The Doctor Is... No, I’m Not Going To Say He’s In #TheGoodDoctor #ABC #3weekroundup #premiereweek #review #recap

The Doctor Is... No, I’m Not Going To Say He’s In #TheGoodDoctor #ABC #3weekroundup #premiereweek #review #recap

All pictures courtesy of ABC

Get ready for yet another three-week roundup review. I’m your writer, Michael Stephenson, and I’m here to bring you the latest on another new fall show that the network execs are praying that you’ll absolutely love. But will this show be a godsend or is it in need of some surgical repair? Let’s dive in together to find out.

The Good Doctor #TheGoodDoctor is an ABC show that stars Freddie Highmore as the titular character named Dr. Shawn Murphy who is special because he suffers from autism but also has an acute form of savant syndrome. In other words, he’s a socially awkward medical genius who thinks like a computer and acts like one, too. While we are going to forego the comparisons to Doogie Howser (yes, though Highmore is 25 he still looks like a teenager), we are going to make the comparison between this series and one of the other shows that apparently one of the executive producers of this show worked on: House, MD. On that show we had a jerk of a doctor who was also a genius at diagnosing a patient’s ailment. While there we got a man on the late-stages decline of his career, here we get a young man on the precipice of his career. An intern in a teaching hospital, Shawn is there to join the surgical team. But problems start before he even arrives.

Before he gets to the hospital he goes to the airport where he witnesses an accident in which a child is injured by shattered falling glass. Though there’s already a doctor tending to the boy, he comes over and tells the man how he is saving the boy’s life incorrectly and shows him the correct way. The guy gets annoyed and is all, “Hey, kid, who are you!” And he’s like, “Hello, I am Dr. Shawn Murphy.”

Meanwhile, as he is busy saving a life, a few miles out is the hospital where he is set to start his last part of the hiring interview later that day. The interview is really just a formality as the hospital president has already hired him but he must make his argument for why Shawn belongs on the surgical team considering his disability. His proponent: President Dr. Aaron Glassman. As we learn, Glassman knew Shawn growing up. He met him one night when Shawn and his younger brother came to his practice asking if he could heal Shawn’s dead bunny. Now, Glassman sees the potential in making Shawn a doctor there and has to fight with his head of surgery, and the board of directors to make this happen.

Meanwhile, as Glassman fights, Shawn saves. He figures that the boy needs surgery and has a tiny shard of glass lodged somewhere in his bloodstream that quickly makes its way to his heart. Clearly that’s not beneficial. He rides along in the ambulance with the boy and the boy’s parents and is repeatedly told even by the EMT that he’s imagining something that the heart monitor isn’t showing. Of course he’s right but that’s not until the end of the show.

Anyway, we get to the hospital where we meet the different doctors Shawn will be working with. We have Claire Browne who is this very beautiful black girl who seems to be the caring motherly type that will be the one to befriend Shawn first. Her immediate connection with him is due to her paralleled idealization as being of lower rank in the hospital. She is both black and a woman surgeon working under mostly males; Shawn, while a white guy, is both very young and autistic and seems more like he should be receiving treatment from the doctors rather than giving it. You see how that works? Don’t get me wrong because this is a very diverse show, but I have noticed how it is the go-to for writers to make the woman the one who is the most open with someone and usually it’s the black woman. Anyway, she listens to something he said to her without even fully knowing who he is. He says that they should get some secondary test on the kid before operating and she suggests that to her superior.

Dr. Melendez

Her superior is Dr. Neil Melendez, an arrogant Latino showboat surgeon who is the lead attending behind the chief of surgery Dr. Marcus Andrews, a black guy. These two, in the first three episodes, seem to butt heads with everybody including each other. Melendez runs a team of surgeons under his tutelage and thinks that he is God’s gift to triple by-passes. Andrews is equally talented but older and angling himself for the job of hospital president as soon as the old white guy either retires or is pushed out by the board. He goes the hardest against this idea of bringing Shawn, an autistic surgeon, into the hospital, throwing out things like “the liability” and “he can barely communicate” as defenders against the idea. He’s not wrong, just not fully right.

Under Melendez (outside of the white woman who has yet to make a meaningful impact save for her horizontal dances with the hot-shot surgeon) is Dr. Jared Kalu. Kalu and Browne are on the same level, still learning and still sniping each other to take credit for ideas and get the hottest surgeries in the hospital. They’re also sleeping together. Let me point out that at this point, the specialties (if any) of each surgeon is unclear. That includes the specialty of Melendez who has been prepping surgeries for livers and cutting open heads. I can only assume that everyone is in general surgery at this point. Anyway, Kalu is a brown-noser (and that’s not just because he is another minority character) who is sleeping with his fellow surgeon but not in a serious capacity. We’re unclear of his motives just yet but things are still taking shape.

