Is It The World Or Just Medicine That’s Apparently Filled With Assholes? #TheResident #3weekroundup #recap #review #FOX

Is It The World Or Just Medicine That’s Apparently Filled With Assholes? #TheResident #3weekroundup #recap #review #FOX

All pictures courtesy of FOX

FOX is batting three for 1000 this mid-season with the bad shows. First you have 9-1-1, which, while good, is far from the award-winning material that you would expect when reading some of the names in the cast (Connie Britton and Angela Bassett deserve better). Then you have the dreadful The Four: Battle for Stardom, which, thankfully, will be put out to pasture in a few short weeks—how can you make a show about stardom-hungry performers going head-to-head in singing battles so boring? Now you have this crap? Really? Oh crap! I’m burying the lede. I’m sorry, uh... So, is The Resident good enough to stay around and become a chief of some kinda... medical... department, or is this the wrong diagnose for FOX’s viewing schedule? God, that was terrible! I’m so pissed right now!!

FOX’s new mid-season show The Resident (#TheResident) follows the lives and sufferings of the staff at Chastain Medical Center. We open with a scene that sets the tone for the entire show and made me question why I (or anyone) even watches a medical show in the first place. Our opening takes place in a surgical room with a guy laying on the table to have a simple appendectomy before it completely ruptures. Here, we meet our first main player, Dr. Randolph Bell (note: I assume he’s one of the main players because he’s been on every episode so far and has had a lot of speaking and character development time, however IMDb lists him as only appearing in 4 out of 10 episodes). Dr. Bell, played by veteran actor Bruce Greenwood, is the aging chief of surgery that every patient loves and the hospital dotes on. People come from near and far to be operated on by him. Later in the episode they literally make a Grey’s Anatomy reference about how he’s the real-life Dr. McDreamy. As another aside, here I was reminded of what some song critic said about an old Omarion song IceBox when he remixed it and had Usher feature on the track. He said something to the effect of never let someone who’s clearly far better than you appear on your song. Dear The Resident, never reference a superior show in your same genre unless you really think you can compete with them. The viewers will just get pissed off and end up wondering why they aren’t just watching re-runs of that show rather than yours.

Hella-long aside but someone had to say it.

Anyway, Dr. Bell is really good, or at least he was at one point. Now, he’s secretly suffering through what looks like an early form of Parkinson’s. In what has got to be one of the worst, cheapest “I totally understand Millennials and even the most well-trained doctor-Millennials would do this” piece of garbage writing, during surgery the rest of the young surgical team (excluding an older nurse) stops to take a selfie because it is one surgeon's first surgery. Yes. That actually happened. It was a real scene. In this show. Not only was it a real scene but it was the opening scene. Of the series. Keep this scene in mind for later because when I tell you about all the other things that happen in these three episodes, you can refer back to this scene and see why I make the conclusion I do.

While everyone else is stopped to do the selfie and hold up the peace sign as they pose in front of a splayed stomach of a HUMAN BEING, Dr. Bell gets the shakes and accidentally slices through an artery. The team rushes to save him as one of the nurses yells something about pinching the artery, and the patient dies. They all gang-up on the doctor for killing the guy in a routine procedure, but he turns the tables on one of the other doctors and says that he “covered” for him on another accidental death during surgery and that if he goes down, the whole team does. The dude blackmails the team into covering up a medical malpractice. I was floored, and not in a good way.

That was the prelude surgery. We open in earnest with our two main characters. First we have Dr. Devon Pravesh, a young, newly Harvard Med-graduated doctor of Indian descent. Think of him as our Noah Wyle from ER (another show that was better than this). Fresh to his internship, he is ready to learn as much as he can and try to apply whatever he learned at Harvard to the real world. He is paired with who I’m assuming is our titular character in Dr. Conrad Hawkins.

Dr. Conrad Hawkins is a dick. I was gonna give some deep description of his look and whatnot, but eh! You know that one really annoying guy at your work who really is quite good at his job, but has few people skills and thinks he knows everything? Yeah, just picture him but white (if the guy at work isn’t). Conrad is supposed to be the semi-young Gen Xer who looks down upon everybody around him because they have an inferior intellect, yet really has a heart of gold because he actually saves patients and OH MY GOD! We’ve all seen this stupid show before, except on that one Conrad was an older, surly bloke who walked with a cane and called himself House. Anyway, ladies (and some fellas) if you aren’t convinced that he is a dick, after his intro scene where he is shown doing something stick-it-to-the-man-good, we are officially introduced to him when Pravesh meets him, and Conrad asks the very engaged Indian doctor what color he likes, referring to women.

