Kindly Cuts

SHOW: THE HUMAN FACTOR

TIME: THURSDAYS, 10 P.M. EDT, CBS

THE BOTTOM LINE: A familiar prescription still produces feel-good results.

“I’VE DONE OVER 500 OF THESE procedures, and I haven’t lost a patient yet,” snarls a brilliant surgeon to the lowly medical student who has dared to offer a pre-op suggestion. What happens next (as if you didn’t know) is that because of his arrogance, the surgeon almost loses a patient.

Such morality tales are part of the daily rounds in cbs’s new medical series The Human Factor, which debuts this week. The show’s guiding thesis is that doctors don’t pay enough attention to the emotional side of treating patients. Viewers, however, may well glean another message: ban all senior medical experts from your hospital-room door, and put yourself in the hands of the first caring youngster you see roaming the halls. Oh, well, who said TV medical shows had to make sense?

Executive producer Dick Wolf (Law & Order) at least doesn’t trivialize the well-worn subject. He avoids Bochco-like comic subplots and focuses on weighty medical-ethical issues rather than on hospital soap opera. Early stories range from a boxer showing symptoms of Parkinson’s disease to a couple who refuse surgery for their young son because of religious convictions. And John Mahoney, as a doctor who teaches a course in humanistic medicine, is the best gruff-but-kindly TV physician since Dr. Gillespie hung up his stethoscope.