Trivia / Chicago Hope

• All-Star Cast: Many veteran and character actors came through over the course of its run and it showed as the acting was top notch.
• Creator Backlash: Not the show itself, but Mandy Patinkin regrets his behind-the-scenes behavior and had said it's difficult for him to watch the show because of it.
• Dueling Shows: With ER, another drama series set at a hospital in Chicago, Illinois that happened to premiere one day after Chicago Hope did. The two ended up competing directly against each other on Thursdays at 10:00 P.M. (with ER on NBC and Chicago Hope on CBS). ER ended up easily winning commercially, maintaining a place as one of the most-watched shows on television for its first 10 years, whereas Chicago Hope ended up finishing its run after sixth season. At the Emmys, the two tended to trade off, with ER being the only one of them to win the Drama Series prize, but Chicago Hope winning more often for its main cast members.
• Trans Character, Cis Actor: Trans femme characters appeared played by cis woman Mia Sara and cis boy Shawn Pyfrom.
• Science Marches On: One episode has a child born as an intersex male to a father who desperately wants a son and this will be his only child. As was accepted medical practice at the time, Dr. Sutton convinces the man to have the boy surgically reassigned to female and raise him as a girl, citing it as the more compassionate choice. However, years later, experience has shown that it is better to allow intersex children to develop their gender identity naturally and this practice is widely condemned as causing physical and psychological problems for the children reassigned at birth. An episode in the sixth season addresses this, focusing on a teenager raised as a girl who had been born intersex male and realized he identified as male.
• Self-Referential Humor: The fifth season finale is practically this from start to finish. The episode came after two years of Seasonal Rot as the show went from a critical hit and modest success to critical disaster and bottoming-out in ratings. Most critics blamed getting rid of Dr. Geiger and replacing him with a "self-righteous Mary Sue" (many times Dr. Austin was treated as the sympathetic wronged one just because she didn't get her way) and that the cast had become a group of bland, interchangeable characters. How was it handled? Title the episode "Curing Cancer" (aka, cutting out the parts of the show that were hurting it) and having Dr. Geiger return, unceremoniously fire all five of the doctors fans didn't like, and spend a majority of the time wondering how his old friends Dr. Shutt and Dr. Watters let everything get so bad. The episode opens with a woman trying to get directions to Chicago Hope only to be told she should avoid it at all costs as it's sunk so low in quality. There's even a scene in court where the fired doctors have sued for wrongful dismissal, and the hospital's attorney lists reasons fans didn't like the characters as legal justification for the firing, including the fact that "Lisa Catera" sounds like a car commercial!