The life and death here is all too real

It's tempting to describe "Hopkins," the six-part ABC News series following the lives of a handful of doctors and surgeons at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital, as "Grey's Anatomy" meets reality television. But that's not what's going on, or at least not quite, for the simple reason that the people who die on "Hopkins" are actually dead, as opposed to voted "off the island." This makes watching "Hopkins" a powerful, unnerving and at times manipulative experience.

Eight years after its precursor, "Hopkins 24/7," presented a more straightforward documentary -- narrated by a reporter, driven by then rare behind-the-scenes footage -- "Hopkins" reflects shifts in the entertainment and news industries, both of which require a new breezy intimacy, the sort of easily digested themes and instant emotional bonding made popular by bloggers and modern memoirists.

So along with the journalistic credibility of unprecedented access, "Hopkins" also has an indie-pop soundtrack and appealing "cast" of young, attractive doctors and surgeons. They serve as their own narrators, often speaking directly to the camera about marital breakdowns, professional shortcomings and the need to urinate at inopportune moments, even as they harvest hearts and lungs or struggle to save the life of a child hit by a car.

Various themes and stories are sculpted in the editing room -- the triumph of illegal immigrant turned brain surgeon Alfred Quinones-Hinojosa, the marital strife of cardiothoracic surgeon Brian Bethea, the straight talking of urologist Karen Boyle -- which gives "Hopkins" the familiar and compelling air of an episodic drama. But they are not actors or participants in a reality show, they're real people (you can tell this instantly by all the glorious flat Baltimore O's). Which means the life-and-death tension wasn't crafted by writers as a necessary ingredient for the dramatic arc. It's actually life or death. Of another human being.

So when we meet, for instance, the nice, young pediatric transport nurse, it's difficult not to shiver a little and reach for the remote. Children in peril are hard enough to bear on made-up shows; watching a young mother try to keep it together as her infant is airlifted from a routine checkup to Hopkins because there's something the matter with his heart definitely takes it out of you.