The Night Shift

Lunchtable TV Talk: Heartbeat

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I wrote a bit the other day about how there is a glut of medical drama on tv and wondered about why some of it works, hits its stride, gains an audience (ER, Grey’s Anatomy, Chicago Hope, Chicago Med, The Night Shift…) while other stuff fails (Monday Mornings, A Gifted Man, Off the Map and a bunch more…). There are other shows that fall into the medical category but I would not put them in the broad “medical drama” category, for example, Scrubs was a long-running and successful comedy; The Knick is an exceptional prestige period piece on Cinemax – an entirely different breed from the churned-out, regurgitated medical-drama-of-the-week delivered on network TV; House was less about medicine and more about a troubled man; Nurse Jackie was a lot like House – medicine was the backdrop but Jackie as a woman trying to balance addiction, work, family was what brought the house down.

Heartbeat is another one of these that absolutely didn’t work. I don’t even know how to count the ways it did not work. But here are some reasons:

  • Melissa George (in general in the role – beyond her reach; in the role – too over-the-top and trying too hard/overacting)
  • The love triangle
  • The head of the hospital: Not believable as head of hospital; it’s like casting decided that they needed a hot, young, non-white/”ethnic” woman in a leadership role and checked that box off a list. It’s not that the actress was bad, just that the whole setup was stupid.
  • The flashbacks: Added no value, tried to build some meaning but just wasted time.
  • The outlandish medical stories (this was meant to be the hook, I guess)
  • The outlandish scenes (dance party in the hospital, some kind of off-site race, a flash mob in the hospital, etc.)
  • Gimmicky
  • Poor writing and even poorer dialogue: It was abjectly stupid

I could elaborate on these points, but it would waste even more time (and I already wasted enough by watching the ten or so episodes of this that existed).

Lunchtable TV Talk: The Night Shift

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Sometimes the stuff television offers feels like it’s churned out on a conveyor belt in a factory. Some time ago I watched the previous season(s) of The Night Shift, about a bunch of doctors working the – duh – overnight shift in a Texas hospital. It was not anything special – in fact when I picked up watching the latest season, I did not even remember that there had already been two, not one, seasons. But… I still kept watching.

Between seasons of The Night Shift, I started watching the Chicago juggernaut (Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Chicago P.D.). Not only did Chicago Med (and all its gratuitous crossovers into the other Chicago properties) wash away all memory of The Night Shift, when The Night Shift returned, it felt and seemed a lot less interesting than it had been because it was a lot like watching more Chicago Med, only with characters I no longer remembered or recognized. (Weirder still, they are all on NBC in the US, so… burnout, anyone?

Despite the American appetite for medical, legal and cop shows, I’d think the idea of getting lost in the oversaturation of the theme(s) would be enough reason to look at different topics. I don’t know – despite the “danger” in being lost in a sea of sameness, people keep introducing new shows in the same mold, and some catch on while others don’t. I don’t know why. I tried to watch Code Black, but holy shit – I could not even get through one episode (it seemed badly miscast), but it was renewed – multiple times, maybe. I thought Monday Mornings was a good premise, and I liked it, but it didn’t last and its decent cast landed elsewhere (e.g., Jamie Bamber had a great turn in the deeply unsettling but immensely satisfying British crime drama, Marcella, and prolific and interactive Tweeter – she seems exceedingly generous with her time – Jennifer Finnigan is a lead in Tyrant). I thought a Jennifer Beals-led medical-supernatural drama, Proof, was overegged, and it too was canceled. Go figure.

The Night Shift, being rather lacklustre and lacking in any real hook, seemed like it might suffer a similar fate. Maybe watching Scott Wolf be an alcoholic surgeon “working the steps” (in The Night Shift) rather than Oliver Platt being a particularly intuitive psychiatrist (in Chicago Med) is the kind of thing that makes the difference. I don’t know. It’s not like either show is must-see… it’s just that this is what is on in the background as I am working on a million other things. It takes something really remarkable to make me look up from my work and pay close attention (and there are very few of those things right now).

Lunchtable TV Talk: The Night Shift

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I don’t know if it was the initial intention when The Night Shift was launched (most shows take time to find their footing), but it has become a showcase for the different aspects and challenges of veterans’ lives as they return from war, whether it’s their access to healthcare, inability to get a job, PTSD or reintegrating and feeling “normal” again.

On the whole the show is a bit over-the-top, and I would not have bothered to watch except that I needed something as background noise during an intensive project. While I did not love the show or anything, I was struck by its intention to bring real heart to its telling of veterans’ stories….

It has been especially good at portraying the bond/camaraderie that cements these soldiers together when they come home – the struggle against their own pride and the feeling that you have lost everything and cannot (and would not know how to) ask for help. One guy discusses having been a leader of men when in the war in Afghanistan but coming home to be nothing – not being able to “find their way back” – and that is where I think the show does its best work. That said, it would be impossible for me – or anyone who has not served in the armed forces or in some other kind of conflict or crisis – to say whether or not this is an accurate representation. But it tries, and getting some visibility on some of the more invisible issues at hand cannot be a bad thing.