Hopkins

Medical drama is one of television’s oldest genres, dating back to Medic in the early 1950s. In Hopkins, filmed at the revered Johns Hopkins teaching hospital in Baltimore, truth proved to be easily as gripping as any fiction—and more educational. There’s no narration. ABC News let the hospital speak for itself. Given unprecedented access to staff and patients, crews took viewers through Hopkins’ halls and into the operating rooms, allowing them to watch complex surgeries, such as an aortic aneurysm repair, and to listen in on doctors’ life-and-death discussions. One especially wrenching choice involved a boy with a heart infection: Would it be more humane to let him die or to place him on a painful, corrosive bypass machine in hopes that a transplantable pediatric heart could be found? Doctors’ personal lives were likewise cracked open, revealing prejudices, even among elite and highly educated, that create resentment, and pressures that can wreck marriages. For its multi-faceted human drama of open-heart intensity, a Peabody Award goes to Hopkins.