- For the Arthur Hailey
novel, see Strong
Medicine
Strong Medicine is a medical drama with a
focus on
feminist politics, health issues
and class conflict. The television series aired on the
Lifetime network from
2000 to
2006. It is distributed by
Sony Pictures Home
Entertainment. The series was created and produced in part by
comedienne and activist
Whoopi
Goldberg, who made a couple of cameos in the series, and
Tammy Ader. The show employed a variety
of regular and guest writers.
On
November 1,
2005,
Lifetime TV announced the cancellation
of the series. The final episode of the series aired on
February 5,
2006.
Background
The show
centers on the staff of fictional
Rittenhouse Hospital in Philadelphia
, largely involving the operations of the ER and a free women's health clinic, run by
inner-city success story Dr. Luisa "Lu" Delgado. The urban
facility receives a diverse mixture of patients, from upper- and
middle-class patients, which generally allows the hospital to
finance the free clinic, and lower-class or poor patients, who come
to take advantage of Dr. Delgado's hospital-funded services.
The staff and its visitors tend to be racially, politically, and
economically
diverse. A core
class/political duality in the episodes' storylines tend to be
driven by comparisons and contrasts (and often cooperation) between
liberal Delgado, and her fellow women's health practitioner across
the lobby, who sees paying patients and generally has more
conservative values—this role has been filled by various
characters, most recently Dr. Dylan West. The show often places the
characters in ironic, soul-searching situations in which they are
forced to question the solidity of their personal beliefs or else
cause them to fight for what they believe in.
Main characters
Main characters on the show as of last season include:
Dr. Luisa "Lu" Magdalena Delgado
(
Rosa Blasi) Born 11/18/70. Delgado runs
the free
clinic (first the South Philly
Health Clinic and, since the pilot, the Rittenhouse Health Center),
and hosts a support group (most
2003 and
2004 episodes open with a scene from these
meetings). Both as a friend and a doctor to many lower-class
patients, Delgado regularly comes face-to-face with bitterly ironic
situations involving the difficulties of the lower class with
government,
debt,
drug abuse, and
exploitation. Her character exhibits a
perennial cleverness which allows her to wheedle or persuade
positive outcomes from seemingly hopeless cases of victimization.
She was raised by her grandmother, Isabel Santana, who now lives in
Puerto Rico, and had a son, Marc, when
she was 16, whom she raised alone. Marc has been at college since
the 2004-2005 season.
Until recently, Delgado has had no luck with a relationship. Her
first boyfriend, Radio show host Harry Burr (
Don Michael Paul) had to leave her because
his ex-wife was using their relationship to gain custody of his
daughter Erin, who was also her son Marc's girlfriend. In fact,
shades of Lu's past came back to haunt her when Marc and Erin faced
a pregnancy scare. Soon after, she survived being raped by the
Rittenhouse's new Head of Surgery, Dr. Randolf Kilner.
She lost her first serious boyfriend, fireman Miguel "Mickey"
Arenas (
Julian Acosta), to a murder
perpetrated by one of her patients, forcing her to face her moral
objection to the
death penalty.
Ironically, in an earlier episode, Lu thought Miguel had died on
the job, when there was a fire at the local mall. It turns out the
only reason he didn't die, is because he switched duties with
friend and ended up driving the fire truck. Lu later becomes
involved with Ben Sanderson (
Grant Show),
an administrator brought on after Rittenhouse is bought by a health
care conglomerate, Octavian.
Sanderson later left to be reassigned to a
facility in Miami
. He
asked Lu to come with him but, after thinking about it, she refused
because her patients are there.
Soon after, she became involved with Jonas Rey, a local self-made
millionaire with a good heart but a large soulless corporation. In
the 2005-2006 season she and Jonas get married, and Lu struggles to
get accustomed to a wealthier life, while trying to reconcile it
with her inner-city loyalties. After Lu discovered she was pregnant
with Jonas' baby, Jonas is plagued by an
embezzlement scandal at his company, bringing
his fortune into doubt.
In the series finale, they decided to move to Jonas' childhood
home, but while he was showing it to Lu, they were affected by an
explosion and got caught in the ruined basement. Lu was injured and
her
placenta detached. She asked Jonas to
perform an emergency
C-Section to save her
and the baby, but she fainted during the procedure. Luckily, the
firemen arrived and called Dylan, who completed the C-Section, and
Lu gave birth to their daughter, whom was named Milagro (which
means "miracle" in Spanish).
