by Daniel Frankel
January 13, 1999, 5:45 p.m. PT
A new condition is sweeping through the ranks of TV doctors—Astronaut Fever. In an eerie ongoing plot similarity between eerily similar hospital dramas ER and Chicago Hope resident doctors think they've got the right stuff.
And producers of the shows can't seem to explain how they came up with the same story arc--one of their main characters getting a space shuttle "payload specialist" gig and going into space--at the same time.
On CBS' Chicago Hope, it's Emmy-winning Christine Lahti's Dr. Kate Austin slowly but surely getting ready to swap her surgical gloves and smock for full-body NASA Kevlar by the end of the season.
And on NBC's also-Chicago-based ER, it's Anthony Edwards' Dr Mark Greene getting recruited by the space agency for possible orbit. (Seems Dr. Greene tried to be an astronaut before signing on at Cook County General. It's unknown if the character will ever actually blast off.)
"We're pretty dismayed over here that all of a sudden they come up with the same story line," Chicago Hope executive producer Bill D'Elia tells the Los Angeles Times.
And while he won't directly accuse rival producers for the higher-rated NBC drama of cribbing his show's ideas--"I won't allow myself to believe it," he explains--D'Elia does acknowledge the coincidence."[It's] amusing and surprising that of all the stories in the universe, that we could share something that is so out there as an idea in the first place."
Representatives from ER and NBC refused comment on the matter.
Maybe because it's not a crib job--or really such a coincidence. After all, in Hollywood (or nearby Burbank) a lot of people eat lunch at a lot of the same places. And different producers get pitched by a lot of the same writers.
Maybe that explains how two major motion pictures about apocalyptic space rocks can get released within a couple of months of each other; or how two digitally animated ants flicks can be produced at roughly the same time; or how two television hospital dramas--yep, ER and Chicago Hope--can air shows in 1996 featuring one of their characters held hostage in a grocery store. "It makes you wonder," says D'Elia tells the paper.
In any event, D'Elia's colleague, Chicago Hope co-executive producer Dawn Prestwich, says that there's an up side to the shows sharing themes. Seems a TV critic told her recently that ER would never do a show with such a ridiculous plotline as having one of its surgeons launched into orbit. "After last week's ER, we had to fight the urge to call him and say, 'Uh, did you catch ER last night?' "