The cruel reality

TV Se­ries

In 1994, the best TV se­ries ever set in a hos­pi­tal was re­leased in the United States. This is ER (Ur­gen­cias), which was a great fol­low-up for those who had al­ready en­joyed Open Heart in the pre­vi­ous decade. ER showed, in a very re­al­is­tic way, how the emer­gency de­part­ment of a Chicago hos­pi­tal works, mix­ing treated cases and the per­sonal sto­ries of the health pro­fes­sion­als. Then came many other se­ries re­lated to “doc­tors”, from House to Grey’s Anatomy, via Cen­tral Hos­pi­tal. One of the most re­cent, and al­ready re­ceiv­ing rave re­views, is This Is Going to Hurt (Mo­vis­tar), pre­sented as a dra­matic com­edy. And it is true that it has a very British hu­mour - it is a BBC pro­duc­tion - but hav­ing seen it all, it can be said that the drama wins by a land­slide.

The main char­ac­ter is Adam Kay, a young doc­tor who works in the gy­nae­col­ogy and ob­stet­rics de­part­ment of an NHS (the UK’s Na­tional Health Ser­vice) hos­pi­tal. Kay is ar­ro­gant, sar­cas­tic, and very ungifted for so­cial in­ter­ac­tion, which doesn’t make team­work easy. But he is also a doc­tor who is tired of end­less days of work, who can’t stand his su­pe­ri­ors and who, in spite of every­thing, tries to help his pa­tients as much as he can. In the first episode, tired­ness leads him to make a mis­take that ends in un­ex­pected con­se­quences. This mis­take will haunt him through­out the whole sea­son, in par­al­lel with the ups and downs of the re­la­tion­ship with his boyfriend, a de­signer who is much more fun and ex­tro­vert than him, and who con­stantly has to com­pete with a job as ab­sorb­ing as help­ing women give birth.

The se­ries is based on the 2017 book This Is Going to Hurt. Crazy sto­ries of a res­i­dent doc­tor, which soon be­came a best­seller in Britain and com­prises a set of au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal sto­ries writ­ten by Adam Kay (yes, he is a real per­son) while work­ing as a gy­nae­col­o­gist (from 2004 to 2010), be­fore leav­ing the pro­fes­sion to be­come a writer and screen­writer. Hence the re­al­ism of the plot, even if the main char­ac­ter, played by Ben Wishaw, is con­stantly ad­dress­ing the viewer, break­ing the fourth wall, ex­plain­ing how he feels or mak­ing po­lit­i­cally in­cor­rect com­ments.

Wishaw’s per­for­mance holds the full weight of the se­ries - he al­ready won a Golden Globe in 2019 for the minis­eries A Very Eng­lish Scan­dal - pro­vid­ing hi­lar­i­ous mo­ments - like when Adam de­cides to earn extra money by ac­cept­ing a shift in an ex­clu­sive pri­vate clinic - as well as stress­ful and sad ones. The doc­tor’s char­ac­ter evolves as the story pro­gresses, es­pe­cially his re­la­tion­ship with the in­tern Shruti Acharya, whom he ini­tially treats con­de­scend­ingly, but who ends up be­com­ing his con­fi­dant. Shruti also has to deal with all the pres­sure of the ser­vice and pre­pare for her spe­cial­ity exams. All this in a hos­pi­tal with a lack of human and ma­te­r­ial re­sources, where the walls fall apart and the alarm bell rings con­tin­u­ously.

All in all, both a fun and shock­ing se­ries, which makes no ref­er­ence to the pan­demic and also serves as a trib­ute to health work­ers and pub­lic health.