★★☆☆☆ The Resident Season 1, created by Amy Holden Jones, Hayley Schore, Roshan Sethi
Doctors don't behave like these cliché characters
The Resident Season 1
Created by Amy Holden Jones, Hayley Schore, Roshan Sethi
Doctors don’t behave like these cliché characters
I don’t like writing negative reviews, and I debated whether to write this review at all. Why do I write reviews? Well, one reason is that I’m an old person, and my memory often needs a jog. I don’t want to forget a work of art in which I’ve invested many hours. Not even if those hours were painful. So, charging ahead:
The Resident is a TV series that ran six seasons on Fox from 2018-2023. It was recommended to me, so I gave it a try. I watched the first season, and I will not watch any more. Why didn’t I like it? Two things, First, the characters were cliché. Second, as Wikipedia puts it, “The series was unpopular with some in the medical profession, with various sources calling it grossly unrealistic.” Yeah, that.
The central character is third-year medical resident Conrad Hawkins, whom you see looking badass in the center of the poster above. You’ve met Conrad before. He’s the one who breaks all the rules and thereby beats all the hidebound conventional folk who surround him. You’ve seen him as a detective in a bunch of police procedurals, and probably also science fiction and military shows. (Lieutenant Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica springs to mind.) He is also, of course, the bad boy whose bed every woman is eager to leap into. Eww… Yuck.
The main villains are two more senior doctors, who are evil people—they kill patients through incompetence or malice. This is, in a perverse way, far too positive a take on the difficulties of healthcare. Healthcare disappoints not because the doctors are evil, but because it is a genuinely difficult problem. Even if all the docs were angels (which, to be completely clear, they are not), there would still be a lot of sad outcomes.
It is fair to mention that there were two characters, I quite liked: the ingénu Devon Pravesh and the brilliant surgical resident Mina Okafor.
Then there’s the unbelievability of it all. I couldn’t tell you how many times as I watched The Resident I found myself saying, “NO! That did not happen.”
I’m not exactly one of those medical professionals Wikipedia quotes. I was a med school professor from 1990-2015. I am not myself a physician—I was on the basic science side. I have not spent much time behind the scenes at hospitals. I do, however, know a lot of physicians personally, and I have seen how they behave with each other. And it is not the way that the doctors in The Resident do.
The Resident gets one thing right: doctors are very status-conscious. But the screenwriters for The Resident have no clue of how the game is actually played. A lot of the dialog was just cringe. I won’t go into detail, because that never ends.