{alltv} 'Childrens Hospital' twists the medical drama

In this publicity image released by Warner Bros., ...

LOS ANGELES – Sexy young doctors fall in and out of love with each other — when they're not busy saving lives in the most impossible, dramatic ways.

But we're not talking about "Grey's Anatomy," "Private Practice" or "House." This is "Childrens Hospital," the best medical drama on television — and the funniest.

The series, which comes from the twisted mind of Rob Corddry and airs on Cartoon Network's late-night Adult Swim lineup, is a fast-paced, deadly serious parody of a genre that can be formulaic, melodramatic and — for millions of viewers — addictive. Patients and doctors alike die and come back to life. They smoke indoors and engage in random make-out sessions in the hallways. Sometimes they even operate on themselves.

Corddry, the show's creator, also stars as the clueless Dr. Blake Downs, who wears clown makeup and treats patients with the healing power of laughter (shades of Patch Adams). Among the talented ensemble cast are Ken Marino, Lake Bell, Malin Akerman, Erinn Hayes and Rob Huebel, with TV comedy veterans Henry Winkler and Megan Mullally respectively playing the hospital administrator and chief of staff.

The show began life in 2008 as a series of five-minute webisodes on TheWB.com. A year later, it won a Webby Award for best comedy series. Now on Adult Swim, it's in its second season, which runs until November, and the network said it is planning a third season, which is scheduled to start airing in the second quarter of 2011. "Childrens Hospital" is on Sundays at midnight but draws about 1.3 million viewers each week.

Corddry, the former "Daily Show" correspondent, got the idea for it when he and his wife had to take their daughter to Childrens Hospital Los Angeles with an injury.

"It was just a horrible place — so obviously the worst place for beautiful doctors to have sex with each other," he said.

This was during the writers strike that shut down production for 100 days, when several series were being developed exclusively for the web. Some programs, such as "quarterlife," made the transition to television with little success. But Corddry never envisioned doing that with "Childrens Hospital" because "I just didn't think this kind of humor could sustain itself for 22 minutes."

But Mike Lazzo, Adult Swim's senior vice president of programming and production, had heard about the show and was intrigued.

"I was obsessed with 'St. Elsewhere' in my 20s. I just checked it out and was astonished that it was not sweeping the world," Lazzo said. "What I loved most about it is, you could tell they love television, they love poking fun at television."

Adult Swim for years has featured shows that last just 15 minutes, including "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," "Robot Chicken," "Squidbillies" and another live-action series, "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" The initial run of webisodes aired as the show's first season; Corddry and fellow executive producers David Wain and Jonathan Stern barely had to make any tweaks.

"We had to bleep a couple of words but the show has never been about getting away with blue humor," Corddry said. "Adult Swim is a very edgy network. They get away with a lot of dark, alt material. I joke that they're the Internet of television.

"The only thing I had to change was adding six minutes to the show. I found it necessary to at least incorporate some illusion of a story — at least fool people into thinking we were worried about character development. Because the web series was essentially a series of sketches. At its core, that's still what we're writing, but there's more of a 'story.'"

And while each episode is scripted, there's also improvisation.

"The script is our Bible that we go by, but oftentimes these guys are much funnier on the fly than I am in front of my computer," Corddry said.

Mullally enjoys the "fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants" quality of taping the show, which is shot in an abandoned hospital in the San Fernando Valley.

"There's no ego, no network interference," said Mullally, a two-time Emmy winner for her supporting work on "Will & Grace."

"It can kind of stay pure because there's not so many cooks in the kitchen. It's very strange and it should be. I love how strange they get."

And her character, the Chief, may be the strangest of all: a social misfit with no sense of propriety or personal space.

"She's just horrible, you know. She's just awful. I wanted her to be a lot uglier — the point is, she's supposed to be hideous — and not that she's not hideous already, but I really want an official hunchback," Mullally said. "I'm not wearing any makeup but I want something else. ... I look kind of horrible but not as horrible as I wanted. I think the wig is probably pretty good, that's a man's wig from a store on Hollywood Boulevard. ...

"At no time am I trying to look good as this character," she added. "It's very freeing."