Cast a strength, but medical drama lacks originality
No cliche gets left on the operating-room floor in the new Fox series “The Resident.”
But that holds largely true for any medical drama anymore.
On the plus side, “The Resident” has an A-list cast and some interesting ideas about medical ethics.
Matt Czuchry ("The Good Wife") and Emily VanCamp ("Revenge") head the cast.
Czuchry plays the arrogant hotshot and senior resident, Dr. Conrad Hawkins, who has little patience for hospital bureaucracy and even less for Dr. Solomon Bell (Bruce Greenwood), the senior surgeon, whose glory days are behind him. Many staff members know that, for all Bell’s fame, he is as apt to kill a patient on the table as to save him.
Nicolette Nevin (VanCamp) is a nurse practitioner working on her doctorate in nursing and trying to convince Conrad — and herself — that he isn’t getting a second chance at romance with her.
Other staff members include the brilliant but impersonal Dr. Mina Okafor (Shaunette Renee Wilson), a Nigerian surgeon; independent-minded Dr. Lane Hunter (Melina Kanakaredes); and a new intern, Dr. Devon Pravesh (Manish Dayal), who is fresh out of Harvard Medical School and has the promise of Hawkins.
Although the series milks melodrama at every opportunity, it explores interesting ethical issues arising from its fundamental premise that a medical institution’s concern for the bottom line sometimes takes priority over patients’ lives.
Hawkins might be a crusader, but he is so convinced of the rightness of his purpose at the hospital that he’s willing to push ethical boundaries, sometimes at the potential peril of patients.
So does that make him, at heart, any different from Bell, who will cut corners to give priority to wealthy and powerful patients over lesser mortals?
Bell also isn’t above blackmailing another surgeon to do his work for him so that no one knows his hands shake.
Later, though, Hawkins does some blackmailing of his own — and switches blood samples — to save a patient.
You’d think these guys were politicians, not surgeons.
All of this raises the question of whether the end justifies the means, especially when the means are unethical and might result in lost lives.
Because this is a medical show, sex has to be a part of it — because that’s how doctors and nurses spend their days when they aren’t blackmailing one another, right?
The series creators — Amy Holden Jones, Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi — maintain that the events, as difficult to believe as some might be, are “all drawn from real life.”
The thought is hardly comforting, but Czuchry, VanCamp and the others are fun to watch, even when the second episode starts with a 28-year-old set for a heart transplant and, suddenly, Bell learns that a congressman pal needs a new ticker.
Can you guess where this is going? It doesn’t take a medical degree from Harvard to figure it out — just a certificate from the School of TV Predictability.