Not to be confused with the unrelated 1999 feature film of the same name, Wonderland cast Levine as a put-upon shrink who not only fought to help criminally disturbed patients in his Bellevue-like NYC facility -- battling its bureaucratic politics in the process -- but also struggled to raise his two young sons in the midst of a nasty custody dispute. His forensic psychiatrist was our entrée into the hospital's chaotic cross-currents, verbally laying out how the patients are just ordinary folks who "cease painting within the lines. These are the people that society would prefer just go away -- the shadow people that project upon us their shadow and remind us just how tenuous mental health is."

Whoa. Poetic. Profound. How did dialogue like that even get on the air? Well, in practical terms, it didn't, ABC throwing the show into the Thursday 10 PM slot against ER in March 2000 when NBC's show was a Nielsen powerhouse. Only two episodes aired, of eight produced.

They deserve to be resurrected now -- TV or DVD, we're happy either way -- considering that the show's writer-director-creator was Peter Berg, who imbued Wonderland with the same hand-held documentary flavor and viscerally teeming texture he gives his current NBC series Friday Night Lights. Berg assembled another superb cast of real adults, too -- Levine, Martin Donovan, Michelle Forbes, with guest stars like Patricia Clarkson and later ER doctor Leland Orser -- who vividly evoked not only hospital turmoil but the personal turbulence it spilled into their home lives.

Berg even got the opening credits sequence right, a kaleidoscopic hallucination that put you right into the messed-up minds of the psychiatric trenches you'd be spending the next hour in. That little gem is about all you can find of Wonderland these days, on YouTube. Madonna hums the theme song!