Dr. Addison Forbes Montgomery (Kate Walsh) moves from Seattle to Los Angeles in this spinoff from Grey's Anatomy. She's now working for the Oceanside Wellness Group, a private clinic with relatively few wealthy clients, quite a change from the frenzy of Seattle Grace Hospital.
The show's got a fine collection of talented actors surrounding Walsh. Taye Diggs and Audra McDonald are the internist and the fertility specialist (recently divorced, and still working through their personal issues); Tim Daly is the alternative medicine specialist, and Addison's most likely eventual romantic interest; Amy Brenneman is the psychiatrist, and like all TV shrinks, she's the most neurotic of the bunch. There's a womanizing pediatrician (Paul Adelstein), a receptionist training to become a midwife (Chris Lowell), and outside Oceanside Wellness, the ice-queen chief of medicine at the local hospital (KaDee Strickland).
Private Practice can't make up its mind whether it wants to be comedy or drama. That's not too distracting when the tone is consistent within a particular story -- the drama of a woman threatened by complications of labor; the comedy of a mistress and a wife fighting over the sperm of the man they love. But when the show tries to shift tone mid-plotline, it's less successful. When Brenneman is summoned to a department store to find one of her patients (a very nice guest performance by Moon Zappa, of all people) on the floor, frantically counting tiles, the story is initially played for laughs. Turns out, though, that she's actually grieving a dead son (and how does her shrink not know about the dead child already, anyway?), and the show can't pull off the turnaround from broad comedy to tearjerker.
The other notable problem with the show is that the ostensible lead, Kate Walsh, is the least interesting actor of the bunch. It's possible that the writers are assuming that we already know her well enough from Grey's Anatomy that they can focus on introducing and developing the new characters, but I'm afraid that she may simply be outclassed by her veteran co-stars.
The show as a whole is pleasant enough entertainment. It's not something I'm likely to ever watch again, but it's made with skill and craft, and will surely please its intended audience.
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