Look, if you read this blog with any bit of frequency, you’ll know that I have said some pretty sexist, pretty politically incorrect things in my time but this bit of dialogue and character building felt pointless. Not only that but it later half-confuses the characterization of Conrad. In writing, they generally teach you to try building character through action and dialogue rather than just saying that the character is this or that. Ex: Sewn into the lining of Carl’s jacket was his most prized possession, the Terrible Towel. OK, that’s not a very good example, but do you see how I use a well-known item of memorabilia to tell you something about Carl rather than just saying it flat? Now you not only know that Carl is a football fan but that his favorite team is the Pittsburgh Steelers. So, it only seems natural for you to assume that this doctor who is gawking at a grouping of women through a thin glass like they are cuts of meat is probably a womanizer or at least a surgeon. Conrad is not a surgeon and he apparently is or was a playboy maybe? It’s uncertain.

At this point, let me stop and point out how I often only go on such long tangents and sink into this weird “I know things about writing” mode when I dislike something. Please bear with me.

Back to the show, Conrad gives Pravesh the rundown about how he is his boss from now on, how Pravesh may have just graduated from med school, but he really knows nothing, about how he can end the kid’s career if Pravesh ever talks back to him or questions his judgment because he’s always right (he actually said those words. I couldn’t believe it), and how he’s pretty much like god around there. At this point I stopped to ask myself, “Self, if this hospital is supposedly so good and Conrad is such an amazing doctor, then why doesn’t he have a gaggle of other doctors following him around too? Shouldn’t he have more than just Pravesh to oversee?” Myself didn’t have the answer to that question.

Conrad and Pravesh go to what will be Pravesh’s first patient interaction, a guy with some kind of disease that could eventually lead to lower-leg paralysis. After the back and forth “intern, what do we do” exchange, and Pravesh wanting to perform some expensive test, Conrad told him to stick a finger up the guy’s butt which will tell him if his anus is tight enough. If not, then paralysis is already beginning. Conrad takes the opportunity to make another crude sex reference before leaving and finding one of the nurses.

Nurse Nicolette Nevin (played by the lovely Emily VanCamp) is Conrad’s ex who he still wants. While it’s not explicit on the first episode, it’s implied through some careful spying on her Tinder-like account that he might have cheated and/or been too afraid to fully commit, not to mention childish. He displays his childishness by yanking her into an on-call room and trying to Christian Grey her in the middle of the day. I’m quite shocked that this scene wasn’t changed considering the atmosphere currently involving sexual assaults/harassment because it’s clearly both. However, that’s not what pissed me off about this scene. What pissed me off was how it so blatantly and easily fueled the fire with ammo for feminists on men’s behavior. It felt like it was written by a woman who hates men and who sees them all as sex-hungry monsters with no tact, which is overall what’s wrong with the character. Conrad, so far, has never tried to be a decent human being. A great doctor? So-so. But just human, someone who understands the most base rules of etiquette or decency? No. And the scene rings false, too. So even after he tells her that he will do anything to get her back, and she leaves him with his pants around his ankles and inside a locked (from the outside?) room, you don’t feel that sorta, “Yeah, you go girl! Show that ass-hat what’s what!” feeling that I think the writers wanted you to feel.

Somehow Conrad gets out of the room and Pravesh finds him after having checked the guy’s butt (note: I don’t remember them talking about the dude’s butt again after that). Right in front of them an addict is brought in with some kind of injury and struggles against all the doctors because she doesn’t want to be treated and is in denial about her addiction. Conrad looks at one thing on her hand and immediately IDs her ailment and tells her that she’ll be dead by tomorrow if she doesn’t allow them to treat her. Time never being on time itself, that tomorrow thing comes immediately, and she collapses to the floor. Conrad then says that Pravesh will take lead on this girl and that it is his call on what they should do about her. Pravesh performs CPR for 26 minutes even after Conrad tells him to stop. Her heartbeat finally returns but Conrad tells him that her brain’s been starved of oxygen for too long and that she’s brain-dead now and that Pravesh broke the first rule.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to another surgeon, Dr. Mina Okafor, a black woman from Nigeria. Not only is she a pretty good surgeon she is also the hospital’s leading surgical robotics expert. She is set to perform the hospital’s first surgery using a machine to make every incision and whatnot. She is shown to lack any sort of personal skills and is solely there to perform surgeries and become the world’s top surgeon, I guess. Frankly, little is known about her for the first two episodes save for that she is black, tall, from Africa, rather rude, single and is having visa problems. That last thing about her is used by Dr. Bell to blackmail her into letting him do the surgery that she’s been training months to do. He’s never operated the robotics, still can’t hold his hands steady with the robotic interface on his fingers, and can’t even cut into an apple with the robot, let alone a person, yet he wants to do the surgery on the hospital’s biggest donor.

