The minute I pledged my troth to CBS' sappy and ridiculous medical drama Three Rivers I knew it was doomed.

TVGuide.com reported earlier this week that the Sunday night show has been yanked from the schedule, replaced with repeats of Criminal Minds and NCIS: Los Angeles.

Sigh.

Here's the thing. Every once in a while I find a sappy, ridiculous, tear-jerking, melodramatic TV drama to fall in love with. Shows like Providence or Beverly Hills 90210 in the recent past, and going way back, shows like Family (remember Family? James Broderick and Sada Thompson?).

They don't necessarily even have to be good, they just have to fulfill my criteria of complete escapist entertainment.

Three Rivers certainly did that. It stars Alex O'Loughlin as transplant surgeon extraordinaire Andy Yablonsky, who works in the transplant unit of Three Rivers Medical Center in Pittsburgh (they have three rivers in the city, the Allegheny and Monongahela, which converge to form the Ohio).

O'Loughlin is yummy to look at, and a competent actor. He was most recently a vampire detective on the failed drama Moonlight (one more bust and he becomes a series killer).

It co-stars Alfre Woodard as the chief of surgery, and she understates her way through the show like the black female Lou Grant. There is a secondary cast of doctors and nurses, none of whom I have seen before and none of whom have been given very interesting plot lines. The character development on the show has been scattershot at best.

But who cares? It starts out every week where someone generally nice ends up brain dead on life support, and then other people who up needing various organs in order to live, and believe you me, they all deserve to live. Organs are harvested, transplanted, lives are sacrificed, lives are saved. It's ridiculous and formulaic and I LOVE IT.

Two weeks ago, Mandy Patinkin guest starred in an episode that had been crying my eyes out and telling everyone I know that I love them.

The network has been sort of boneheaded in its marketing of the show. They did that annoying thing where they aired the pilot second, which made it sort of dumb and confusing, and it has been stymied by the football delays that are built into the Sunday night schedule every fall.

It averages only about 7.5 million viewers a week, which compared to NCIS: LA's 17.5 million is not good.

Now, CBS has said it will let the show complete production on all 13 episodes that were ordered, but it stops short of saying it will air them.

In the last episode that aired, the great Dr. Yablonsky was revealed to have some sort of dark past that was about to come back and bite him, and it was completely unbelievable and ridiculous and I LOVED IT.

How about you? Did you watch Three Rivers? What's your favorite ridiculous TV melodrama?