The Corpse Has a Familiar Face in 'Body of Proof'

The new ABC crime procedural Body of Proof, which is about a quirky but brilliant big-city assistant medical examiner who solves cases that stump the police, gives me a distinct feeling of déjà vu.

That's not just because it stars Dana Delany, the 55-year-old actress who won two Emmy awards for her portrayal of Nurse McMurphy in ABC's Vietnam war drama China Beach back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and who has worked steadily in TV ever since. No, the reason Body of Proof seems immediately so familiar, as if we've been watching it for years, is that we have -- only under different names.

Since Jack Klugman's Quincy, M.E. pioneered the detective-in-scrubs premise in the mid-1970s, we've been treated to a succession of forensic pathology whodunits, ranging from Diagnosis: Murder to Crossing Jordan. Eccentric but insightful medical examiners have become stock fixtures in just about every crime show, from Homicide: Life on the Street to Rizzoli & Isles. In the CBS hit NCIS, David McCallum's Dr. "Ducky" Mallard, who has conversations with corpses and subjects the agents to rambling soliloquies on historical and scientific trivia before giving his conclusions, is one of the show's central figures. In the long-running CSI and Law & Order franchises, characters seem to spend more time discussing petechial hemorrhages and stomach contents than they do questioning suspects. Bones, a hit for Fox, follows the adventures of a forensic anthropologist, Dr. Temperance Brennan (portrayed by Emily Deschanel).

The influence is even seen in more mainstream doctor dramas such as House, in which the lead character acts more like a detective than a healer.

What is it that viewers find so endlessly engrossing about TV medical examiners? Maybe we just like the macabre moments, such as when Ducky saws open a cadaver's rib cage, yanks out the internal organs, and discourses drolly upon them in the fashion of Hamlet joking with Horatio about Yorick's skull. Or maybe it's the voyeuristic implications of autopsies, in which even the deceased's most embarrassing secrets are exposed.

I tend to suspect, though, that we are deeply attracted to the underlying premise of all these shows -- that is, that science and medicine, if applied with sufficient deftness and a few grisly jests, can brush aside the world's maddening ambiguities and unknowns, and provide us with absolute, unassailable truth. In reality, of course, that seldom turns out to be so; nevertheless, TV viewers have so completely embraced the notion that legal experts worry about the so-called CSI Effect, in which jurors expect prosecutors to show them the same sort of damning evidence produced by high-tech gadgetry that they see David Caruso boasting about on the tube. It's a peculiar paradox, in that the same public that holds such a faith in criminalists' work is somehow also deeply skeptical of other areas of science such as evolution and climate change.

But back to Body of Proof, which, judging from its impressive early Nielsen numbers, is on its way to becoming a hit. It's accomplishing that feat despite being one of the most derivative TV shows ever created, one whose content and characters seem to be gleaned almost entirely from previous ME dramas. (Quincy, M.E., in contrast, relied heavily upon Los Angeles Medical Examiner's office forensic scientist Marc Scott Taylor, who served as the show's chief technical consultant and suggested plots based on his actual cases.) The sole original twist is that Delany's Dr. Megan Hunt is a former neurosurgeon who was forced to switch specialties after a car accident left her with injuries that made it impossible to perform surgery on living patients. That misfortune, coupled with a bitter divorce in which she lost custody of her daughter, presumably is supposed to imbue our protagonist with the existential nobility that struggling to keep on keeping on confers.

Delany is one of those stars whose charismatic presence and graceful physical moves can make up for a script's shortcomings. Her Dr. Hunt is a bit too self-absorbed and lacking in empathy to resonate as a haunted, brave heroine -- it seems to be a running joke that she struggles awkwardly to give her co-workers the impression that she is interested in their personal lives. Basically, she's a more physically attractive, somewhat less inappropriate version of Hugh Laurie's Dr. House.

On the positive side, I like shows built around strong, tough women (think Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect), and I could envision Delany doing some interesting things with the character, given that she's also got a certain amount of input as one of of the show's executive producers. Already, as this recent New York Times article explains, she's toned down some of the character's initial brusqueness and is trying to wield her acerbic wit more deftly. That Dr. Hunt is a former top dog now at the bottom of a different food chain gives the show some intriguing potential. "We need to have more smart women on television," Delany told the Times. I'm hoping she'll do something about that.

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