Code Black (2015)

Not for the squeamish, but a well-done new medical drama.

The show, based on a 2013 documentary about a real Los Angeles ER trauma bay, rings with crisp dialogue and authoritatively shouted medical jargon in sufficient quantities that you'll never be more than halfway through an episode before you're completely immersed in hypochondriac terror of what your miscreant organs are plotting against you.

It might just do the trick, if its frantic doctors can save the first episode from a deadly case of hammy dialogue.

Though some would probably be happy to have the show compared to the long-running "ER," there are signs that others may be thinking a bit too much of "Grey's Anatomy." If the show lasts, we'll have time to get to know the individual tragedies of the Angels Memorial staffers, so there's no need to burden the pilot with all that clunky exposition.

Code Black is at war with itself, trying to sell its setting's realistically jagged edges even as it files them down to nothing.

As rendered here, none of its medical crises or characters are terribly compelling.

You'll find some fine actors here, Harden and Somerville among them, along with some whose continued employment may strike you as a mystery. Not that it matters much: Dr. Zorba returned from the dead would not have been able to breathe life into this stiff.