{"id":64,"date":"2001-11-07T15:13:47","date_gmt":"2001-11-07T22:13:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/?p=64"},"modified":"2001-11-07T15:13:47","modified_gmt":"2001-11-07T22:13:47","slug":"wonderland-wrung-out-strung-out-in-bedlam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/?p=64","title":{"rendered":"‘Wonderland’: Wrung Out, Strung Out in Bedlam"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York Times<\/em>
\n‘Wonderland’: Wrung Out, Strung Out in Bedlam <\/strong>
\nBy 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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’.<\/p>\n

“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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[34],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}