Medicine Ball

If ER and Chicago Hope did not exist, Medicine Ball might almost be watchable. This hour-long doctor drama has a young, reasonably appealing cast bursting with the requisite energy to run up and down hospital corridors. As it is, however, Ball is utterly pointless -- like looking at a group of actors trying mightily to reproduce a mediocre episode of the other networks' medical shows. There are subplots that are self-consciously oddball (a flatlining senior citizen can restart his own heartbeat when he thinks about toe-tapping '40s swing music), a fair amount of aren't-we-gutsy bloodiness (a doctor stuffs his finger into a patient's spurting gunshot wound and compares himself to ''the little Dutch boy''), and lots of curdled romantic byplay (someone actually says of a cute, reed-playing doctor, ''He gives great sax''). Come to think of it, the cast isn't really very appealing, either. C-