Boston Med is produced by ABC News, but it's aired in ABC primetime. That means that, at times, it's an uneasy amalgamation of both approaches to television. It'll have some genuinely impressive moments that feel more like a really good documentary or something, and then it will cut to a scene about the personal lives of one of the doctors it follows around, scored to some singer-songwriter pop act that the ABC music supervisors pulled off their MySpace playlist. The weird conflict between these two approaches is what drags some of the show down, but, fortunately, it's good enough to not be dragged down by those problems. It's not the best show ever, but in a summer where there's not a good deal to be recommended on the main networks, this is one that just might be worth following.
Boston Med is the latest series from Terence Wrong, a news producer and documentary filmmaker who found great success two years ago with Hopkins, which won him a Peabody. Like that series, Boston Med follows the lives of a bunch of doctors, medical students, and patients, as they work their way through three hospitals in the Boston area. Where Hopkins was focused, Boston Med attempts to take a wider view. That's both to the series' credit and its detriment, as its able to tell a wider range of stories and view a wider range of characters than the previous series, but it also sometimes feels a little too chaotic, cutting freely between the three hospitals in a way that can leave viewers just a bit exhausted. Still, there are some truly terrific little moments here, as when Wrong and his cameras settle in with a family that's waiting for a lung transplant and captures their reactions, especially of the woman's husband and the man who's on his third date with one of the woman's daughters and has ended up at the hospital, viewing this long before he probably wanted to meet her family.
Most reality shows stick to the tried-and-true format. Even if they're not competition reality shows (like Survivor or American Idol), they'll feature lots of confessional interviews and high-stakes drama that the show pushes too hard for. A show like Deadliest Catch is fine (and is having a good season), but it never really attempts to be anything other than a reality show set among fisherman with a very dangerous job. And that's fine. Not all shows need to have that sense of cinema verite. The problem is that basically no shows on TV have a feel for that, outside of a few documentaries in the last few years on the Sundance Channel (Nimrod Nation, a fine example of this, is one of my favorite documentary films of the last decade).
Honestly, I feel like cinema verite is a natural fit for television. Imagine a show in weekly hourlong or half hour installments about, say, the life of a family of illegal immigrants or a bunch of fundamentalist Christians or some other undervisited subgroup within the American populace. The rhythms of real life – which often are stretched out over long periods of time – probably correspond better to television than film anyway, and such a project could be artistically satisfying and audacious all at once. I'm not saying such a series would be successful, but the initial outlay of cash would probably be small enough that the series could make a tidy profit all the same, particularly if it were on cable.
Weirdly, the place that this sort of documentary filmmaking seems to be popping up the most in recent years outside of Sundance is on ABC. Hopkins wasn't entirely successful, but it was about as natural as a medical documentary on a network that brought you Grey's Anatomy could be. Even better was this year's Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, which skewed a little more toward reality show but was a fascinating attempt to redo a reality show as a Frank Capra movie about a small town. Not everything in it worked, but the core of the series was surprisingly successful. Boston Med follows in the footsteps of those two shows, but it's much closer to my cinema verite dreams than either of those shows was. There will be occasional intrusions from the aforementioned pop songs or from a confessional talking head interview that underlines what's happening a little too heavy (and, technically, shouldn't be in a cinema verite work at all). There's a general sense here that the audience needs to have its hand held a little too firmly, which detracts from the overall sense of this as a news documentary.
But what's there is still very good indeed. Our first episode follows three stories – that of a medical intern who's still feeling over her head, that of a family waiting for their mother to get a lung transplant, and that of a cop who's been shot in the face and somehow miraculously survived and might get to live with his doctors' help. The series wrings as much drama as you'd expect from all of these stories, even as it has a tendency to amp up the drama a bit too much from time to time. In particular, the story of the family waiting for the transplant is rendered with surprising skill, as the episode cuts between the family and the doctors, traveling to another hospital to get the lung she needs, and having to wait out someone else's death. It captures all of the emotions inherent in the moment and makes the doctors out to be somewhat aloof but very, very skilled, something you'd rarely see on a straight-up medical drama.
But, yeah, constantly cutting between three hospitals – for the record, Massachusetts General, Brigham and Women's, and Children's Hospital Boston – threatens to upend the show at many different moments. This allows Wrong and his team to tell many different kinds of stories, but it also keeps us constantly wondering just where we are. Hopkins wasn't as good as this series was, but its sense of focus made it easier to keep track of who was who. Boston Med keeps throwing new people at us and expecting us to remember who they are, and that's sometimes a little hard to do with all of the other events swirling around our heads. It sure seems like Wrong has enough material here for three different series, and I'd probably watch all of them, if he wanted to cut them together that way. Instead, we're stuck with a flawed but highly enjoyable series about people who want to save lives, yet seem to sacrifice their own. Granted, it's not the world's most original premise, but when it's pulled off with this much skill, why not?
Stray observations:
- In the "next week on," we get to see overworked intern Pina Patel go on some sort of vacation, which seems like the sort of thing ABC entertainment tossed in there. "Can't we see some people smiling?"
- Pina is in her 30s but looks about 21. The section where she complains about what men call her when they assume she's much younger than them is amusing, as is the section where she complains about her parents' hopes and dreams for her.
- My favorite doctor: The grim, glasses-wearing guy (I forgot to write down his name) who goes to get the lung and moans, "Oh, I hate propeller planes!" when he sees he has to ride on one.