Meanwhile, the show unfolds in a back and forth of chaos and tranquility for Shawn. While Shawn is barred from entering the surgical gallery because the guards don’t believe that he works at the hospital and the surgeons there were hostile to this crazy man suggesting that they aren’t doing their job properly, he flashes back to his childhood. That bunny that I mentioned earlier got broken and dead because his abusive father grabbed it and threw it against the wall in a scene that I just knew would trigger PETA’s angry-letter-writing department. Shawn’s brother, a kind soul, then takes his brother and the bunny to a small clinic where they meet Glassman. Glassman can tell that there is something wrong with the young Shawn but doesn’t press the issue. He does, however, pay close attention to Shawn’s brother’s plan to run away and never return to their abusive home again. Glassman extends a helping hand that sees him serve as the number the boys can call if ever in serious need. In some rather heavy foreshadowing we not only get the sense that Glassman will somehow end up raising Shawn as his own, but that something bad will happen to Shawn’s brother.

And something bad does happen. Shawn and his brother link up with a group of other Never-Neverland street boys and run to play in an old abandoned garage near the junkyard they found to live in. They manage to climb onto a bus or train car and Shawn’s brother slips off and dies as Shawn watches, his head smashed just like the bunny’s.

Back to now and we finally see that not only does the hospital let him in, but Shawn was right about there being extra glass in the boy’s heart that had got there from his veins. That and the fact that a video of him saving the boy’s life in the airport goes viral helps the board to allow Glassman to hire the boy. He also stakes his own career on Shawn and has him explain why he wants to be a doctor—to stop all the dying in front of him and start saving lives. But he’s still got Sauron’s eye on him as both Melendez and Andrew are looking to get him out and don’t think he belongs. Melendez has him on suction duty, making sure he won’t touch a blade.

Episode two sees Shawn diving into some grunt work around the hospital. Everyone, including Melendez and Shawn himself thinks that he needs to improve his bedside manners, but all the grunt work is also a punishment for daring to even exist on Melendez’s team. While doing it, he learns that he doesn’t need to order expensive tests for everything that he thinks maybe could be wrong with someone. Most people are upset that they get this kid who doesn’t seem confident in anything he’s saying and is scaring them.

Meanwhile, while the others are preparing to do a big surgery, Shawn discovers that a little girl who came in for a stomach ache actually has a genetic disorder in which her organs turn and twist around each other which can cause cut-offs in circulation, disruptions in the digestive system and even death. Committed to his job, he oversteps the line and goes to the little girl’s house to talk to the parents.

Why to her house? See, earlier in the day, after ordering all the expensive tests, Shawn was told by Melendez to follow the orders of an older nurse. She tells him to dismiss pretty much every patient because none of it is serious. Well, the girl is serious and she was wrong. The parents go back to the girl’s room and find her passed out, unable to awake. Had he not come, she would’ve been dead by the morning.

They rush back to the hospital and Murphy is ready to do the surgery, scalpel in hand, when Melendez swoops in to take it over and put him back on suction duty. Not only does Melendez get to push him aside and do the surgery when he also thought the little girl’s stomach ache was nothing, but he also doesn’t know that on the earlier surgery he performed to save a woman’s life, the idea he utilized (cut out a healthy kidney to properly get to a cancerous tumor) came from Shawn. Kalu took credit for the idea and Browne said nothing. They had a talk about how cutthroat the surgical department is and blah, blah, blah.

Episode three saw the first new surgical twist on a medical show that I’ve seen in a very long time. Granted, I haven’t been keeping up with too many surgical shows in recent years, but I just hadn’t seen this twist. Anyway, the twist was that Shawn and Claire had to go on a liver pickup for a liver transplant. While in route back to the hospital, they had to stop on the side of the road to do surgery just on the liver because it had a bloodclot in it. This, after the liver had been removed prematurely and after their helicopter transport couldn’t take off into the fog. I can’t ever remember seeing doctors do surgery on an ex-body organ. Usually they are taking organs out and just throwing them on ice or in clean baths or something, not doing surgery on them.

