Hopkins

The best unscripted show on commercial television this season, which you may correctly point out is faint praise; but in this case, it's not.

Having shot more than 1,500 hours of footage, the crew mostly eradicates the conspicuous influence of the filmmakers' presence, capturing harrowing moments graced by genuine humanity.

There's something about the terrible lighting, those horrible curtain dividers, the washed-out gowns that makes every patient seem extraordinarily vulnerable. Which, of course, they are, as are we all, including the men and women who provide our last line of defense in this life. This is precisely the stuff of great drama and of great documentary, but it gets a little troublesome when combining the two.

As a follow-up to the groundbreaking summer series "Hopkins 24/7" that ran nearly eight years ago, this revisit to the medical center is, if anything, even more grounded in authenticity and honesty, even if it sometimes feels compelled to pile on the soapy elements.

The deeper bow to the dictates of prime-time storytelling in this return to Hopkins by executive producer Terence Wrong and his ABC News documentary team isn't a bad thing. In fact, the choices made by Wrong and his digitally armed filmmaking troops result in a faster-paced, more engaging series.

If you can get past the blatant attempts to sell an ABC News production to fans of ABC dramas--prepare yourself for a lot of going-into-commercial cliffhangers where the surgical patients don't seem to be waking up--Hopkins is a rewarding, and often surprising, experience.

The new version bears less of a resemblance to “ER”-styled medical drama of the 2000 “Hopkins” than it does to “The Hills,” the MTV sensation that introduced a whole new visual vocabulary to unscripted TV. The stories still involve people being treated at Hopkins, of course, but what’s striking is how much time is spent outside the hospital with the docs and their families.