The most hotly anticipated ratings battle of the new television season takes place at 10 p.m. EDT Thursdays, between the NBC warhorse hospital series “ER” and the up-and-coming CBS crime drama “Without a Trace.”
Over the summer, “Trace” repeats were on a popularity binge, outdrawing “ER” replays by so much that the younger series was able to pull its season average, covering last September to this, to within one ratings point, or about 10 percent, of the longstanding NBC hit.
Now comes the new season, in which “ER” is expected to get a boost, not so much from the cast addition of Parminder Nagra (“Bend It Like Beckham”), but because the drama’s serialized nature means it does much better when original episodes air.
But based on the premiere hours of each, the 10th-season “ER” has a real battle on its hands. Its season opener is more of the same doctor-soap-opera and kids-in-medical-crisis business that felt old and tired five years ago.
Carter is back from his dangerous medical mission to the Congo, despite actor Noah Wyle’s probably fervent wish that he’d land another gig and his character could get killed off in the violence there.
Old doctors are flirting with new doctors, making other old doctors jealous. Powerful doctors are being mean to those with less power. Great doctoring averts death, rapid-fire terminology suggests authenticity, and a too-slow remodeling means the ER is – get this – a really harrowing, confusing place in which to practice.
In other words: Ho. Hum.
“Without a Trace,”on the other hand, delivers a corker of a second-season premiere, one of the finest episodes in an already impressive collection of them.
Anthony LaPaglia’s FBI missing-persons team is called on to track a bus full of children that goes missing on the first day of school.
Sidekick Samantha (Poppy Montgomery) is still feeling the mental and physical aftereffects of being shot in last season’s taut finale, and LaPaglia’s Jack, we learn, is tentatively trying to work things out with his formerly estranged wife.
But the beauty of this series, from creator Hank Steinberg (“61(ASTERISK)”) and the Jerry Bruckheimer production house (“CSI”), is that you don’t need to know any of that to enjoy it.
The missing-person-of-the-week format means there’ll be a story resolution. And the skill of Steinberg, who wrote this one, and his crew and cast, especially the magnetically world-weary LaPaglia, means that it is delivered with intelligence, style, taut pacing and a creatively nimble ending.
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