Courtesy ABC
BOSTON MED
Friendly Rating: Middle school and older.
Safety Rating: Some operating room scenes with blood and organs, may be too intense for younger/sensitive viewers.
Quality Rating: Compelling, but not earth-shaking.
Series premiers on ABC tonight at 10 p.m.
As a former E.R. junkie, my first instinct was to look for Noah Wylie and Laura Innes. But then I stepped and realized that this is real. Ouch.
Basically, it’s a fly on the wall look at the doctors, nurses and patients at three top Boston hospitals: Massachusetts General, Brigham and Women’s, and Children’s Hospital. You’re mostly getting the more intense trauma cases, here. Tonight’s episode looks at a cop who was shot in the jaw and two women receiving lung transplants. I strongly suspect your basic gall bladder surgery and pneumonia cases are not going to happen too often.
There are some language issues, mostly piss and ass – that level. A couple patients do die, you get to see incisions being made and the bad lung coming out of one patient – eeeeeuw! But overall, it could be a lot bloodier. And it is kind of neat to see the new transplanted lungs re-inflate in each patient.
One thing that is fun is listening to resident Daniel DiBardino and his running monologue/commentary as he rushes with the transplant team to the hospital where the donor is to harvest the lungs (another team is taking the heart), and the trip back. On one hand, he’s very excited about the possibility of this one set of lungs giving new life to two different women. But on the other, he notes that for that happen, something terrible happened to someone else and his or her family. In fact, as he enters the operating room where the donor is, he literally growls that so many of these donors are his age.
The cop story is no less compelling and it can be hard watching his wife and his parents arriving at the hospital. These are folks acting – these are real people facing their worst nightmare – to the point that while you understand and respect the cop’s desire to go back to work, you want to clobber him for even thinking about going back out there.
If you’ve got a kid considering a medical career, it’s a good show for her or him to be watching. This is as real as it gets, except for the really boring parts and the paperwork – no insurance hassles here, I suspect. There will even be a face transplant on the last of the eight episodes – a very rare operation and ironic as hell when you see it. Not something I want to look at, but ultimately admirable in the extreme and again, a good glimpse of reality for those so inclined.
