TV Guide April 8, 2000 issue
Next Stop, Wonderland
By David HandelmanForget the emergency room – welcome to the psychiatric ward. The extreme hospital drama has arrived.

It’s just another morning on the hospital ward. Doctors Robert Banger (Ted Levine) and Neil Harrison (Martin Donovan) are leading an entourage of medical students on their daily rounds from bed to bed, waking up the patients and assessing their status. Today, there’s a patient who says he’s “depressed.” Banger asks him why. “Something happened,” the man says evasively. Turns out he poured gasoline on his mother and set her on fire.

OK, this isn’t your everyday hospital ward. It’s got prison bars, uniformed guards and signs warning: NO WEAPONS BEYOND THIS POINT. Doctor Banger runs the forensic psychiatric ward of a New York public hospital, tha place where crime suspects displaying mental disorders land between arrest and their ultimate destinations.

Nor is it your everyday network drama series. But Wonderland (Thursdays, 10 P.M./ET), created by former Chicago Hope star Peter Berg, got the go-ahead from ABC to air as an eight-week, mid-season tryout. “There’s no question this is a very risky show for us,” says Lloyd Braun, cochairman of the ABC Entertainment Television Group. “But it’s unlike anything else on television right now.”

The risky, gritty Wonderland further blurs the line between cable and network programming. Like The Sopranos and Oz, the show takes a decidedly non-glossy approach to its volatile subject matter. It’s shot in a documentary, improvisational stye; its writing staff includes literary humorist Mark Leyner and Scott Burns, an advertising executive who had never written for TV before; and it’s filmed in New York on locations that include the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, which radiates an institutional creepiness that set decorators could never fake. Even the actors’ dressing rooms are former solitary confinement cells.

“It’s the real deal,” Levine says with a bit of a shutter. “There’s some ghosts in those walls for sure.” When Berg left ChicagoHope after four years, he swore he was done with hospital drama and was convinced that his taste was too extreme for the networks. (One Hope episode he’d written about family psychoses was deemed so disturbing that CBS has vowed never to rerun it.) Yet just a year later, Berg, 38, is behind an extreme hospital drama on ABC. He was inspired watching the 1975 movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” on TV and, he says, “It occured to me that there’d never been a show that took a realistic approach to the psychiatric concepts of medicine.”

When Berg was 13, his mother, Sally, who voluteered at New York Hospital’s psychiatric unit, introduced him to Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies,” a 1967 documentary about a Massachusetts mental institution that made a profound impression on him. Growing up in Chappaqua, New York, he had always heard about the city’s notorious Bellevue hospital, where the corrections department and psychiatry met. “It represented a scary, forbidden place,” he says, “and there’s something irresistable about scary, forbidden places.”

When Berg got a deal with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment to create a pilot, he spent six months there following the doctors on their rounds. “From the minute I walked in, I was hooked,” he says. “It’s a very dramatic and dynamic place. I felt like I’d stumbled onto some uncharted territory.”

After securing stringent non-disclosure agreements, Bellevue opened its doors to the writers (including veterans of Law & Order and Homicide) and actors (Homicide’s Michelle Forbes, Joelle Carter, Michael Jai White and Billy Burke), who spent time with patients whose sordid crimes had landed them on the covers of New York tabloids. “It was amazing,” recalls Forbes. “I walked away with enormous respect both for the doctors and for patients who are devastatingly ill and have families broken apart by this illness.”

Despite the harrowing backdrop, what will ultimately drive the show will be the doctor characters’ personal struggles. “Their lives are very complicated; there’s a lot of pressure,” says Donovan. “When they get a high-profile case, like subway shovers, they have to deal with the D.A.’s office, the press and all the pressure to, quote-unquote, fry these people. And they have to be able to steer clear of the politics of it and fight for what they believe in.”

The toughest problem has been fashioning plot resolutions. “It’s not like a cop show or a traditional medical show where you can cure a patient or convict a criminal in one episode,” says Berg. “Mental illness is a bit more ambiguous than that. So it’s a curse and a blessing for the show that we’re trying to portray it as realistically as we can.”

