LIFE AND DEATH - '24/7' SHOW LOOKS AT DAILY ROUTINE OF BALTIMORE'S EMINENT HOSPITAL.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

``Hopkins 24/7'' is yet another example of how reality television is infinitely more riveting when it actually has some basis in reality and eschews the goofy contrivances. This compelling, emotionally wrenching documentary series from ABC News explores life and death at prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, from its emergency room (with scenes as gripping as any on ``ER'') to its operating theaters (featuring medical procedures as arcane as any seen on ``Chicago Hope'') and beyond.

While many of the doctors depicted here seem valiant, as we're used to seeing TV actors portray them, more appear to be pushed to the outer edges of their psyches as they watch the death and mayhem envelope them (the hospital borders a violent, drug-embattled Baltimore neighborhood). In fact, future episodes will see doctors despair over losing patients, a young doctor fear for her own life when she comes in contact with HIV-tainted blood, and one doctor walk away from the profession when the stress and long hours become too overwhelming. ``Hopkins 24/7'' depicts the practice of medicine as a calling more melancholy and reflective than glamorous or heroic.

This six-episode series premieres tonight with a grim irony prompting yet another impassioned railing against HMOs - it's easier for the hospital to OK an MRI for a sea turtle than for a teen-age girl with rapidly spreading uterine cancer. There's also a profile of a dedicated ER doctor who practices preventative medicine - he brings potential gang members into the hospital to witness the grisly work done by guns on others. On Thursday, we'll see an Indiana couple hold their own against what husband and wife perceive as bureaucratic indifference at the hospital as they see their 3 1/2-year-old daughter through a ``hemispherectomy'' - the removal of half her brain - to stave off a frightening series of seizures, as well as a portrait of a beleaguered first-year intern who has better luck maintaining his sense of humor than sorting through the avalanche of information and protocol heaped upon him.

Upcoming episodes will present memorable characters - a 17-year-old boy in dire need of a lung transplant (which is organized with the precision of a military operation as doctors fly to Pennsylvania for donor organs); a colorful oncology doctor who must perform his most solemn task - informing a patient that she's dying; an 8-month-old baby in dire need of a heart transplant; and a woman whose family braces itself for the possibility that a donor liver will not be available in time to save her husband's life.

ABC News teams were allowed to explore the hospital day and night for three months, venturing into areas TV cameras don't often go (such as tonight's ``Mortality and Morbidity'' conference, where doctors sometimes testily comb through patient deaths to see if any mistakes were made). Largely, the doctors and patients are allowed to tell their stories with little editorial comment from ABC reporters (outside of, naturally, editing of the pieces; there's also some infrequent but occasionally condescending narration from Sylvia Chase). This approach gives the series an edgy immediacy that pulls viewers into the human dramas as they unfold.

Haunting and uplifting in equal measures, ``Hopkins 24/7'' is, like Fox's grievously short-lived ``American High'' before it - smart, demanding, nonfiction television that moves and entertains as well as, if not better than, the slicker, pre-packaged product we've become accustomed to sitting through.

The facts

--The show: ``Hopkins 24/7.''

--What: Documentary series on life and death in one of America's most influential hospitals.

--Where: ABC.

--When: 10 tonight and Thursday; thereafter, 10 p.m. Wednesdays, through Sept. 27.

--Our rating: Three and one half stars.

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Photo: (color) ``Hopkins 24/7'' shows the day-to-day workings of John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md.