Medical Drama 'Monday Mornings' Puts Docs Under the Exam Room Glare
If cop and lawyer shows are the bread and butter of TV drama, then the doctor show is surely the vanilla ice cream.
Even though it's life and death each week, it's a wonder what new can be brought to the medicine game. House juiced up the format with every kind of obscure illness and topped it with an unhinged Doc who might be as dangerous as the disease he was treating.
Monday Mornings, the latest David E. Kelley offering premiering on TNT Monday (10 p.m. ET), doesn't have House-like anarchy. But it does have a bit of a new slant by showing us patients who are – surprise – dying, and doctors who are under the spotlight for their possible errors made while treating those patients.
The cases gone wrong are reviewed in M&M conferences - short for Morbidity and Mortality. Held, of course, on Monday mornings, they're chaired by Chief of Surgery Dr. Harding Hooten (Alfred Molina, Spider-Man 2) who sits at a desk in the M&M amphitheater with a clear glass pitcher, pouring himself cold glasses of water while similarly dousing the inflamed egos of the doctors defending their failures.
The ensemble of docs (including Jamie Bamber as Dr. Tyler Wilson, top photo) likewise stand before their peers in the spotlight at a crystal clear lectern, unable to hide behind even a piece of solid furniture. Not even the most reputable doctor is safe from the examination by Dr. Hooten, who gives the equivalent of a Sherlock Holmes-level prosecution at the climaxes of both of the two episodes sent for review.
Kelley, the genius behind such memorable series as Ally McBeal and Picket Fences, is adapting the novel of the same name here by doctor and CNN contributor Sanjay Gupta. It doesn't have any poetic McBeal-style hallucinations or any of the Denny Crane (William Shatner) antics from his 2004-08 Boston Legal. But it has the dramatically lit amphitheater and the requisite yet quirky ensemble, including Dr. Park (Keong Sim, Glee), who tells patients in broken English that if they don't agree to risky procedures they won't survive. ("Don't do, die.")
Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction) is also along, as a cranky and crack doc who can diagnose a case from across a busy ER.
Monday Mornings has the craft and the pace Kelley is known for, although the medical cases here dwell in the usual TV emergency brain surgeries. There is some worthy territory traveled, though, with one subplot delving into doctors' appropriate and necessary level of compassion towards their patients. And we see ambitious, sometimes overly aggressive know-it-all docs get theirs when they indeed have it coming, because they didn't think through all the details of their cases.
There may never be the equivalent of another St. Elsewhere (1982-88) the NBC series which reinvented the genre, and showed us an imperfect hospital and its even more dysfunctional staff. In current drama, we take the gritty underside of things for granted these days, but it took that show to take us get us here.
Of course, no medical show has gotten down to the actual horror of waiting for the nurse to finally arrive with the pain medication, or your doctor walking out before you had a chance to finish your last question.
Patients who have survived that get a bit of payback in the form of Monday Mornings.