who, he says, “are human beings, not superheroes,” Gupta may alienate a few along the way. For instance, Hal Holbrook will guest star in an upcoming episode that deals with the aging and competency. “When pilots turn 42 they are required to have a mandatory physical exam every few months,” Gupta says. “Doctors have no mandatory exam, and no retirement age.”

As Hollywood event comes to a close, Gupta grabs his brief case to rush off to CNN, where he’ll be the substitute anchor tonight on “Anderson Cooper 360.”

A few weeks later, he attends the show’s premiere screening at the LA Soho House, and he’s surrrounded by the press and “Monday Mornings” cast, easily the most popular, celebrity in the room.

“I don’t think there is any danger Sanjay will be swayed by this, but he certainly has a reason to be,” says the soft-spoken Kelley. “He performs surgery every week, flies off to cover a tsunami, writes a novel, and consults on a TV show. Either he has a group of elves doing this for him, or he deserves to be a celebrity. He’s got talent.”

Still, if one recent brush with mistaken identity is any indication, he’s not there yet.

“I kept saying, [my name’s] not Deepak Chopra,” he says, “it’s Sanjay Gupta.”

And then he lets out a big laugh.

MONDAY MORNING

Monday, 10 p.m., TNT