(ABC, Wednesday, 8,00)

So, while technically not a pilot, tonight's Private Practice was a premiere, so I'm going to review it.

Private Practice follows Addison Montgomery as she adjusts to life at a new practice: a private practice in LA where she'll see one patient a day, has no staff and no operating room. Quite a change from Seattle Grace Hospital. She works with a bevy of other middle-aged doctors, all of whom have problems of one kind of another. There's the shrink who has her own mental problems, the divorced couple who still work together because the practice needs both of them (he's famous), there's the pediatritian/sex-addict and Tim Daly, an alternative medicine specialist.

If you wanted Grey's Anatomy II: Anatomy Harder, this is not the program for you. Which is to say that it's not a show about pretty young doctors doing exciting things and sleeping with inappropriate authority figures or pretty young people. What it is, instead, is a show about middle aged people trying to get it right while helping their patients out. If that sounds lame, I agree. If that doesn't sound lame to you? Well, you're wrong, but go ahead and watch the show; you'll probably like it.

So, yeah, there were plenty of times that the writing was flat or obvious or the plot dealt with something dumb and I almost turned it off, because what do I care who gets the dead guys sperm? Yeah, and that whole subplot is about the divorced woman learning that she just ought to be nice to her ex-husband, but what do I care about either of them? It's not an emotionally charged situation for me and the show doesn't build it into one. The two characters in this case are placeholders--we should care because they're nice people (or whatever) and it's always sad to se a marriage dissolve into mutual antagony. Except that I don't think that's true and so I don't really give a crap.

So that's one plot, the sperm thing. Then there's Addison's plot, involving her performing, as she later puts it, "crazy MacGuyver surgery" which didn't seem all that crazy or MacGuyverish, particularly as there was no doubt that she was going to do it and she was going to pull it off. So, no drama.

So there's also a subplot about how the boss-lady didn't tell any of the other doctors that she was hiring Addison, which, while it led to the other docs having a nice conversation in the break room, didn't really pay off, because, I mean, seriously? Were they going to vote to reject her? Again, no drama.

And then, despite my best efforts, there was a plot that did, actually, affect me. It involved the psychiatrist dealing with a patient that had degenerated into counting behavior at a local store. Not only did she have to keep the manager from calling the cops, she also had to figure out what went wrong in the woman's head in order to set it off, so she could help her work through it.

And damn if what set the woman off didn't get me to crying. And I fucking hate that, because, alright, I cry at TV sometimes and movie trailers sometimes and books sometimes and so it's not that I'm pissed about crying. I hate that this show that I didn't really like managed to bust into me like that with this fucking three minute segment in an otherwise not-worthwhile program.

But, if you can make me cry, you get a B. That's how this works. I don't recommend Private Practice (unless, like I said, you like the idea of middle aged doctors trying to get it right w/r/t their lives while saving patients) but I've got to give it a B, because damn did that scene work on me, even if the rest was pretty crappy. (Except Kate Walsh, who's always great.)

Private Practice. ABC, Wednesday, 8,00. B.