From GP to transplant surgeon

From GP to transplant surgeon
Monday, June 18, 2007

By KATHY BLUMENSTOCK
THE WASHINGTON POST

Treat Williams is not a doctor, he just plays one again on TV.

After four seasons as Andrew Brown, a general practitioner on "Everwood," Williams now portrays Nathaniel Grant, an organ transplant surgeon, in TNT's new drama "Heartland."

Grant, who heads the fictional St. Jude Regional Transplant Center in Pittsburgh, has a reputation for taking risks with difficult procedures other doctors won't attempt. Grant's quest is to save more lives, but his methods often lead to clashes with the hospital administration. Even Grant's operating-room mentor, Bart Jacobs (Dabney Coleman), sometimes disagrees with him, refusing to cooperate when Grant insists that Jacobs himself needs a heart-lung transplant.

Overworked, overweight

Williams, who quipped that "all I had to do for this part was shave my beard, and yeah, I'm a doctor again," said he was drawn to the character's collection of contradictions: He performs lung transplants but continues to smoke; he lectures his young daughter (Gage Golightly) when she's caught shoplifting condoms but doesn't spend enough time with her to know what's she's up to anyway.

Grant's workaholic ways and infidelities soured his marriage, but he still hopes to reunite with his ex-wife, Kate (Kari Matchett). Tangling that relationship is Kate's own work: As an organ donor coordinator, her success on the job is essential to his.

"With the ex-wife, it's a love-hate thing," Williams said. "They both know they're doing something very special. He wants to run this hospital, and she takes great pride in getting the donors for him."

Williams said he likes his character because "simple people have never been my forte, and this guy deals with issues that most of us are feeling. He's overworked -- that's an American disease -- he wants to lose some weight, he'd like to stop smoking."

David Hollander, the series' creator and executive producer, "is not afraid of the dark side, but he also has this big heart, and there's a lot of that in the show," Williams said.

Hollander said he researched background for the series by moving back to Pittsburgh, near where he grew up, and spending time at an organ recovery center. Hollander said he was fascinated as a youth by the work of a local transplant surgeon who achieved success with anti-rejection drugs, which help recipients' systems to accept new organs.

"Even as a major recession was hitting, with the steel mills shutting down, this small city was still so international," he said. "There was a local impact because the donors were from our region and people were coming from all over the world to get organs."

Transplants "cut across socioeconomic, religious, ethnic boundaries," Hollander said. "The equation is simple: To live, someone's going to die. That is the life of a transplant patient. In reality, there is a trade, and it's a kind of bittersweet environment."

About donors, too

To ensure realism and accuracy in the medical details, Hollander said, the show consults with members of the transplant field, from Johns Hopkins to a small regional hospital in Texas, "to get it right."

Williams "started considering becoming an organ donor the minute I started doing this show," he said. "The hardest job is not getting the donors but asking someone in shock and grief to consider the removal of the organs of their child. That is what makes our show interesting.

"What I like is that we don't win a life every week," Williams said. "There is a wonderful balance as we focus on the recipients, a beautiful moment where a young man takes his first breath at the age of 20 because he's been given a new set of lungs. He begins to laugh, and at the same time, another character is passing on. ... I am taking home with me this awareness of how fragile life is and how vulnerable we all are to it."