ABC News Debuts BOSTON MED 6/24

Picking up where "Hopkins" left off, "Boston Med" travels to a city renowned for medical excellence and home to three superb American hospitals, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Children's Hospital. Over four months, ABC cameras had unparalleled access to hospital staffs and patients. From operating rooms to end-of-life meetings, "Boston Med" explores the culture of doctors and nurses and the conversations that happen outside the patient's earshot. This unsparing look at the ups and downs of hospital care holds many surprises for viewers. "Boston Med" premieres THURSDAY, JUNE 24 (10:00-11:00 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network.

"Boston Med," an eight-part series that will air Thursday evenings this summer, is an emotional rollercoaster capturing moments of crisis, joy and heartbreak. The doctors and nurses depicted here are among the best and brightest. Still, medicine is as much art as it is science, and random bad luck can trump the most carefully calculated treatment. Every hospital knows that good doctors can make mistakes and routine surgeries can go horribly wrong. The caregivers of "Boston Med" are often heroic, but as viewers also learn, no one is guaranteed a perfect outcome.

The medical staff of "Boston Med" represents a spectrum of ages, ethnicities, races and nationalities. Maria Troulis is a warm-hearted Greek-American surgeon who must reconstruct a police officer's shattered jaw, the result of a botched robbery attempt. William Curry is a young African-American brain surgeon who is unfazed by colleagues and patients telling him that he looks like President Barack Obama. Bo Pomahac fled communist Czechoslovakia as a penniless medical student, never imagining that one day he would make medical history by performing the second-ever face transplant in the United States. A wife donates the face of her husband, a Hollywood marketing genius, to a down on his luck Vietnam vet.

"Boston Med" does not flinch from the sometimes untidy results of medical intervention. In one episode, viewers will see a pediatric heart surgeon perform a complex operation on a newborn that goes badly awry. In another episode, a veteran surgeon explodes at young residents who have put a patient on an unnecessary medication. And there is the ER doctor criticized by colleagues for failing to show leadership in a crisis.

"Boston Med" also examines the emotional toll that demanding medical careers exact on the personal lives of caregivers. Crushing financial debt, years of apprenticeship, and daylight hours spent in windowless hospital rooms are a rite of passage. Viewers will meet a gay obstetrician who blames the break-up of her relationship on work. Another doctor fears that he is becoming emotionally cut off from his own family and patients. Even as they're called upon to heal and restore others to health, some of the caregivers in "Boston Med" are in mourning for the personal lives they have sacrificed.

Terence Wrong is producer and executive producer. Rudy Bednar is senior executive producer. Sedika Mojadidi and Carl Hansen are supervising producers of "Boston Med."

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