HOLLYWOOD, CA.—In its latest attempt to bolster ratings and revenue, TLC, one of the many cable networks successfully producing a wide variety of reality shows, has made its mark on the genre by featuring one of two things: celebrities in rehab, or the day-to-day operations of hospital emergency rooms. So on Monday, November 1st , the network will premiere Celebrity ER, its latest creation that will combine both.
“Quite frankly, we couldn’t think of anything else,” said a TLC employee who thought they’d remain nameless. “We’d already produced real-life emergency room stuff, scripted emergency room stuff, what happens in the ambulance before you go to the emergency room, the wackiest cases in emergency room history…” Continued TLC President Eileen O’Neill: “Unless we were prepared to air a show about emergency room doctors driving to work or paying their bills, we needed something new. And who doesn’t love to see washed-up celebs desperate for the limelight? Maybe if David Cassidy would have given a heartbroken little girl in Akron, Ohio an autograph back in 1972, I’d feel different.”
Each Monday night, Celebrity ER will feature the star of a 1970’s television show performing surgery on an unsuspecting emergency room patient. The first episode will reveal what happens when The Partridge Family’s Danny Bonaduce tries to re-set a broken ankle and stitch up an accompanying three-inch gash.
“When our creative team first came to me with the idea, I thought it was a joke,” said O’Neill. “But that night, I couldn’t lose the image of an operating room curtain being pulled back and Richard Simmons walking toward the patient wearing rubber gloves and holding a catheter. If that’s not a ratings grabber, I’m in the wrong business.”
“I gotta’ admit I was a little nervous,” said Bonaduce, who played Danny Partridge from 1970-1973 on ABC. “Not because I had to fix the patient, but because I was double parked and have a bench warrant for a trumped-up Failure to Appear charge.
“I knew the patient would live whether I listened to my Surgery Mentor or not,” continued Bonaduce, his gravelly voice the thirty-year product of too many cigarettes, bourbon and Grape-Nuts. “A broken ankle? That’s nothing. Just wait till you see what happens when Tony Danza uses Defib paddles while standing in a pool of saline solution. It’s a riot. Even the patient, whose heart hadn’t taken a beat for ten minutes, sat up and laughed. They’ll have to change the name of Danza’s show from Who’s The Boss? to Sorry For Your Loss.” Bonaduce threw his head back and laughed…then coughed. “Priceless. I hope they ask me back. I’m dying to route around inside a chest cavity.”
But the American Medical Association (AMA) is concerned that Celebrity ER will minimize the work emergency room physicians perform on a regular basis, and, worse, might give viewers the notion that if a fourth-rate actor can perform timely medical procedures without any formal training, so can they.
“TLC was gracious, forthcoming and, well, stupid enough to invite our [AMA’s] Emergency Surgery Committee to screen the first several episodes of Celebrity ER,” said Igor Tud, a member of the association’s Board of Trustees. “While it is, admittedly, quite entertaining, we don’t want viewers to think this is the way emergency rooms really work. For instance, in the show I never saw anybody waiting for hours to see a doctor while they bled all over the waiting room floor. And where was the indifferent admitting nurse who takes obvious pleasure in telling you there are several other patients ahead of you?”
The only hitch in TLC’s plans for Celebrity ER occurred during the show’s third taping. The network hasn’t decided whether or not to air the episode, which features Jeff Conaway, Danza’s co-star on the 70’s sitcom Taxi, attempting to perform a tonsillectomy.
“I wish one of our overpaid staffers would have done a little more research on Mr. Conoway,” said a visibly disgusted O”Neill. “I didn’t know he’d been abusing drugs and alcohol for the past twenty years. Seeing him jab at that man’s tonsils with a scalpel was terrifying. His hand shook so much he looked like a speed freak with an inner ear infection.” —Citizen Dick Arneson reporting