But realism still has its limits in network TV. When Berg submitted the pilot to ABC, the brass found some scenes too disturbing. So he wrote and filmed a softer first episode, which emphasized the family lives of the principals. After much debate, the network decided to go with a toned-down version of the original pilot. “It was the best example of what the show is and the version Peter had in his head,” Braun says. “Some scenes were tough for me to watch, too, but it also was extraodinarily gripping television.”

ABC’s view, says Braun, is that “it’s not about mental patients; it’s a much broader show than that. It’s about very multidimentional, flawed and yet heroic characters who work in this world.” Even if it’s toned down, the show is certain to spark debate — which is fine with the cast. “The worst thing you can do,” says Levine, “is be half-baked.”

Besides, Donovan has a foolproof plan for selling Wonderland to the public: “We’re thinking of bringing in Regis to run the hospital.”

Toronto Sun
Actor in wonderland
By CLAIRE BICKLEYYou’d expect Martin Donovan to be disappointed by the cancellation after a mere two episodes of his ABC-TV series, mental hospital drama Wonderland. And you’d be right. But he wasn’t as surprised by that harsh outcome as you might assume.

“I wasn’t totally shocked. This profession is 90% discouragement. It’s 90% rejection and disappointment and bad reviews or people dismissing your work or ignoring it. It’s really not even 10% of the time where you get the rewards,” Donovan told me a few days ago, on the set of Lifetime movie Custody of The Heart.

“Which is why you have to do it for yourself. You have to really love the work. It has to be a very personal thing. If you’re relying solely on outside (feedback), which I’m not saying you don’t need, but if that’s all you’re looking for, you’re going to be a really bitter, disappointed person.”

San Francisco Gate
Next stop, “Wonderland’
By Tim GoodmanABC’s riveting new hospital show is shaping up as TV’s next great dramatic series.

When “ER” first burst onto the scene, it was a mix of supreme drama and over-the-top hospital theatrics – yelling, running, cameras swooshing around the room. The worry then was that even though you couldn’t take your eyes off it, who could bear the clatter?

A lot of people, apparently. “ER” has been the most dominant drama on television since it debuted. With two other hospital dramas already on the schedule – “Chicago Hope” and “City of Angels” – a cynic might say a fourth is overkill. But ABC’s new midseason replacement series, “Wonderland,” is a special kind of hospital drama, one that recalls all the greatness of “ER” without having yet fallen into the soap-operaesque storylines of a tired front-runner. In fact, “Wonderland” is the new “ER,” the fresh take with a twist. Anyone with an inkling that “ER” has played itself out and needs a discharge should take a look at this show’s premiere (10 p.m. Thursday, Channel 7). Yep, a head-to-head battle with the champ – conventional programming wisdom would call that a suicide mission.

However, “Wonderland” is worth skipping “ER” for. It isn’t about ruptured spleens and heart attacks. It’s about the mentally ill, the psychotics and schizophrenics and the severely depressed. It’s about the doctors who take care of these special cases, the so-called gatekeepers holding the barbarians back from society.

Produced, written and directed by Peter Berg (himself an alum of “Chicago Hope,” as well as an independent filmmaker), “Wonderland” is a riveting if challenging bit of television. Berg and a team of writers spent months at New York’s Bellevue hospital, where they were allowed to witness and interview doctors working with the mentally ill. They’ve borrowed storylines from there and have gained a convincing knowledge of psychiatry and its terms, much as “ER” mastered the fine art of yelling for drugs and clinical tools with the right words.

To further the effect of being in what is essentially an asylum, Berg uses hand-held cameras and lets the actors improvise when needed. This gives “Wonderland” a gritty, realistic feel. But the technique also adds a sense of chaos to the viewing experience. Watching “Wonderland” is a sensory overload, as patients scream at the top of their lungs, bang on things, turn TV channels rapidly and provide a kind of non-stop white noise over the show’s dialogue.