Now, ready for the kicker? Though newbie Pravesh idolizes Dr. Bell, almost everyone in the hospital knows that the old guy is unhealthy and that he keeps killing patients. A few other doctors know, all the nurses do and most of the other surgical crews do as well, yet he keeps doing surgeries. And nobody reports him for malpractice or violation of the Hippocratic oath or violation of hospital guidelines or something! My mind has never been more boggled. And worse, Conrad comes face-to-face with him multiple times and asks him when he’s going to give it up and stop trying to operate on people and the dude is just like, “I still got it.” And it’s half-baffling because you don’t know if these interactions were written on some kind of artistic level or if the writers were completely unaware, because from any outside viewer with a decent understanding of what’s going on in the episode, you can see that Bell is basically Conrad in 20 or 30 years. They’re both the same amount of arrogant, narcissistic and egotistic. But worst of all is that near the end of the episode you learn that they’re also the same amount of corrupt.

Left to right: Dr. Bell, Dr. Conrad

After Bell blackmails Dr. Okafor into a genius plan of operating the robot during the surgery while he sits up front (the surgery is recorded and broadcast worldwide) and mimes the movements to take credit for her work, Conrad sneaks off to the brain-dead girl’s room, closes the door and the blinds and turns off her machine on the sneak. Luckily, Nurse Nevin comes in and catches him, guilt-staring him into turning the machine back on and quietly leaving. Dude was about to Million Dollar Baby the girl without any forethought to organ donation or something like that. And I really sat there like, “What?” He seems more like an idiot than a compassionate person trying to save the family weeks, months or years of agony thinking she might wake up. You wanna take a guess at what the next episode involves?

Episode two starts with three people all going down in a medical emergency that will unite them all with the brain-dead girl. While at career day for a local high school speaking to the class of one of his patients, Conrad helps to save the life of his teacher-patient by recognizing the signs of heart failure. Across town, Dr. Bell and another lead doctor in the hospital Dr. Lane Hunter are out on a hunting excursion with a congressman and a lobbyist. The Congressman has a heart attack and errantly fires his gun, filling the lobbyist’s ass with buckshot. You know what happens next?

Yep, you guessed it: both the congressman and the young teacher need a heart transplant. At first they only have one new heart that is on the way from another donor and because the teacher is on the top of the list, it’s scheduled to go to him. However, because the congressman is a VIP, Dr. Bell does some shady stuff and un-allocates the heart for the teacher (he’s black, by the way) in order to give it to the old, white congressman. Antoine Fuqua is one of the producers of this show. I can’t believe that he or somebody didn’t see this or read the script, or stop to think about the casting and say, “Wait a minute, something’s not right about this.” But nope! Nobody saw the blatant racism in episode one; nobody saw the blatant racism in episode two. And no I’m not talking about the Dr. Okafor thing from episode one. I’m trying to save my critiques for... you know, the critique, but it’s just so stupid to set up these kinds of easily identifiable racial plot-points and not actually make a statement about race that I have to call it out a little right now. I digress.

After a ton of back and forth about whom the heart belongs to, Conrad tampers with the DNA/viability tests that determine if the heart would take in the old congressman. This forces the head of surgery to finally concede and go talk to the mom of the brain-dead girl and convince her to donate her daughter’s organs. Both men get saved.

Meanwhile, Conrad sends Pravesh out on his own on what he’s deemed “Independence Day.” He will have no other doctor to help him with anything but can turn to nurses for stuff. Now, I don’t want to compare this to Grey’s Anatomy but since this show did bring that show up, isn’t it customary for the new interns to follow their lead resident for at least a couple weeks before going out on their own even for basic chart work-ups? There is literally nothing in this episode that makes us think this is even two days after episode one. I swear it’s the next day. In any case, Pravesh has to do all the charting and sign-out work for the other doctors. He also has to visit a few patients and deal with the pesky task of learning. There’s a scene where he is in the room with Dr. Bell and a patient can't breathe so Conrad comes and dumps a bucket of ice on her to stop her from crashing, and Pravesh also fonds over the female doctor that was on the hunting excursion. He then notices that something is happening with the lobbyist who took the buckshot and runs the guy up to surgery when the nurses and another doctor told him that he should've paged Conrad and that they could’ve taken care of whatever was happening with a much more simple procedure.

