Trash TV: Hospital Edition

Recently, while hospitalized for ten days, I decided to check out some thematically-appropriate medical dramas. This is a stratum of TV junk food that I don’t have a lot of familiarity with. While I have been known to watch a police procedural, hospital shows are outside my usual interest zone.

As we all know, the best way to tackle unfamiliar genres is to pick two completely random examples from the various streaming platforms. In that vein, here are reviews of the first episode of Night Shift and the first season of The Resident (guess which one I liked more).

Night Shift

What if it was like Grey’s Anatomy...but extreme???

That seems to have been the guiding philosophy behind Night Shift, a show I had never heard of until it showed up in my Netflix reccies. Other medical dramas have dramatic pop ballads over their emotional end-of-episode montages; Night Shift has Nickelback-esque rock music. Because it’s cool and macho, and it smells like Lynx body spray and outdoor grilling, unlike those other girly hospital shows.

Our protagonist is some guy whose name I’ve forgotten, who used to be a combat medic in the US army but became a regular non-shooty doctor after being drummed out of the military for being too cool. He’s a maverick bad-boy who doesn’t play by the rules, and also he’s totally hot and all the women are into him! Hell yeah, brah!

Guy works on the titular night shift, which is where all the most extra cases happen, although his first bit of on-screen doctoring actually happens on his way to work (he drives a cool motorbike, of course), when he encounters someone who got impaled on a tree during a car crash. Like all medical dramas, the characters in Night Shift find themselves embroiled in exciting medical emergencies outside their working hours with a frequency that seems improbable.

Night Shift’s main feature, besides the chasmic gulf between how cool it thinks it is and how cool it actually is, is it’s bizarre pacing. Something dramatic and action-heavy is constantly happening. Events that in other shows would take up entire episodes are here brought up and dealt with in the space of minutes. In just the first episode we get: guy impaled on a tree! Baby girl with emergency kidney problems that needs a saline IV opened all the way STAT! A belligerent guy starts a fight in the reception area! Main Character Man and another doctor get flown by helicopter to the site of a car accident! Boy has internal decapitation and the main character has to hold his head totally still while the EMTs are cutting the car open and there’s fucking sparks everywhere woah! The asshole hospital administrator is losing his sight! One of the other soldier-doctors is gay! Dramatic romance! Dangerous surgery!

Most of this isn’t strung together into anything resembling a plot; things just happen, and then they’re swiftly discarded. At least one of the scenes I described doesn’t make any sense unless you assume it’s a flashback, even though it isn’t presented as one.

On top of just being obnoxious and haphazardly constructed, Night Shift also has an unpleasant whiff of US conservatism about it, which is anathema to me but I guess will be appealing to others. Obamacare gets tossed out casually as a reason why hospitals are closing, and one of the hospital staff who’s a soldier basically turns to the camera and delivers a recruitment ad at one point.

On the other hand, that same soldier is gay, and when the protagonist confronts him about it he encourages him to come out and reassures him that the hospital staff will accept him, so maybe the writers are trying to play to both sides of the aisle.

Either way, I didn’t find Night Shift very compelling and didn’t end up watching anything beyond the first episode. Bring me another medical drama, stat!

The Resident

After Night Shift I was looking for something totally different, so I jumped over to The Resident, a hospital drama about a handsome ex-soldier doctor who doesn’t play by the rules.

I picked these shows completely at random, just to be clear.

This particular ex-military hot maverick doctor is the titular resident, Conrad Hawkins, and let me tell you, his first impression in the pilot episode is absolutely disastrous. He ogles women, makes sexist and racist jokes at his newly-assigned intern, and just in general acts like a swaggering nineteen year old douchebag. This is obnoxious enough in actual nineteen year olds; when you apply those traits to someone who is meant to be in their early thirties and a genius doctor, it’s insufferable. I actually stopped watching initially due to how fucking annoying he is.

However, I think even the show’s writers realized that they went too far, as in subsequent episodes Conrad quickly stops acting like a huge asshole for no reason and develops a more subdued and nuanced personality. His presence in the show is also diluted by a cast of interesting and charismatic supporting characters, including Dr. Okafor, about whom I could watch an entire series because she’s awesome. The show as a whole still dips into the same cringe-inducing “THIS AIN’T ONE OF THOSE MEDICAL DRAMAS FOR GIRLS” posturing that Night Shift indulges in--there’s an extended slow-motion mountain biking sequence early on that’s absolutely hilarious--but by and large, after the disastrous pilot it turns into something actually worth watching.

Taking place at a big private hospital with spacious, camera crew-friendly rooms, the show frequently focuses on the struggle between the well-meaning doctors and nurses on the frontlines versus the profit-focused upper management who only care about the bottom line (this seems to be a common theme in American medical dramas, for some mysterious reason). The show takes a somewhat novel approach to the subject: rather than heartless corporate ghouls, the big villains are veteran doctors and surgeons who’ve reached the medical equivalent of rockstar status and believe that they deserve to be paid big bucks for their high-level services, even to the point of letting those who either can’t afford the price or don’t qualify for government assistance die. I don’t know how common that attitude actually is, but it’s a fresher take on the subject of how profit motives distort medicine than just pinning everything on management.

The series is somewhat unexpectedly based on a non-fiction book called Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You And How Transparency Can Save Lives (no bad boy hunks there), which makes sense in hindsight given that hospitals covering up medical mistakes and other shady goings-on is another major theme. According to the series the operating room is shrouded in a veil of secrecy that ensures that screw-ups and negligence get presented to the grieving families as unavoidable acts of God; again, I don’t know how accurate that is, but based on some of the stuff I’ve heard about surgeons from family members, I could believe it. It certainly makes for interesting viewing, although maybe not if you’ve got major surgery coming up