Parents who have put to bed unruly children will find no relief here, nor will anyone else seeking to unwind from the day’s work. “Wonderland” makes the frenetic talking-and-walking banter of “The West Wing” look like a mime show.

In fact, “Wonderland” has more in common with Martin Scorsese’s “Bringing Out the Dead” than any hospital drama on TV.

But those who hang in there will discover the potential of television’s next great drama. The doctors and patients in Rivervue Hospital’s psychiatric and emergency wards are an engaging bunch. Dr. Robert Banger (Ted Levine, “Silence of the Lambs”) heads up the forensic psychiatry department. He’s the calmest in the storm – a trait he needs with a crumbling marriagge and the impending custody loss of his two beloved young sons. Levine is brilliant, by the way.

Another forensic specialist is Dr. Neil Harrison (Martin Donovan, “The Opposite of Sex”), who is married to Dr. Lyla Garrity (Michelle Forbes, “Homicide: Life on the Street”). The two are expecting their first child – and for two tightly wound people, that’s just added pressure. Donovan has been wonderful in every movie he’s been in and Forbes’ intensity is her greatest asset. She heads up the Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program – meaning she has to decide if people checking in to the crowded hospital are really disturbed or not. A misread in the pilot leads to the dramatic crux: A mentally ill man who thinks he’s taking orders from Zeus guns down five people in Times Square.

Also in the mix: young Dr. Abe Matthews (Billy Burke), whose womanizing and fear of intimacy sometimes cloud his psychiatric evaluations; Dr. Derrick Hatcher (Michael Jai White), a physician (as opposed to a shrink) at the hospital; and resident Heather Miles (Joelle Carter), who is bright and understanding (and a potential romantic partner to Dr. Matthews). Like any good series, “Wonderland” is littered with smaller characters giving fine performances, and its “crazy people” truly get into their parts.

The writing and acting in this series are superb. And Berg hasn’t tried to tell too many stories too quickly, so we can get to know the characters slowly. That said, the pilot has an explosive subplot that kick starts everything.

If you’ve been attracted to the reality feel of “NYPD Blue” or the fine writing of a show like “The West Wing,” you’ll see the potential in “Wonderland” right away. This thing is just dripping with quality. The question is whether you can adjust to the in-your-face chaos and, more importantly, if you can give up “ER.”

You ought to at least give “Wonderland” a chance. It’s time to switch hospitals.

Philadelphia Inquirer TV Week
Settling Down into Stardom: Martin Donovan of ABC’s Wonderland is glad to have steady work without travel.
By Eirik KnutzenA few years ago, Martin Donovan spent some months on a 100-foot boat moored in the lagoon of a deserted island 600 miles northeast of Papua New Guinea.

Donovan, now featured in the new ABC series Wonderland, was starring opposite Maya Stange in the Australian adventure-drama In A Savage Land, playing a respected anthropologist and his young student-bride chasing Trobrianders and each other all over the South Seas.

“There were no facilities on shore… so the cast and crew stayed on the film equipment-crammed boat for about eight weeks,” says Donovan. “On the third day we were there, we suddenly got hit by enormous swells that seemed to come out of nowhere. In matter of hours, I was deathly seasick, along with a dozen other people.

“It was a strange, strange feeling to be caught in an enormous force of nature – the ship was tossed around like a toy in a bathtub – that we had no explanation for,” he continues. “The next day, we [learned] that everything was due to a tsunami, created by an undersea earthquake.”

Shortly thereafter, Donovan questioned his sanity again while shooting Onegin with Ralph Fiennes in Hungary during the dead of winter. It didn’t take long to get tired of hotel cuisine in Budapest, where chefs often operate on the principle that “if you don’t like the way this meat is boiled, we’ll boil it some more.”

It occurred to him that it would be nice to see his actress wife, Vivian Lanko, on a semi-regular basis, and his sons, 4 and 6 years old, before they entered college.

Donovan, 42, stayed fairly close to home last year, portraying philandering Tom Buchanan to Mira Sorvino’s long-suffering Daisy in The Great Gatsby, to be shown later this year on the cable channel A&E. He also starred opposite Irene Jacobs in a high-intensity independent film, The Pornographer, A Love Story.

