“Saved,” a new TNT drama about paramedics, has something rarely seen on television or in movies: a handsome young hero with bad teeth. It’s an admirable attempt at realism in an era when even drug dealers and serial killers have smiles as bleached and bright as bathroom tile.
Like “The Closer,” which it follows, “Saved” (at 8 p.m. Mondays) fills a gap between “Law & Order” (NBC) and “CSI” (CBS) and rougher cable offerings like “The Shield” and “Rescue Me” on FX.
In “Saved,” Wyatt Cole (Tom Everett Scott) is a medical-
school dropout with a gambling problem (and poor oral hygiene), but he’s not a coarse, corrupt policeman or a middle-
aged, emotionally frayed fireman. He is a confused young man who hates pressure from his wealthy, snobbish family but loves the adrenaline spike of his job as a paramedic.
And that puts him on about the same moral plane as Deputy Police Chief Brenda Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick), who on “The Closer” brings more personal tics and back story to her job than most network police detectives but is nevertheless a stand-up heroine. Her worst sins are a complicated love life, brusque manners and an addiction to sweets, though you couldn’t tell from her teeth.
A crime series is one of the easiest genres to put on the air and the hardest to pull off well. It demands a fresh, jarring take on the comfortingly familiar.
“The Closer” works because it recasts a classic television archetype – the Columbo-style detective – along modern, feminist lines. Brenda is known as the closer because her unusually personal, intuitive interrogation style always seems to elicit a confession. Her office manner is rude and abrasive until it suits her to turn syrupy and solicitous, and part of her charm is that she is so easily disliked.
In the new season, she is more accepted by her subordinates and peers than she was when transferred from Atlanta to Los Angeles to head up a special high-profile crimes unit; it took a while for them to accept her bossy ways and Southern wiles. She is a complicated single woman who uses her own neuroses to deconstruct suspects’ behavior and motives.
“Saved” is a medical show, and cards, not candy, are the protagonist’s weakness, but Wyatt is supposed to have the same kind of flawed-but-endearing personality as Brenda does.
He is first seen at a high-stakes poker table, where his smart-
aleck style lands him in a fistfight so fierce his opponent requires emergency care. “I am 911,” he says while examining the wound he just inflicted.
The series has a nifty gimmick: Each case is introduced by a brief flashback that shows, in a quick montage of images, what led to the emergency call.
But Wyatt’s story falls together too neatly. He is the son of a prominent doctor and still has a thing for his old girlfriend, Alice (Elizabeth Reaser). His best friend, Sack (Omari Hardwick), his partner in the ambulance, is a divorced father.
The episodes focus as much on their heroes’ troubled personal lives as on the lives they try to save. Wyatt is a more conventional television protagonist than Brenda, but “Saved,” like “The Closer,” seeks a new way into oft-told stories.