Anyway, as they are trying to save the liver by keeping it cold in the ice box, back at the hospital the guy who is supposed to get it tests positive for alcohol in his blood when he was supposed to be sober for six months. In the end, he doesn’t get the liver and goes home to die because the liver damage is even worse than before. Also, a wealthy donor is back in the hospital to get the skin on his jaw repaired as part of the post-op of another surgery. It’s important that his surgery go well, so the chief of surgery is going to do it himself. The president of the hospital orders that he have Melendez as his second in the surgery just in case and he throws a fit, until the president tells him to stop thinking like a surgeon and think like the president of a hospital.

Claire and Shawn

In the end, the surgery for the donor goes well and Claire discovers that Shawn doesn’t like questions because it reminds him of the time just after his brother died and the cops kept asking him why he didn’t want to go back to his parents. They are bonding.

What’s my grade? I give this a B+ verging on an A-. This series, for those that don’t know, is based on a South Korean show. Here, I like how the characters relate to each other. We have some clearly defined character patterns and it looks like there could be some really interesting medical mysteries. This series, though coming from the guys behind House, actually reminds me heavily of another medical show that came on ABC’s spring schedule around four years ago (I know because that’s how long How to get Away with Murder came on and the black girl in that was also on this show) called Black Box starring Kelly Reilly. In it, she was a whiz doctor with mental problems that made her see medicine differently. Her problem was depression and I believe some form of schizophrenia. In any case, just like on The Good Doctor, she could see surgical procedures, see what was wrong with someone in her imagination. Here, Shawn imagines dissections of organs and can take the body apart and put it back together in his head, all of which we see in neat animations similar to on the defunct show Limitless. This adds an extra cool layer to the show because it lets us into the mind of a character that has trouble communicating. So while he isn’t able to tell us everything he’s feeling or thinking like on Grey’s Anatomy, he still lets us know how he perceives the world.

I also like the lightheartedness of the show. It’s good-natured, not all about sex or love or bed-hopping, and filled with hope and an American can-do attitude. While it comes on at ten o’clock and I’m sure it might get more racy or gory over time, this could easily be a nine o’clock family-time show. In fact, putting my network scheduling exec hat on, I’d probably move this show to Sundays to fill some of the dead air that currently is ABC Sunday nights, which features Toy Box and Shark Tank—two shows that don’t belong on Sundays.

The one thing wrong with the show so far is the lack of details. Again, while all the characters are good, there is not much depth to any of them at the moment. You don’t get a sense of who they are and why they are doing the things they do. The mystery of what all happened between the president and Shawn in his childhood is not really that compelling, the doctors just seem to do surgeries at random, and we don’t have the clearly defined lines that we did with the Grey’s Anatomy characters from their first three episodes. For instance, is Kalu a Cristine—someone driven above and beyond all to be the best surgeon to possibly ever live and certainly the best in the hospital—or is he just a jerk. Does Melendez want to be known as a world-best surgeon like Dr. Shepherd? And outside of being the one who Shawn will identify with after the president is gone, what role does Claire play? Who is she? What’s her background? Why is she a doctor?

Still, I think that if given enough time over the course of a season, these flaws should iron out.

Should you be watching? Yes. Freddie Highmore as Shawn is fairly brilliant. This is far different than his last turn as Norman Bates in Bates Motel. His reputation for playing quirky, off-beat characters is growing on me. I also like the actress playing Claire, Antonia Thomas. Is she attractive, yes, but she also exudes a certain intellectual innocence that calls back to the early days of Noah Wiley on ER. You get the feeling that she knows a lot but still likes to listen. If this show were to stay on as long as Grey’s Anatomy, I wouldn’t be surprised if she somehow ended up as the chief of surgery one day similar to how Bailey got there. She is both caring and determined—a great example of modern femininity. The penis-wagging of Melendez and Andrews might get on your nerves, but I think it will tone down through the season as Shawn continues to prove himself. In the end, the Good Doctor is a good show that has potential to be great with a slight tightening of the writing reigns and deeper personal stories for all of the characters. The Good Doctor airs on Monday nights at 10pm on ABC.

What do you think? Have you heard of The Good Doctor? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll check it out now? If you have, have you seen it? Did you find the show engrossing? What would you like to see the show improve going forward? Who is the most intriguing character? Do you think Claire will keep sleeping with Kula? And do you think the president actually raised Shawn or no? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend. #AhStalking

If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary on Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

Until next time, “Is there a doctor in the house?”

‘Yes, but the house burned down. Plus, he wasn’t that good of a doctor anyway.’

P.S. Don’t you love meta TV show references? That’s for all you House, MD fans out there. Yeah, you don’t have to miss that show any longer. I think it has a worthy heir here. I’ll think of a better sign-off next time.

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