David E. Kelley and Alfred Molina should be worth watching, considering their past triumphs, but this pilot was dismal. The overall effect of the show is dark and depressing, with medical professionals stressed from the demands of their job, stressed from the demands of justifying their decisions and actions, stressed from dealing with patients' family members and loved ones, stressed from dealing with the quiet desperation of their own lives. And then they get called in front of their professional peers and raked over the coals.
I understand the current climate in the US calls for accountability in all walks of professional life, but this series seems to equate accountability with humiliation, brow-beating, and punishment. At the very end of this first episode, Ving tells us that this work environment is designed to make better doctors; the formula pushed by the chief of staff, Molina, seems designed to break down doctors, their egos, their risk-taking, their thinking outside the box to try daring new approaches, and instead to mind-whip them into standardized conformity, as if medicine (or any profession) is an either/or endeavor. In reality, work environments like that make me make more mistakes rather than fewer!
Additionally, none of the characters is interesting yet, and they are all very cliché: the overly-pretty married doctor who has "feelings" for a tortured surgeon who seems to be trying to fight his attraction and emotional dependence upon her; the non-fluent Asian neurosurgeon who's a cross between Christina Yang and Gregory House in the intellect and personality departments; the pushy busy-body surgeon who's into curing everybody else's patients (did we ever see her with one of her own???); and a couple of others whose pregnant gazes we watched, but who didn't actually do or say anything in this episode. Is the scruffy, unshaven surgeon, Ty, supposed to be the "star" of the ensemble? He looks like he should be sweeping up the OR rather than probing inside anybody's head...
Instead of the solid, fatherly chief of staff Richard from Grey's Anatomy, pushing everyone to be better, giving them opportunities to challenge themselves and grow, while nurturing their strengths, or Cuddy's chief of staff character, deftly coming up with strategies to work with staff foibles and genius for the benefit of the hospital and patients, we have Molina's character, barking at his doctors and harping on their short-comings or failures in a very negative, tyrannical, destructive way. I would not want to be a patient in that toxic atmosphere, much less try to work there! This show needs a lot of improvement. I'll give it one more viewing before it goes off my viewing list....
