'Code Black' Season 2 Brings Rob Lowe To The Show

The season 2 premiere of the CBS medical drama Code Black  revealed a number of changes to the show - and the biggest of which is the introduction of West Wing star Rob Lowe as Colonel Ethan Willis a military doctor joining the Angels Memorial Hospital ER, fresh from the Middle East battlefield. He sports a crew cut to fit into the part!

"What's really happening in the world is that all of our advances in the trauma world are coming off the battlefield," said Lowe to TVGuide.com. "We've been at war for 16 years, so you can imagine what we're learning on a day-to-day basis. These military doctors from elite units are often repositioned in the big county emergency hospitals to help facilitate the new technology and the new way of thinking."

Lowe makes  a dramatic entry in the season premier, jumping off a helicopter on a rescue trip to save a shark attack victim in Malibu. 

The medical scenes on Code Black have always been called as true-to-life - a fact attested to by real-life doctors and nurses. So it was not surprising that Lowe underwent some intensive training despite this not being the first time Lowe is acting as a doctor. He had played a plastic surgeon in Behind the Candelabra.

Lowe explains the training he underwent

"There was a class," Lowe said.  "They had four or five different trauma cases set up and we would all rotate through them. There were sutures -- that would be one. Another would be how to incubate someone, or how to put in a chest line."

Lowe's character Ethan is being portrayed as a maverick shown as using never-before-tried medial techniques and jumping into the ocean to save a colleague. Returning ER head Dr. Rorish (Marcia Gay Harden) welcomes him as a fresh breath of air.

Code Black introduces other new characters this season, most of them part of a fresh bunch of first-year students joining the hospital. The show airs on CBS, Wednesdays at 10 p.m