A plan eliminating major travel commitments for 2000 was the only thing missing in his life.

That’s when Wonderland, which airs Thursdays at 10pm on ABC, wa pitched into his lap. The one-hour drama series – created by former Chicago Hope star Peter Berg, who also executive-produces along with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer – examines a group of forensic psychiatrists at Rivervue Hospital (a fictional institution loosely patterned after New York’s Bellevue).

Fortunately for the Manhattan-dwelling Donovan, Wonderland’s interiors are shot at a sound stage in Queens and in an unused wing of a psychiatric hospital on Long Island.

He portrays the passionate Dr. Neil Harrison, who deals almost exclusively with the criminally insane. As the series began March 30, Harrison’s wife, Dr. Lyla Garrity (Michelle Forbes), who heads up the hospital’s psychiatric emergency program, was about to deliver the couple’s first child.

Harrison works with chief forensic shrink Robert Banger (Ted Levine), a man battling to keep his head on straight while his marriage is in tatters and a bruising custody battle for his two young sons looms. Rounding out the cast is Derrick Hatcher (Michael Jai White) and psychiatric intern Heather Miles (Joelle Carter).

“Ted [Levine] and I had a good look at the psychiatric ward at Bellevue and the guys who run it,” says Donovan. “No one in that organization is connected to the show, but I learned a lot observing there and met some pretty famous New Yorkers charged with crimes. You’re struck by their normalcy. Nobody is sitting in corners drooling or scratching themselves.

“In terms of the psychiatrists, I was fascinated by the rapport carefully built with each patient,” he says. “There is no judging, no condescension. They have empathy, compassion and respect” for the criminally insane, who “are victims of mental illness, too, regardless of the crimes they committed.”

Donovan is the third of three children born to a Los Angeles-area homemaker and a public school administrator. With a brother who studied psychology and a sister who is a registered nurse, there is plenty to talk about when the family gets together.

Donovan found his calling as an actor while doing a high school production of Bye, Bye Birdie. He spent seven years studying acting at L.A.’s American Theater Arts, financing his studies with odd jobs. “I tried to avoid waiting on tables – I was never good at dealing with the public,” he laughs, “but I’ve mellowed.”

His professional acting debut earned him $50 for recording an answering machine message sounding like a pirate for a treasure hunter. In 1981, he obtained his Screen Actors Guild card as one in a cast of thousands on Masada, the massive mini-series starring Peter Strauss.

Two years later, Donovan and Vivian loaded their 1972 VW Squareback and leisurely drove to New York, visiting friends and relatives along the way. With no immediate broadway prospects, he joined the Cucaracha Theater Company in Tribeca. It didn’t provide a handsome living, but it led to collaboration with film auteur Hal Hartley on six short subjects, including The Book of Life (as Jesus), Trust and Flirt.

The exposure at film festivals paid off with roles in films closer to the mainstream, such as The Portrait of a Lady, Heaven, Hollow Reed, Nadja, Living Out Loud and The Opposite of Sex.

Life is good now, and Donovan is happy to be home – even after 15-hour work days.

“Wonderland is very intense… but the rewards are great.” he says, “especially since the show comes complete with a terrific cast, crew, producers, directors and writers. Most of these elements add up to something far superior to several of the so-called art films I’ve done.

Now I just want to enjoy the simple life for a while, like discovering good restaurants with my wife and hanging out in the park with the kids.”

New York Times
‘Wonderland’: Wrung Out, Strung Out in Bedlam
By CARYN JAMESTo watch “Wonderland,” the unsettling series set in a New York psychiatric hospital, is to step into a world of pure chaos. Everyone races, everyone yells, doctors scream instructions, patients scream delusions, somebody dies, someone is saved and at the end a viewer is wrung out. It is a perverse compliment to say that near the end of the first episode you may wonder if you’ll ever want to enter this hellish atmosphere again.

