Living With B

Once upon a time, I was a medical drama girlie. It all started in high school when I found Grey’s Anatomy. I, as any normal 15-year-old, fell in love with the drama and romance between Meredith and Derek. So much so, I’ve rewatched it three or four times now. Then The Pitt came out, and that has had me in a chokehold since episode one. If you’ve seen it and loved it, you know why. And my mom is old school – she loves ER and can’t get into The Pitt since it’s not the same. I even enjoyed Nurse Jackie, which had all of the drama of Grey’s, but was so much messier!

Lately, however, it feels like these once-beloved medical dramas are pulling from a hat for their next plot. Their next dreamboat. Their next twist. And sadly, it’s just not working.

Many medical dramas no longer feel intimate, unlike older, more iconic shows. It’s just the same cases in different fonts with a new cast of conventionally attractive people who are broken, but big-hearted. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but usually they look like they should be on Instagram rather than in scrubs.

Sometimes it feels like they took Grey’s Anatomy‘s formula with tragic backstories, workplace hookups, and a charismatic leader who hides their trauma and copied and pasted it. As I mentioned earlier, it’s simply presented in a different font, with a different cast, and a different name.

That is how we ended up with The Resident.

I watched The Resident a while ago, and remember telling Denver the only reason I was still watching it was that I hated leaving things unfinished. I mean, it wasn’t good, but I’ve watched way worse. The longer I watched, the more I started noticing how each show is more or less the same (except for The Pitt, which is being left out of any criticism).

These shows love when:

• Random catastrophic accidents happen in every episode.
• Doctors bend or break the rules every five minutes, but somehow keep their jobs.
• A love triangle that I don’t want, but am stuck with
• Prayers are being answered, and cures are being found in the span of 42 minutes.

I guess I need to start taking a shot every time it meets this criteria, because man, I’d be drunk!

And that is why The Pitt hits different. It’s not Grey’s 2.0; shoot, it’s not even all that similar to ER. It has its own tone; it knows who it is. If you don’t know, Noah Wyle (Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch) and his co-creators created this show as a love letter to those in health care. Personally, I find this admirable. It’s chaotic, raw, gritty, and even horrifying, but it has more heart than every other medical drama combined. It doesn’t shy away from showing the mess of working in emergency care, the burnout, trauma for both the patient and healthcare workers, and from what I’ve seen, many medical practitioners appreciate this honest take on healthcare.

It’s not trying to be a sexy tragedy that inspires fanfictions. It’s a universe that many folks live in every day.

It’s no surprise, however, that every genre borrows from itself. Romances, for instance, will have meet-cutes in coffee shops, or enemies will have to share a bed. This isn’t bad, by any means. But where it begins to become repetitive is when they use the exact same formula from what came before. Inspiration is a-okay. No problem with that, at all, but build something new around that inspiration.

When they choose to follow a Shonda Rhimes formula, you get predictable characters, déjà vu storylines and cases, and emotional beats that I saw at the ripe age of 15.

It’s not paying homage to what came before, it’s just repainting someones masterpiece with a different palette.

And I, as a viewer, get so tired of it! I’ve seen it before. All of it. Four times plus some.

I’m not dumb, and neither are you, dear reader; we know we are watching the same thing over and over again in a new show. The magic from your first time watching Grey’s Anatomy is no longer there because these new medical dramas don’t want to take risks. Shows like The Pitt or Nurse Jackie took risks, and it’s paid off. They are dramatic in their own way, with their own characters and plotlines to go with it.

At this point, it feels like there is a checklist that many medical dramas are trying to check off, and I will say that is the Shonda Rhimes effect. They check off all of these things instead of telling a human story.

All of this is not to say you can’t enjoy these shows or that every medical drama needs to reinvent the wheel. But for the love of everything, please stop showing me the exact same show every week; give me originality. Give me weird, but loving characters who feel like someone I’d meet on the street. Give me chaos.

All in all, I want more of The Pitt or even Nurse Jackie and fewer shows that feel like a reboot of Grey’s Anatomy with a different brand.