In the end, Pravesh and the rest of the doctors (not Bell) end up in a bar like Grey’s Anatomy, where he stands up to Conrad and tells him that this spoiled white boy really doesn’t know everything and that he made the right call about the lobbyist and that if Conrad wants to end his career he can, but he was right. Conrad, in turn, congratulates him on passing Independence Day because he wanted him to realize that no doctor is always right, which felt kind of like a false-flag victory because the dude is Harvard trained. I think he has the sense enough to figure out that no human is ever always right about something.

Dr. Okafor

Oh and there’s also this completely perfunctory scene that, unfortunately, cemented my original idea that this series was written by a male-hating woman who clearly doesn’t even care to entertain notions that the male mind or social norms could both be slightly different than she expects. Case in point: The male nurse who works to remove the buckshot from the lobbyist sits at the bar and tells a woman that he is on-call and that he works at the hospital across the street, and she assumes he’s a doctor and moves closer to him. Meanwhile, Dr. Okafor, the tall, short-haired Nigerian woman sits at the same bar and is approached by a black man who sits and smiles and asks her what she does. When she says she works at the hospital, he assumes she’s a nurse. She corrects him and says that she’s a doctor actually. He then, in the most ludicrous way possible, stares at her and quietly slips off the seat and away into the crowd. A-tee-hee!

I’m sorry but this was the funniest thing. First off, I get that they are ever-so briefly touching on social attitudes about gender and what’s assumed here. It’s not that the guy is mistaken for a doctor and the girl for a nurse that is funny. What’s funny is both how this scene is acted and this recurring notion among professional women of all races (black women especially) that men are too afraid or intimidated by their success, which is why they are single. It’s not that serious. And if you are going to keep thinking this then you will remain single. The gender love gap is far more complex than that.

First off, they’re in a bar. You seriously think this dude is looking for a wife or even a relationship in a bar? No. Most men are looking to pick up some woman, so they can get laid. This is how you can tell that the scene was most likely written by a woman, just like you can often tell when female sex scenes are written by men, because they think differently about the situation. A woman is already thinking long-term about how her success will intimidate a man away when you just met. The guy is not. The guy is just thinking about how hot she is and how quickly he can get her to put out. Might be a sad commentary on things but it’s true. There’s no way he’s gonna care about your career or what you do the first time he meets you, especially if it’s not an ACTUAL date. Most men are like those four kids from Stand By Me, they only care about DAT BODY! So thinking that a man is gonna slip away just because you’re a successful doctor (actually, he doesn't even know if she's a successful doctor or not and doesn't even know she's a surgeon), and not because he maybe saw some other more attractive woman down the bar, is slightly self-fulfilling-prophecy-ish. But I digress.

Episode three starts with Conrad in a bike race with another doctor. He does some nice BMX jump to show how cool and fearless he is and wins by a hair over the other doctor. As soon as the race ends, some drunk guy (horrible acting) steps into the spokes of a bike on the ground and snaps his leg. They take him to Chastain where Conrad and Pravesh, along with all the other doctors must sit through a presentation on the billing practices. Basically, they're showing more corruption because they are trying to figure out ways to charge patients more for simple things like irrigating ear infections. Naturally, Conrad bails.

While the pay thing is going on, one of the women who subcontracts with Chastain and helps to exercise long-term patients experiences some back pain that turns into something serious when she drops to the floor. The billing specialist doesn't want to treat her because she doesn't have insurance and can't pay for the expense that the hospital will incur. It turns out she's an illegal immigrant with a huge tumor that's killing her, but the billing specialist doesn't care. Even worse, she was brought here as a child and has no more family here, so she can't be released into her own care by law. She is, essentially, a ward of the hospital, and, regardless of what they do, they aren't getting out of the situation without an expense of at least half a million. So the CEO of the hospital then engages in a bidding sale to try to pawn the girl off onto some other hospital for a fee. They're trading the girl for cash considerations.