But the show is so gripping and often so dazzling in its visual command that if you had two episodes on tape (as reviewers did) you might watch them back to back, against your expectations. Whether viewers who have a week to decompress will choose to re-enter a landscape of such excruciating intensity is the big question ABC and “Wonderland” are staring at.

This new series is the anti-”E.R.,” and the fact that it is running opposite that other medical show is the least of the reasons. “Wonderland” defies the conventions of episodic television. When someone dies on “E.R.,” a doctor’s heroic struggle offers redeeming light and uplift. The doctors of “Wonderland” are dedicated, but the very first episode reveals that one has made a medical mistake that will haunt and maybe ruin lives, including her own.

“Wonderland” (originally called “Bellevue” for the hospital where it was researched) is even more directly the anti-”Chicago Hope.” It was created, written and directed by Peter Berg, who played the volatile Billy Kronk on that series. Mr. Berg’s wily new series turns his old one upside down. While the “Chicago Hope” doctors thrive on up-to-the-minute medical wizardry, the psychiatrists of “Wonderland” are simply trying to keep themselves, and their patients, afloat. With “E.R.” aging into predictability, “Chicago Hope” ready for the scrap heap and the new “City of Angels” already a stale imitation of the others (despite its largely black cast), “Wonderland” comes at just the right time to reinvigorate the hospital genre.

Because the patients in “Wonderland” are psychiatric cases, the series has a surreal aura, sparing and effectively used. Here a patient behind barred windows looks down at his slippers and sees a tiny rhino step around them. Because these shots from the patient’s perspective are rare, watching the show is not like existing in some mad state of mind. The effect is more jolting, as if the sanity of the doctors and the illness of the patients were present in the air, at times colliding with a physical force.

What saves the series from total bleakness is the shaky order the doctors impose. They are played by a spectacular cast. Ted Levine is the head of the criminal psychiatry department, Dr. Robert Banger, who is battling his ex-wife for custody of their two small sons. Mr. Levine is still best known for his chilling performance as the killer in “The Silence of the Lambs.” Add to that his ominous deep voice and large presence and Banger is not instantly likable, even though he is first seen making Mickey Mouse-shaped pancakes for his sons. But Mr. Levine is remarkable in making the stern and thoughtful Banger the sympathetic center and conscience of the series without moving an inch toward sentimentality.

Martin Donovan is calmly powerful as Dr. Neil Harrison, also a forensic psychiatrist. His pregnant wife, Dr. Lyla Garrity (Michelle Forbes, once the coroner on “Homicide”), is the head of the emergency department at the hospital, called Rivervue here.

Early in tonight’s premiere, as a man walks through Times Square during morning rush hour, his thoughts are heard in voiceover: he babbles about Zeus and transmitters. Abruptly he takes out a gun and shoots half a dozen people. When the police take him to Rivervue, it turns out that Garrity, cranky, exhausted and wrong, had examined and released him the week before.

There are horrifying scenes in “Wonderland”: the shooting in Times Square and the aftermath in the Rivervue emergency room, when the pregnant Garrity is stabbed in the stomach. But individual scenes are not what make the series hard to take; the relentlessness of its nervous energy does. The cacophony of people yelling seems constant; the jangly visual style mirrors the unrelieved tension and high-voltage impact of the story. When Garrity is attacked, the camera picks up isolated images as she sees them: one patient’s bloody leg, another’s bleeding neck.

Mr. Berg also wrote and directed “Very Bad Things,” a 1998 black comedy about murders. The film didn’t completely pull off its humor, but Mr. Berg was not afraid to go over the edge trying. He brings that daring and a touch of dark wit to “Wonderland,” but the series is also shrewdly connected to the world of real people. When the Times Square killer, Wendell Rickle (Leland Orser), is arrested, he recites his own Miranda rights, “like ‘N.Y.P.D. Blue,’ ” he says. The line astutely captures the way so many people gain any knowledge about the police, and also winks at television cliche’.

“Wonderland” poses significant questions in a dramatic, unpreachy manner. Dr. Banger tries to protect and treat Rickle in the second episode; earlier Dr. Harrison had tried to strangle him. Should a mad killer be forgiven or punished?