Dr. Dylan West
(
Rick Schroder) Replacing Dr.
Campbell's role is Dr. Dylan West, a male women's health
specialist. His gender raises initial eyebrows, especially with
Delgado, who has also had past negative experiences with him as a
resident. He has his own troubled past and seems to be seeking to
redeem himself from something in his past. He is a
diabetic, which becomes a recurring plot device.
Dylan has tremendously bad luck in romance. One such former love
interest arrives at Rittenhouse needing a new heart to survive;
West is unable to save her life, but gains a teenaged half-Japanese
daughter, Araya (
Eileen Boylan), he
never knew he had. His relationship with his daughter is troubled
at first, but slowly they get to know each other.
Peter Riggs
(
Josh Coxx) A registered nurse and
midwife, Peter is generally progressive, open-minded, and an eager
advice-giver. He practices
Buddhism and
believes in the principles of
holistic
medicine. He is often a kindred spirit to Delgado. Often,
Riggs' character makes a balanced sociopolitical observation that
influences a positive action by one of the two doctors; other times
he is the protagonist of action. He was also the nurse union
representative.
When he met Lu, he almost ran over her with his van. He played the
Bass Guitar in a band until his
girlfriend Simone (the lead singer) dumped him during a fire, and
Lu gave him a job in her new free clinic.
Often shown as a ladies man with several girlfriends, he finally
has settled into a relationship with Kayla, to whom he proposes in
the series finale.
Lana Hawkins
(
Jenifer Lewis) Hawkins serves as the
front receptionist for the RWHC, or the Rittenhouse Women's Health
Center. A former
drug addict and
streetwalker long since rehabilitated,
she met Lu at the same bar Peter and his band were playing at.
After a fire destroyed the bar and the owner rented the locale to
Lu for her clinic, she gave Lana a job. She has two sons, Harry, an
officer in the
Navy and Maurice,
a con artist who once pretended he had a wife and son to trick his
mother out of money.
Hawkins is the hospital's eyes and ears, i.e. chief
gossip, as well as matchmaker, and general benevolent
schemer and rule-bender. Lana often refers to herself in the third
person. Lana went back to school, earned her high school diploma
and went to college, earning a degree in
psychology. Afterwards, Lu enlisted her to
consult for her women's group, as volunteer work towards her
Master's degree. She was maid of
honor at Lu's wedding.
Kayla Thornton
(
Tamera Mowry) A new doctor and young
medical prodigy, Thornton is a fast study at Rittenhouse, entering
residency in the beginning of the 2004-2005 season and becoming a
depended-upon ER regular by the end of that season, despite
occasional disbelief by patients that she is a qualified doctor. As
she becomes a main character to the show, her personality can be
compared to that of a young Dr. Delgado with her ambition and hard
work. She decided to become a doctor as a young girl when a brother
was shot in the chest by a friend when playing with a hunting
rifle. While the friend ran for help, Kayla cradled her dying
brother. The nearest doctor was 25 miles away, so therefore Kayla's
brother died in her arms. She then decided to become a
doctor.
Throughout the medical drama's seasons, Thornton rooms with various
fellow staff members in her search for affordable housing. First
she moves into Dr. Campbell's house, where she spends some of her
time helping with Andy's two daughters. After Andy's departure, she
rooms with Lana. She was later on selected as
Chief Resident after narrowly missing it due
to a complex emergency house call. We find out that she has a twin
sister, Keisha (played by real-life twin sister
Tia Mowry) who ends up needing 24-hour care for a
schizophrenic mental disorder, because
she felt that Kayla always had a perfect life and had a depression
when they were younger.
Jonas Rey
(
Nestor Carbonell) A local
self-made billionaire with a good heart but a large soulless
corporation. He first appeared on Rittenhouse when his mother was
brought to ER due an accident. While his mother was in the
hospital, he saw Lu interacting with several of her patients. Even
before he exchanged a single word with Lu, he told his mother he'll
marry her.
He met and pursued Lu until she agreed to date him. They got
married in the middle of the 2005-2006 season. After personally
bringing sick
South American children
to Rittenhouse for treatment, Jonas is plagued by an
embezzlement scandal at his company, bringing
his fortune and stability into doubt. After discovering that Lana
had stock of his company, he decided to sell most of his assets and
pay the shareholders back a part of their money. He and Lu moved to
his childhood home, but while he was showing it to Lu, they were
affected by an explosion and got caught in the ruined basement. Lu
convinced him to perform an emergency C-Section to save her and the
baby, but she fainted during the procedure. Luckily, Dylan arrives
to deliver their daughter.