Left to Right: Dr. Pravesh, Immigrant, Nurse Nevin

And then somebody calls immigration. Before the men in ICE jackets get to her Conrad the black doctor and their minions send her into surgery with Conrad's other doctor surgeon buddy. And the operation goes well, which means that she will be their patient for a little while longer but as soon as she can walk they will kick her out because she becomes someone else's problem then. Dr. Bell even tries to make her walk the moment she gets out of surgery and I sat there wondering how ridiculous this show could get. Nurse Nevin even has to stick it to the billing specialist when she discovers that the woman has ordered an expensive MRI for a patient who doesn't need it without checking his history. MRI's are magnetic and will rip out anything metallic. He happens to have a metal penis implant. Yet another bit of close-call malpractice in a hospital rife with it.

As far as the broken leg guy, his liver is failing, and he needs to stop drinking but can't. Oh, and Conrad was in the Marines at one point making him a poor man's TC from The Night Shift.

What’s my grade? I give it a D+. Yes, the plus is for the diverse cast. Other than that, you would be hard-pressed to find something worth a single damn in this show. It’s funny because it’s actually rare that I give not one but two super-low ratings to new shows in a single season, let alone in a single week, yet here we are. And for them to both be on the same network is astounding. It’s funny how I started this 2017-18 viewing season back in September/October thinking/writing, “Gosh, there are really not that many new shows premiering this year for the networks, at least not full-season orders.” If this show is an example of what they were offered, I can see why. And it’s also crazy how everyone calls out either ABC or NBC for constantly having new shows because they have to cancel so much stuff. At least they actually try to make good and/or innovative and creative programming. FOX decided not to do something creative this year, but instead went with watered-down carbon copies of other things that are hits. Between this show, The Orville and The Gifted (which started good but became like every other X-men film you’ve ever seen, save for Logan and Deadpool), we’ve gotten stuff that reminds us of other, much better stuff. Where do I thoroughly begin?

Before I rip into this show, I cannot stop and stress enough how much I hate critiquing other people’s work even when it’s good. As a creative myself it always makes me queasy. And distance-critiquing is the worst because you know that you are too far away to effect anything which makes it feel like you’re old-man-shouting obscenities at the kids on your neighbor’s lawn. “Like, Old Man, we’re not even on your lawn. Chill!” Just know that this is going to be very painful for all parties involved.

Like House But Without House And Kal Penn's Character Alive

To say that The Resident is a ripoff of House, MD does a disservice to all the other medical shows it rips off. Now, before you start jumping on me about how medical shows are a genre to themselves and how there will of course be overlap and similarities, let me take you through the odyssey of good/decent versus lazy shows. For those people who were there in the beginning, Grey’s Anatomy, when it first came out, was so good, so new, so different from the reigning medical show at the time (ER), that it literally (in concert with Desperate Housewives) helped to change the language and flow of all of ABC’s shows going forward. It became somewhat of a cultural phenomenon, so much so that to this day people are still referencing the McDreamy, McSteamy thing. Hell, this very show did it! Not only that but it melded music from up-and-coming artists into what often became the most heartfelt moments of the show. Would The Fray have been as big without Grey’s Anatomy pumping their single “How To Save A Life?” Maybe.

We can jump off Grey’s and over to other medical shows in recent years. To try to be different from Grey’s, they all went with some kind of hook that either drew us in on an emotional level or made us sit at the edge of our seats. Private Practice had a different feel than Grey’s while still fitting into that universe. The Night Shift was a hospital populated by soldier-doctors dealing with all sorts of PTSD, US disillusionment, etc. Code Black followed a hospital under severe stress from running out of supplies. Pure Genius tried to bring super-tech into medicine. Red Band Society tried to show what it was like to be a sick kid living in a hospital. Even The Good Doctor has a unique twist with our main character having autism. The only one that didn’t have a huge twist was Chicago Med, which survives because it is part of a much larger shared universe with the entire Chicago franchise on NBC.

The Resident does not have a draw or catch, at least not a good one. From what I can see, and this will take us back to the beginning of this post about how I had to think about why we watch medical dramas, this show is about corruption in the field of medicine. Our main character has a surgeon’s-like god complex and so does the actual surgeon. Both of them have already proven in the first three episodes that they will stop at almost nothing not to do what’s right but to do what best feeds their ego. If that means breaking the law, blackmailing someone, or just flat-out committing malpractices, so be it. What’s worse is that there is an emotional dissonance about this whole thing. Whereas House seemed like he really did care and was an overworked, beleaguered genius who was essentially always mad because he could never master the art of being human, Conrad doesn’t seem to show any of that. For House his gift was his curse. Conrad doesn't seem compelled to help people. Yes, the hot nurse he used to sleep with tells Pravesh that he totally has a heart of gold and is the guy you go to if you “want your engine fixed” but there’s something so intrinsically oily about him that it’s hard to see past his bad behavior.

