New ‘Hospital’ Needs a Care Unit

Walk into any children’s hospital and you’re bound to come upon a gut-wrenching, heart-tugging, tragic or joyful story in a matter of minutes. The problem for a filmmaker is how to tell this story without drowning the viewer in an emotional swamp. Tonight’s first installment of the PBS series “Children’s Hospital” throws off plenty of emotion, along with some graphic footage. There are two lovable children--a 10-month-old baby named Christian and an energetic, older boy named Quantell--both in need of liver transplants.

But the show--set at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital--leaps into the lives of these children and their families too abruptly. We don’t have time to learn who exactly they are and why we are supposed to care about them right off the bat.

Those who stick with it past the first half of the hourlong episode, “Decisions” (9 p.m. KCET and KVCR) eventually will come to have strong feelings for adorable Christian, whose older brother already had a liver transplant and is thriving, and Quantell, whose good-natured candor makes him quite the charmer. The trick is to stay with it that long.

They say timing is everything, and “Children’s Hospital” has the misfortune of following in the footsteps of ABC’s “Houston Medical,” which began last week and is probably the best medical documentary in some time.

There are many differences between the two shows, but to name the most obvious: character development and something journalists call a nut graph--that is, a paragraph that lets the reader/viewer know why they should care about what they are watching. In television or film, these elements must be incorporated into the storytelling. “Houston Medical” does this effectively. “Children’s Hospital” doesn’t.