Former characters
Dr. Dana Stowe
(
Janine Turner), an ambitious doctor
and scientist seeking a cure for breast cancer; she is rigid and
stoic, but cares deeply about her patients. Like her successor Andy
Campbell, she was good friends with Jackson. She had a short-lived
relationship with resident doctor Nick Biancavilla, which she broke
up when he wasn't willing to have children.
Her character left the show at the end of the 2001-2002 season
after adopting two challenged children (an HIV-positive infant and
her older sister), choosing to put her medical ambitions aside to
pursue a successful motherhood.
Dr. Andy Campbell
(
Patricia Richardson) A former
military doctor with the rank of Colonel, Campbell came on the
staff during the third season to replace the much more ambitious
and strict Dr. Dana Stowe. Her patients tend to be
upper-middle-class, and often include minor local celebrities and
professionals. Her character ostensibly lives the almost typical
suburban nuclear family lifestyle, aside from her status as
breadwinner. She has two teenage daughters, Jesse and Lizzie.
Campbell kicked out her husband, Leslie, after he hit her during a
domestic dispute, forcing her to examine
domestic abuse issues as well as
single motherhood. Campbell and Leslie had
been married for thirty years without any violence in the home, and
Leslie is presented as changing from a loving husband to a violent
maniac over the course of a single episode. She later becomes
involved with another doctor,
cardiac
surgeon Dr. Milo Morton but he dies in a car accident (a
development forced by the death of actor
Richard Biggs due to an undiagnosed heart
condition).
Campbell was named
United
States Surgeon General (which was also a stated ambition of her
predecessor) at the end of the fifth season and left the
show.
Dr. Robert "Bob" Jackson
(
Philip Casnoff) Chief of staff of
Rittenhouse Hospital, he is the stoic, administrative figure and
also ultimately in charge of decisions regarding funding,
especially to the women's clinic. Jackson had once been a top
surgeon but when a young girl died during surgery due to a
mislabeled drug doseage, Jackson lost his nerve for the operating
room and moved to administration. Jackson considers himself a
personal friend of Dr. Campbell (as he was with Dr. Stowe), but
generally is more impersonal and sometimes butts heads with Dr.
Delgado over financial or liability issues, and with Lana over
administrative issues. He was married with two daughters, Lauren
and Paige. A recurring subplot throughout the series was Jackson
dealing with his beloved wife Susan's advancing
MS condition. He even briefly left her,
unable to watch her succumb to the illness, but eventually went
back to her. Jackson's character was laid off by hospital owner
Octavian prior to the start of the sixth season.
Dr. Nick Biancavilla
(
Brennan Elliott), an ER doctor at
Rittenhouse who had a brief relationship with Dr. Stowe. He has
four older sisters, one of them (Francine 'Frankie' Biancavilla) a
lesbian whose girlfriend he married to get her the medical care she
needed. It didn't work because Dr. Jackson found out, but he gave
his sister a medical plan as "wedding gift" that covered existing
illnesses. She promised she'd pay it herself once she got promoted.
He left at the end of season 4 when he transferred to Manhattan
General.
Marc Delgado
(
Chris Marquette), Lu's teenage son,
whom she had when she was a teenager. He lived with his mother, but
saw his father Bill (who was married with young twin girls)
regularly. He once saved his great-grandmother Isabel Santana's
life with a
bone marrow
transplant. He left for college in the middle of season 5,
after graduating one year in advance but returned once for Lu's
wedding, and walked her to the altar.
Episodes
Season 1 (2000-2001)
Season 2 (2001-2002)
DVD Release
Sony Pictures Home
Entertainment released Strong Medicine: The Complete First
Season, a 5-disc set, on 10 January 2006. It is unknown if the
remaining 5 seasons will be released at some point.
First Response spinoff
Near the end of the
2004-
2005 season, a special episode "First Response" aired,
prominently featuring three new characters: Katie and Zack, both
EMTs, and Dr. Vanessa Burke, head of the new
Rittenhouse Trauma Center and adopted black sister of Katie. The TV
Home website reports that this episode was meant as the pilot to a
potential
Strong Medicine spinoff series,
Strong
Medicine: First Response. Such a series would have been the
first spin-off to an existing Lifetime original series. Lifetime
did not order the new series into production after the ratings for
the pilot were not what was expected.
References
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