NBC’s take on the real world….. umm….. yeah….
For nine years we produced TRAUMA, Life in the ER, a series for TLC, and for many years their top-rated show.
The thing is still on in reruns all over cable.
For four of those years we produced Paramedics, a reality spin-off of the Trauma series.
Trauma took place in hospital ERs; Paramedics in the ambulances that fed them.
So it was with a bit of interest that I noted that NBC was running a new series, TRAUMA.
This is scripted drama as opposed to reality, but the concept is still very much the same.
It follows, in theory, the lives of a paramedic crew in San Francisco.
This was ironic because I shot a series of Paramedics shows in San Francisco. We spent many days and nights riding shotgun with the SFFD, the San Francisco Fire Department, because they ran the paramedics units.
Both were successful series because the adrenalin rush is real, and you can’t get greater tension. Most of this is over life and death. Real life and death. And it comes wave after wave after wave.
I remember one night when we were with the San Francisco paramedics and we got a call at about 3AM to come to an apartment where a man had had a heart attack.
The thing about paramedics is, they go.
And they can be walking into just about anything. And the fact that they are unarmed and carry narcotics means that anyone with a gun and a notion to hold them up could call at any moment. But they go anyway.
In this case, it meant a five flight walk-up in the Tenderloin.  A man was laying on the floor. Not moving.
He had suffered a heart attack and was dying. His wife was in hysterics. Really out of control.
Those guys worked on this guy… CPR, lines in.. and they worked on him while they carried him down five flights of stairs into the ambulance and kept him going while they sped to the hospital, with the wife in the back, still going nuts.
He made it.
Barely.
But he made it.
This is drama.
When I saw what NBC did, (see above), it was pretty disappointing.
Helicopters blow up apparently on a regular basis. Tankers explode every few feet on the freeway. I am sure there is a weekly terrorist incident as well, and the paramedics, from what I can tell from the promo? Arrogant. Cocky. Loudmothed.
That may be the way LA actors are, but it sure wasn’t my experience with the SF Paramedics.
And you don’t need helicopters crashing into office buildings in balls of flame to build tension.
Saving a life is more than enough.
I think.
But what do I know.
These kinds of cheap thrills do two things, neither of them I think good:
First, they devalue what the real people do, which is more than enough if you did it right.
Second, like an adrenalin junkie, they create a kind of culture where we crave for more and more stimulation, because the last fix is now ‘boring’ or ‘too slow’.
I haven’t seen the show. Only the trailer. But based on the trailer, I don’t think I will be watching.
