When the first serious premiere of the fall season is a letdown, it’s a bad omen. It makes you think: “Oh, God, they’re all going to be like this.”
Fortunately, I’ve seen enough pilots to know this isn’t really true, but “Red Band Society,” which premieres next Wednesday on Fox, has a terminal case of the cutes. It’s “The Breakfast Club” set in the pediatric ward of LA’s Ocean Park hospital with a collection of stock characters who, aside from one amputee, never exhibit any symptoms of the dreadful diseases they have.
One of the reasons people were looking forward to “Red Band Society,” which derives its name from the wristbands given out by Leo (Charlie Rowe, who can actually act) — the cancer patient who’s been at Ocean Park the longest (hint: he’s probably not going home) — was to see Oscar winner Octavia Spencer head up her own series.
But cast as the one-note, wise-cracking Nurse Jackson — who works alongside Dr. Jack McAndrew (David Annable) — her talents are largely wasted in a role that’s seriously underwritten.
One of the problems here is that the kids in this hospital are sick in name only. What they really are, like the cast of “Glee,” are teenagers on the make. One guy, Dash (Astro), has cystic fibrosis, but he’s moving and grooving around the hospital trying to get a pretty nurse to give him a sponge bath so he can propose that she help him not die a virgin (cute, right?). Another patient, Jordi (Nolan Sotillo), has osteo sarcoma — that’s leg cancer — but he doesn’t even limp; he runs up and down the hallways, like he’s in “Chariots of Fire,” ebullient, no doubt, that he may lose a limb. Worst of all is Kara (Zoe Levin), the churlish, blond, white cheerleader we have only seen in dozens of movies and TV shows. She insults everyone in sight and then her parents get the bad news: the poor creature is suffering from (bet you haven’t figured this one out yet) heart failure.
There’s nothing wrong with these kids that an overdose of saccharine won’t cure. The feelgood message of this show is so relentlessly upbeat — like the music that nearly drowns out every scene — that one patient who’s in coma, and only communicates by voiceover, proclaims, “Everyone thinks when you go to a hospital, life stops. But it’s just the opposite: Life starts!”
This is LA writing at its worst. And if the fates are truly against us, and this series gets a full-season order, we can expect some of these patients not to make it, right? So life will indeed stop.