Entertainment

BLOOD SHOT

MORE than 30 years ago, Randy Newman wrote a song about how hard it is to live in Baltimore.

That might be as true now as it was then, but despite that (or because of it), little old Baltimore has emerged as some sort of television paradise – a cradle of miracles where TV producers go, toil for a time, and then return to civilization with some of the best TV shows ever made.

The list is short but sweet: “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “The Wire,” and now, “Hopkins,” a seven-part documentary series about Johns Hopkins Hospital, produced by ABC News and having its season finale tonight.

It cheapens this monumental series to describe is as a real-life “ER,” though that description is not inaccurate.

“Hopkins” (and its antecedent, “Hopkins 24/7,” which aired eight years ago) is really the show that scripted dramas such as “ER” wish to be, but never are for the simple reason that real-life stories told this well often trump their fictional counterparts.

“Hopkins” took 4-5 months of almost continuous filming last year, resulting in an estimated 1,500 hours of footage.

The series is a true documentary, with the footage edited and assembled to tell its stories of doctors and their patients without the aid of a star news personality popping up in the hospital’s corridors or outside on the lawn to explain what’s going on.

The cases range from everyday (a man breaks his foot exiting his home from a second floor window after his wife prohibits him from using the front door to go out for a drink) to life-threatening (a six-year-old undergoes emergency heart surgery).

Watching this show can be a wrenching experience, depending on one’s own personal experience with hospitals.

Among other things, this series captures that particular agony of watching a loved one disappear into an operating room for risky surgery and then wondering over the next several hours if the patient will ever be seen alive again.

Congratulations are due to ABC News for producing the kind of documentary series that almost no one else produces anymore. Like a few other shows that have emanated from Baltimore recently, “Hopkins” is the kind of show that represents the best that television can be, but seldom is.

“Hopkins”