And the show sheds light on the rest of network television. This series makes the pablum of typical happy endings understandable; they’re easier. Here, even the commercials may come as a relief from the tension. “Wonderland” asks viewers to be discomfited week after week and trust that the effort will be rewarded. Even the toughest series tend to get soft over time, but for now the uncompromising “Wonderland” is worth every demand it makes.

New York Times
A New Prime-Time Address: The Mental Hospital
By BERNARD WEINRAUBThe scene in the opening episode of ABC’s “Wonderland” is harrowing. A pregnant doctor in the emergency room of a hospital patterned after the forensic psychiatric unit of New York’s Bellevue intervenes when a violently unhinged patient tries to harm himself with a syringe. In the scuffle that follows, the syringe pierces the doctor’s stomach.

“It’s a powerful scene,” said Lloyd Braun, co-chairman of the ABC Television Entertainment Group. “Like any series that pushes the envelope — and this one clearly does — there may be some people who will find the show too intense. But we repeatedly talk at the network about how important it is to take risks with programming. Without question, this show represents a risk.”

The risk, of course, is that a drama about psychiatric patients and their doctors will prove simply too unsettling to network audiences accustomed to sitcom humor and twentysomething angst. Compounding the difficulties for “Wonderland” — it was actually called “Bellevue” before legal concerns prompted the name change — is that the series, which starts on Thursday, will be pitted against NBC’s enduring medical drama, “E.R.”

Yet ABC and the creator of the show, Peter Berg, a film and television actor who spent three seasons as a hockey-playing surgeon on “Chicago Hope,” are convinced that the provocative nature of the show will rivet viewers unaccustomed to such intensity. Then again, are television audiences ready to spend an hour each week with the criminally insane?

The show has attracted attention at the top level of ABC. Mr. Berg recalled that at a personal low point, when he was sure that the network was going to scuttle the show, he was working late in a New York hotel room where he goes to write and escape phones and family distractions. The phone rang, and a woman’s voice announced that Michael Eisner was calling. Mr. Berg, thinking it was a friend needling him, shouted an expletive and hung up. Minutes later, the phone rang again, and a man’s voice said sternly: “Don’t hang up! This is Michael Eisner.” Mr. Eisner is chairman of the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC.

“I had the most productive conversation with him about the show in terms of its strengths and weaknesses,” Mr. Berg said. “Eisner has been tremendously supportive. He said he felt that America was not ready to sit down with a show that was entirely about the mentally ill, and if we added an emergency room set with an emergency room physician, we would have some sort of portal that felt familiar to an audience.”

“Wonderland” is set in the psychiatric and emergency rooms of a fictional New York hospital called Rivervue. (It was filmed mostly in an abandoned building at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens.) The series deals specifically with forensic psychiatry — that is, the treatment of mental patients who have committed crimes. For this, Mr. Berg had the cooperation of Dr. Robert H. Berger, director of Bellevue’s Forensic Psychiatry Service, and Dr. Alexander Sasha Bardey, a clinical and forensic psychiatrist at the hospital.

Mr. Berg, who is 37, said the idea for the show had been tugging at him for years. When he was a teenager, growing up in Chappaqua, N.Y., his mother, Sally Berg, a homemaker, began doing volunteer work in a psychiatric hospital in White Plains.

“I watched her transform herself from a suburban housewife to a volunteer psychiatrist — and she was exhilarated,” said Mr. Berg, who lives in New York with his wife, Elizabeth Rogers, a public relations executive for Calvin Klein, and their 4-month-old son, Emmett. “She came home with daily reports about the patients, the staff, the issues. And it had some kind of imprint on my consciousness.”

Years later, while Mr. Berg was performing in “Chicago Hope,” he saw the Frederick Wiseman documentary “Titicut Follies,” about a state prison for the criminally insane. “I was sort of shocked, horrified and intrigued at the same time,” he said. At a meeting with Imagine Television, Mr. Berg proposed a show about a psychiatic hospital. “I couldn’t recall it ever having been done — especially in a way that was realistic and honest,” he said.

