The medical drama should be an easy homerun. Like the saying goes, if you like that sort of thing, then that’s the sort of thing you’ll like. Throw in some explosive personalities, one hesitant romance, and a disease of the week, and bam! Hit show. And CBS, the staid older sibling of the five networks, should be a perfect fit for it. But Three Rivers is a mess from start to finish.

An odd mess, to be sure, since the show’s premise is that instead of the usual doctors and surgeons, Three Rivers is about a leading transplant hospital where someone is always jetting off to pick up a heart or a kidney. But the show has been badly written and miscast, not to mention the bizarre camera work that adds a weird, surreal flavor to the proceedings.

Too bad, because star Alex O’Loughlin (whose vampire detective series Moonlight premiered two years too soon to be a hit) deserves a hit show. His charisma and charm are completely wasted here, as a good-hearted surgeon whose sense of humor never fails him. The rest of the characters are straight out of The Idiot's Guide to Writing a Medical Drama. Alfre Woodward, who still hasn’t learned her lesson despite her abysmal season on Desperate Housewives and last year’s flop My Own Worst Enemy, is the tough-but-fair boss; Christopher J. Hanke is the newly hired, unbelievably stupid assistant to O’Loughlin’s surgeon, one who runs up to a woman whose father is dying to scream that she should donate his heart; Daniel Henney is the requisite smarmy doctor; and Katherine Moennig is painfully miscast as a doctor, coming across as a stoner who’s trying to avoid the cops by disguising herself in scrubs and a stethoscope before slowly inching out the front door.

As if the performances and bad writing weren’t enough, the screen splits in a desperate attempt to connect the storylines in the moments before every commercial break. CBS is hardly the home for experimentation in TV (especially experimentation that is such a colossal flop), so expect Three Rivers to either shape up and get on track or to dry up completely.

Photo by Sonja Flemming/CBS.