NY Med opens its ER doors
Cameras show real life drama
I’m beginning to think medical dramas are the Mogwais of television. If you watch one after midnight, it mutates and pops out dozens of TV gremlins.
Watching so many copycat shows about preternaturally good looking, charming doctors saving lives — and occasionally sleeping with one another — has certainly distorted my view of the health profession. (It’s so bad that I keep trying to get injured, just to see if I can get in on the action.)
All of which makes ABC’s new documentary series NY Med (that’s right, it’s a doc and NOT a drama) so unique and compelling. For a full year, the network’s cameras followed the patients and staff at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. This new, eight-part series depicts modern health care on the front lines and offers a window into the allto-real world of an ER staff performing miracles — or falling short of them. The series can be uplifting one moment and heartbreaking the next.
And for those who enjoy the soapy aftertaste of prime time medical dramas, we also get glimpses into the private lives of these brilliant surgeons, nurses and orderlies. Given most of them spend more time together than their own families, the relationships are often more than a little complicated.
“Medicine is a universal subject. At some point in our lives we or those we love will become patients for one reason or another,”
Terry Wrong, the series’ executive producer, said in a statement. “This series take you behind the curtain to learn about those we depend on to fix us and how sometimes they just can’t.”
Reoccurring characters in the doc include Dr. Anthony Watkins, an African- American from the Deep South who overcome long odds to become a top-tier transplant surgeon, as well as heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz, who also has a successful career as a talkshow host.
This fall’s prime time schedule can keep its sudsy medical fiction. The real thing is happening on the small screen this summer. NY Med is opening the doors on modern medicine and inviting you in.