Yeah, I used this pic twice, in ode to this recycled show 

Also, the supposed genius of him feels lost when, on Pravesh’s first case, the girl goes brain-dead and he just seems completely pissed about it. Yes, Conrad told Pravesh to stop and he wouldn’t, but he also told him that the case was his. And in the end, when the girl’s organs were needed for harvesting, I kinda felt, “Well, wait a minute so Pravesh technically did the right thing twice and both times Conrad told him he was doing wrong? What?” I know every single thing doesn’t have to be written in one episode and you need to give the characters time to build and whatnot, but it truly felt like Conrad didn’t even conceive of the possibility that the girl’s organs could be harvested. He was willing to turn off the machine and let her die and risk having some of her organs sour in a corpse. Who knows how often they would come in to check on the girl? Whatever.

And the third episode, to me, was morally washed out by the actions taken by nearly everyone on the first two episodes. They try to build this narrative that our titular character and his minions are the rebels against the corporate health machine, yet took no time to truly build the ground on which their moral superiority could stand. Between Bell willfully killing patients, Okafor being just as robotic as the tools she uses in surgery, and Conrad also being willing to kill, lie or cheat to get his way, why should I root for any of them to get their way over the wishes of the hospital? Do they really care or are they all just on a spiraling ego trip to the bottom? Right now I'd vote for the latter.

Then there is the overt racism, sexism, misogyny and misandry that has been written into the DNA of each character. Both Conrad and Dr. Bell are the literal epitome of white boy privilege. White male Trump voters, if you’re still wondering why or can’t see why so many minority groups dislike you and think that things are unfairly advantaged toward you, watch the first three episodes of this show, because this is why. The older, white male Dr. Bell who is known to be killing patients because he’s unfit to be a surgeon, gets to keep doing it for however long he’s been doing it because... well, because he’s white and has a good reputation. A reputation, mind you, which is filled with lies manufactured by him. There’s no oversight for this dude, nobody checking behind him, except for people that rank beneath him in the hospital. Meanwhile, Conrad gets to be as mean, conniving, sexist and racist as he wants and nobody says a thing. Can he sexually harass his ex-gf by pulling her into a room and forcibly kissing her? Sure. It’s just a cool joke and oh he will do anything to get her back. And seeing as how he was willing to kill a patient without consent (at least Bell attempts to save his patients every time), I’m not unsure that he’d do more devious things for Nevin if she asked. Do they have terrible personalities and could easily cause the hospital dozens of lawsuits if either of them were found out? Of course, but they’re really good at their jobs sorta (even that’s questionable) and they’re white males, so they get to stay.

This view of them and how their characters are built wouldn't be so bad if they tried to make an actual statement on social justice, or at least one that was less muddled. Right now it feels like they're saying that yes white men disproportionately have advantages in this society and that many of them can act like a-holes but it's OK so long as they do good with that. It is the Trump syndrome personified. Yes, House had some of this same shtick, however, he also had a certain bit of quirky, comical charm to both the character and the actor's performance. Here, unfortunately, Conrad looks like a d-bag. There's almost zero real charm here. Instead of a rye smile, you get a smug grin that doesn't feel like it's been earned either by age or experience. Oily. Super oily! I think what it is, is that almost all of the heroes here lack any kind of nobility. Again, I will keep going back to Conrad trying to kill the one patient, yet this military guy has Death Before Dishonor tatted on his back. Give me a break! 

Frankly, their behavior is partially indicative of a much larger problem in dramas (med dramas specifically) these days. They’re filled with assholes. We get it, hospital drama is life and death, so you need people who are at the top of their game to be the ones calling the shots, but where Grey’s Anatomy excelled at giving us more love and coaching-up of talent, most of these new dramas are corner-stoned in the chew out. There’s a sense that the teaching doctors have to be asses to you because that’s what the job requires. Uh, no. The job requires that you be on point and come ready. But you don’t have to challenge someone’s personality and try to make them in your own image in order to do that. On the flip, people are not as stupid as they are made out to be. They don’t come in thinking they know everything (and yes, that even goes for Millennials). Yes, they will come in thinking they know a lot but that doesn’t mean that they are so stupid that they have no idea what they signed up for. Again, I think this is a superficial generational thing to treat anyone under 37 as a complete moron because their brains are wired differently. I even noticed this in Grey’s Anatomy this season with the new interns. If you go back and watch the first season and compare how they were treated and reacted to things then as opposed to now, you can see that this new round of interns is, for some reason, written as intrinsically more stupid. It baffles me.

