New TV Doctors Are in Critical Condition

The problem is not only his age (16), but his name. How would you react if your doctor was named Doogie?

Thus the credibility gap for “Doogie Howser, M.D.,” an earnest, but fundamentally flawed ABC series from Steven Bochco, premiering at 8:30 tonight (on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), before moving into its regular time slot at 9:30 p.m. Wednesday.

As it happens, tonight is a sort of coming out for TV doctors, for premiering at 10 (on Channels 2 and 8) is “Island Son,” starring Richard Chamberlain in a weak CBS series about an adult physician who has less plausibility even than Doogie.

Ironically, tonight’s “Doogie Howser, M.D.” episode occupies the time slot of wondrous “Wonder Years,” whose hero, Kevin Arnold, is a boy who acts like a boy. Straddling comedy and drama, “Doogie Howser, M.D.” is about a child prodigy’s awkward coexistance in the seemingly incompatible realms of medicine and fumbling adolescence. A med school graduate at 14, Doogie (Neil Patrick Harris) is now a brilliant second-year resident at a Los Angeles hospital.

Here he is tonight with a patient: “Seven stitches, nice and neat. There shouldn’t be much of a scar.” And Wednesday night, barking orders in the emergency room: “Put a dressing on that! . . . Get the O.R. ready! We’ve got a live one going and we want him to stay that way!”

Socially and emotionally, however, Doogie is a kid, someone who still has to ask his dad (James B. Sikking) for the car and can be doing something as ordinary as dancing with his girlfriend when his hospital beeper goes off.

This overlapping--a “Small” counterpart to the boy in a man’s body played by Tom Hanks in “Big”--just doesn’t work, however; and despite a good effort by Harris, the dueling Doogies are not convincing. We can relate to the child within the man because there is a boy in most every man. But not the reverse.

It comes down to very basic things. A child prodigy in music or science is a fairly easy sale because all that counts in these fields is performance. In medicine, however, practitioners won’t get very far without first getting the confidence of their patients. Uh oh.

The problem is that when you look at this cute kid Doogie in a lab coat, you want to laugh when you shouldn’t laugh. And if he so resents being treated like a “jerky kid,” then why doesn’t he drop the infantile nickname in favor of his real name, Douglas?

Doogie tonight overcomes some tough moments when he is comforted by his dad after losing his first patient. The premiere is rather somber compared with Wednesday’s funnier and better second episode, in which Doogie starts fibrillating himself when a beautiful radiologist proposes that he father her first child because he has “the best genes available.”

This is the point at which Kevin of “Wonder Years” would wake up and discover he’d been dreaming. But this is no dream, as the story later makes a screeching U-turn toward an appealing surprise ending.

Closer, but still no shingle.

If Doogie is farfetched, Chamberlain’s Dr. Daniel Kulani of “Island Son” is out-of-sight-fetched, the prototypical superdoctor who is All Universe when it comes to ideals, talent, wisdom and sensitivity. He dresses great too. If only he could impart his perfection to Anthony Metzger (Timothy Carhart), the rebellious, second-year resident who insists on doing things his Way.

The adopted son of Hawaiians, Kulani practices at a large hospital in Honolulu, where tonight he and his cellist girlfriend (Leslie Bevis) witness a drunk-driving auto accident that severely injures a little girl named Alice and renders her brain-dead.

The moral dilemma: Should Kulani urge the girl’s mother to pull the plug on her daughter so that her heart can be implanted in a critically sick boy whose own heart is about to give out?

The dog dilemma: A patient has smuggled his dog into the hospital, and the animal is loose in the halls.

Back to Kulani’s moral dilemma: “Alice would live again in another child,” he tells the mother.

Back to the dog: It’s caught by its owner.

Back to Kulani’s moral dilemma: “When you see a bird flying in the sky. . . .”

Back to the dog: The owner is hiding it under his sheets.

Back to Kulani’s moral dilemma: “Every day people come into the hospital expecting us to save their lives. . . .”

Will this guy not shut up? Later, when Kulani begins lecturing a real Hawaiian on Hawaiianism, it’s the doctor’s heart you want removed. And then his tongue.

Kulani spends a lot of time looking at the sea. Next week he probably walks on it.