West Meets East in Hospital Drama

Sunday on the Pax network, Richard Thomas (“The Waltons”) made his return to TV drama in the legal series “Just Cause,” and tonight on the same channel, another familiar face who came up big in the 1970s, Peter Strauss, takes another turn in the box.

Strauss, who first jumped to prominence in the landmark 1976 miniseries “Rich Man, Poor Man,” stars as Dr. Isaac Braun in the new offbeat medical drama “Body and Soul” (9 p.m.)

The program, the result of an idea that had been percolating in the head of co-executive producer John Whelpley since an experience with cancer a dozen years ago, sets its scene in an Ohio hospital.

But it’s an ongoing battle between traditional and alternative medicine that gives the series its dramatic thrust.

Braun is the old-school rep, or at least he remains so until a bizarre mishap leaves him conscious but muted by a death-like paralysis. After being wheeled to the hospital morgue to await his autopsy amid a roomful of corpses, he begins to have doubts about the hospital’s way of doing business.

Helping cement those doubts is Dr. Rachel Griffen (co-star Larissa Laskin), who is the series’ yin to Braun’s yang. Griffen has returned to Century Hospital after spending two years in the Far East, where she learned the value of nontraditional medical techniques while easing her terminal father’s final days.

But her efforts to meld East and West care regimens at the hospital get a frosty reception.

Griffen’s earnest philosophizing occasionally lapses into phrasing that conjures up memories of David Carradine in “Kung Fu,” but her chemistry with Strauss and some kooky plot twists help to brighten the long-term prognosis for “Body and Soul.”