Dear Emily VanCamp, you are wasted on this show

Again, circling back to my idea that this show is about corruption in the medical field, I had to sit down in silence for a while and have a good think about why people even tune in to any kind of case-of-the-week procedural or medical drama. If we tune in to cop shows to see bad guys perform slick and ingenious crimes but ultimately getting caught, do we not tune into medical dramas to see people’s lives saved? Sure, there is always the one or two criminals that outsmart the cop or patients that die, which we ourselves learn from just as much as the characters, but we watch more for a good feeling, right? So then why the hell would I want to watch a medical show that has a malpractice seam running through its very fabric? Dr. Bell is almost every person’s worst nightmare whenever they think about going to the doctor’s even for a routine checkup. This man will kill you while removing a mole for god’s sake. He is definitely the one to leave a pair of scissors inside of you or accidentally make you blind when you had 20/20 vision. What’s worse is that Conrad doesn’t seem much better. They both operate with a mindset that rules don’t apply to them. Amidst the show’s light, sunny cinematographic composition lies a fairly dark show that both covers some of the same storylines as Grey’s and other medical dramas, yet has little to no gravitas underneath to support its weighty inquisitions. It’s a wonder to me that they chose Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me” as the song to promote this show because it doesn’t fit the tone of the show in anyway. Same can be said for the title of the show because it really isn't about The Resident. In fact, I would have appreciated this show more if they just named it Malpractice and explored the dark side of medicine. For now, however, it seems to have taken on a mixed tone where it doesn't know what it wants to be and both the viewer and the characters are lost in this murky mess.

Therefore, I’ve come to what, to me, feels like the only logical conclusion I could produce: this show is a satire of other, much better medical shows. It has to be. Whereas Grey’s is a serious show and Scrubs was a parody, this lies somewhere in the middle with worse writing than both. Taking the storyline of McDreamy’s hand problems after the accident and turning it into a head-shaking killfest with Dr. Bell has to be the writers and producers critique of how terrible they thought that Grey’s Anatomy storyline was. Just like the annoyed, egotistical Conrad, who thinks he’s some kind of drill sergeant and/or father figure to the younger doctor who he sees potential in has to be a nod to Scrubs’ Dr. Cox. Because if this is supposed to be taken seriously, then yikes! What's worse is that I know at least two of the writers on the show have done far better work on shows that have gotten cancelled. One of the male writers and past doctor (currently under investigation for sexual harassment) worked on The Night Shift which most likely influenced the bits and pieces of military protocol on this show. The creator of the show also worked on Black Box which handled the business side of medicine in a much better, more interesting light and, because it was an ABC show, had far more heart and emotional weight to it than this show does. It's rather sad that both of those shows were cancelled when they explored some of the same territory that this show has but with greater writing.

Should you be watching? I would say no, but it seems like I don’t know what people like because people seem to watch the shows that I vehemently dislike. So maybe people are looking for something new or are looking for villains in a medical drama because if so, this will fulfill that need. But I’d say that there have been far better medical shows within the last three years and I named some of them here. Hell, I liked Pure Genius better than this. Sadly, I can see this getting renewed, but I doubt that it would make it past season three. The Resident airs on FOX Mondays at 9pm. Catch it on FOXonDemand or at FOX.com.

What do you think? Have you heard of FOX’s The Resident? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll check it out now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? What did you think of it? Was I too hard on it and it’s your new favorite show? What do you think will happen to Dr. Bell when the hospital board finds out about his sickness? And do you think Conrad will get back with his nurse ex-girlfriend? Let me know in the comments below.

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Until next time, “You got into Harvard Med?”

'What? Like it's hard?'

“Uh... Yes. It's really, like super hard. Super duper hard.”

P.S. There were some things that I wanted to say in this review/recap but I just got so frustrated with even reviewing this show that I couldn't spend another couple of minutes on it. I think of a better sign-off next time.

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