Bellevue was selected because of its preeminent reputation, and Mr. Berg spent nearly seven months at the forensic psychiatric unit observing and taking notes. But getting into Bellevue was not easy.

Dr. Berger had been extremely reluctant to allow Mr. Berg to, essentially, hang around. Screenwriters and novelists who had made similar requests in the past were granted only a brief tour.

“Peter told me he wanted to present to the public what mental illness really is and not to whitewash it in any way,” Dr. Berger said. “He impressed me. He was geniune. And he hasn’t proven me wrong yet.”

Dr. Bardey said that depictions of mental hospitals in films are generally inept. “People have a very, very two-dimensional notion of what mental illness is,” he said. “The depictions are often way out there — like cartoons. Very rarely is individual pathology made accessible.”

Some of the patients in the series were inspired by the kinds of people Mr. Berg saw at Bellevue — although he and the psychiatrists, who have seen several episodes, said there were no breaches of confidentiality. Patients in the opening show range from a Wall Street broker who had tried to kill himself to a young man who bit off his mother’s thumb. Dr. Berger said that the story lines are realistic, but that situations are sometimes unrealistically condensed because of time strictures.

As would be expected, the plots also involve the personal lives of the doctors. One of them is fighting for custody of his small sons; another is struggling with single parenthood. A third is a womanizer, inside and outside the hospital. (Mr. Berg said that ABC raised more objections to a brief but steamy sex scene between the doctor and a girlfriend in the opening episode than to the violent behavior of the patients.)

Mr. Berg, who does not act in the new show, made his feature film writing and directing debut in 1998 with “Very Bad Things,” a violent comedy with Cameron Diaz and Christian Slater. Casting “Wonderland” presented an unusual hazard, Mr. Berg said. It seems that many of the actors who sought roles as patients had seen Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man” way too many times. In the end, he said, many of those who were selected, often from the New York stage, knew something about mental illness because, through friends or family members, they had been touched by it.

The cast includes Martin Donovan (“The Opposite of Sex”), whose character is based loosely on Dr. Berger. Mr. Donovan said that everyone on the show understood the pitfalls of turning it into something overwrought and not truthful, of turning the patients into monsters. “There’s no moralizing here,” he said. “These doctors have tremendous compassion for the patients and passion for the work. Their job is to get at what makes these people tick and what has gone wrong — is it chemical, is it treatable, how severe is it, are they, in fact, ill or faking it?”

Dr. Berger, who has worked at Bellevue for 23 years, owns up to being stirred by the show. “Every time I see the pilot, I don’t know, it sounds corny, but I get chills when, after the patient has been so obstructionist and agitated and against treatment, I hear him say, ‘I’ve got this problem; you think you can help me?’ I feel like hugging him.”

Mr. Berg, the actors and producers are, not surprisingly, apprehensive about facing “E.R.” One reason for the unenviable time slot is that ABC’s schedule revolves around the ever-present “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” and only a handful of hours are available. And, for their part, the producers are persuaded that “E.R.” may be getting a little tired.

“Sure, it’s a difficult time slot for us, but so many people say they don’t watch ‘E.R.’ anymore,” said Tony Krantz, the chief executive of Imagine Television, which is producing the show along with Touchstone Television. “These people who watched ‘E.R.’ might be interested in checking the 21st-century version of a medical show.”

Mr. Berg said that nearly every “Wonderland” episode presented to ABC executives has provoked friction with the network. “We keep getting calls saying, ‘it’s just too intense, too disturbing, can you take the edge off?’ Every show. ‘Tone this down. Ease back. Don’t let this patient get too upset.’ ”

In the end, though, Mr. Berg has few complaints. “It’s an odd marriage,” he said. “Walt Disney and a show about the insane: we aren’t necessarily the most obvious of bedfellows.”

Mr. Braun, at ABC, put it another way: “We feel we have a unique program — very fresh and very risky. Are there concerns? Yes. Are we proud of it? Yes.”