Most people will never be involved in a murder investigation, but nearly all of us will find ourselves under the care of doctors and nurses at some point. That might explain why hospital dramas have always been a staple of television, starting with ABC’s short-lived “City Hospital” in 1951. At their best, these shows are a mirror for what ails society, typically delivered with a heaping side of melodrama and romance.
‘M*A*S*H’ (1972-1983)
One of the best series based on a movie, the beloved “M*A*S*H” softened its source material’s grim anti-war messaging just enough for primetime viability over the course of its 11-season run. But even with a laugh track foisted on it by CBS executives, the series maintained its focus on the horrors of the Korean War, following the staff of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, including surgeons Benjamin “Hawkeye” Pierce (Alan Alda), nurse Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Loretta Swit) and Corporal Walter “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff).
“No scripted television show before, and no episode of any show in the 40 years since, has ever had more eyeballs on it at the same time” than the M*A*S*H series finale, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” said Kenneth Lowe at Paste Magazine. (Prime Video)
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Along with “Hill Street Blues,” NBC’s medical procedural “St. Elsewhere” was “one of the shows that helped unlock TV’s full narrative potential and started to change the platform’s reputation as a haven only for big-tent, pre-chewed, lowest-common-denominator storytelling,” said Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone. The show followed a series of residents at crumbling, fictional Boston hospital St. Eligius, including future Hollywood superstars like Denzel Washington as Dr. Philip Chandler.
It also was one of the first dramatic series to tackle complex moral, social and political issues as part of its core mission. One example: The womanizing plastic surgeon Dr. Robert Caldwell (Mark Harmon) dies of AIDS in a season 4 arc. (Prime Video)
‘ER’ (1994-2009)
ER | Trailer | Seasons 1-7 available now | RTÉ Player - YouTube
The closing act of NBC’s legendary 1990s Thursday night lineup, the Chicago-set “ER,” was an instant hit, with its vérité medical-acronym-per-second style of depicting the thrills of emergency medicine. Created by bestselling “Jurassic Park” novelist Michael Crichton, the show featured a stellar cast, including Anthony Edwards as Dr. Mark Greene, George Clooney as Dr. Doug Ross and Julianna Margulies as Nurse Carol Hathaway, and those characters were the enduring emotional core, even in later seasons when the writers piled one implausible trauma on top of another. In “its heyday, ER was one of the rare shows that I looked forward to each week with a mixture of eagerness and sick dread,” said Noel Murray at The AV Club. (Hulu)
‘Bodies’ (2004)
Unlike most medical procedurals, BBC Three’s little-known, two-season “Bodies” has a very tight narrative through line. Max Beesley is Dr. Rob Lake, the British equivalent of a resident training in obstetrics, who comes to believe that his boss, the renowned Dr. Roger Hurley (Patrick Baladi) is dangerously and negligently incompetent.
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Dr. Lake becomes romantically involved with a nurse, Donna Rix (Neve McIntosh), and tries to convince his colleagues that Dr. Hurley is a fraud. Full of “suffocating claustrophobia, grinding despair or nameless dread,” creator Jed Mercurio’s series is “totally addictive” in part because a “brilliant seam of dark humor runs through the show, lightening the load considerably,” said James Donaghy at The Guardian. (The Roku Channel)
‘House’ (2004-2012)
They don’t make them like “House” anymore. Its 176 episodes over eight seasons represent about 25 theoretical years worth of “The Last of Us” — a show that HBO Max is doling out in seven-episode, snail-paced increments every two years or so. Hugh Laurie is the titular Dr. Gregory House, a gruff and often deeply unpleasant diagnostic medicine specialist whose forte is solving medical mysteries. He’s also fighting a Vicodin addiction that makes him erratic.
The supporting cast shifted several times over the course of its run, but several characters, including his friend Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) and colleague Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps), were with him for the duration. The show eventually focused on Dr. House “descending deeper and deeper into his own darkness,” a “vast undertaking for a series of its kind, which usually deals with a big group of equally billed stars,” said Caroline Preece at Den of Geek. (Hulu)
‘Nurse Jackie’ (2009-2015)
Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie” stakes out its territory in the first episode, when we see nurse Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco) sneaking Percocets before treating patients and flushing a patient’s severed ear down the toilet. An emergency room nurse at a fictional Manhattan hospital, Jackie isn’t quite a classic prestige TV antihero, but neither is she the kind of protagonist viewers will trust.
Jackie is “grippingly watchable but far from likable” in this “deftly touching show,” as she trades sex for opioids with her pharmacist paramour, Eddie (Paul Schulze), oversees a new trainee, Zoey (Merritt Wever), and tries to keep her marriage to Kevin (Dominic Fumusa) alive, said Tim Lusher at The Guardian. (Netflix)
‘This Is Going To Hurt’ (2022)
Ben Whishaw Stars in 'This Is Going to Hurt' | Trailer | AMC+ - YouTube
Based on a memoir by a physician in the U.K.’s National Health Service, “This is Going to Hurt” is an unflinching look at the country’s systemic medical dysfunction, as well as a searing critique of the insane hours and nonexistent work-life balance of the average doctor. Adam (Ben Whishaw) is a junior doctor making his way through his obstetrics and gynecology rotations.
This isn’t a case-of-the-week drama but rather a difficult look at how doctors become fatigued and embittered as they navigate the constraints of an underfunded system. He’s also working with a trainee, Shruti (Ambika Mod), who begins to fear that the system might turn her into a jaded version of Adam. Adam is “not an antihero; he is simply not a hero at all,” said Linda Holmes at NPR. That’s because the focus of this limited series is on what medicine asks of doctors and how it is unsustainable, a “devastating, funny, sharp story about life and death and failure and success.” (Netflix)
Coproduced by and starring “ER” veteran Noah Wyle, “The Pitt” taps into a seemingly unmet demand among streaming audiences for nostalgic, network-style drama. Each season of the series (there are two so far) unfolds over the course of a single day, which somehow doesn’t feel like a gimmick.
Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a world-weary emergency room doctor who clashes with higher-ups over costs and spending, and is supported by a superb ensemble including Taylor Dearden as Dr. Melissa King and Shabana Azeez as Dr. Victoria Javadi. There is “simply no way to watch The Pitt and feel good about the way society is currently functioning,” as the show features an “emphatic moral clarity that feels awkward only because we haven’t seen it for so long,” said Sophie Gilbert at The Atlantic. (HBO Max)
David Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of "It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics." He's a frequent contributor to Newsweek and Slate, and his work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Republic and The Nation, among others.
