Boston Med – ABC New TV Series
ABC new series, Boston Med, started airing on Thursday night, June 24, 2010. “Boston Med,” the eight-part series that will air Thursday evenings this summer, is an emotional rollercoaster capturing moments of crisis, joy, and triumph. The doctors and nurses depicted here are among the best and brightest. Still, medicine is as much art as it is science, and random bad luck can trump the most carefully calculated treatment. Mostly, viewers will see feats of medical brilliance. However, good doctors can make mistakes and things don’t always go exactly as planned. The caregivers of “Boston Med” are often heroic, but as viewers also learn no one is guaranteed a perfect outcome.
The medical staff of “Boston Med” represents a spectrum of ages, ethnicities, races, and nationalities. Maria Troulis is a warm-hearted Greek-American surgeon who must reconstruct a police officer’s shattered jaw, the result of a botched robbery attempt. William Curry is a young African-American brain surgeon who is unfazed by colleagues and patients telling him that he looks like President Barack Obama. Bo Pomahac fled communist Czechoslovakia as a penniless medical student never imagining that one day he would make medical history by performing the second ever face transplant in the United States. A wife donates the face of her husband, a Hollywood marketing genius to a down on his luck Vietnam vet.
“Boston Med” has plenty of near miraculous outcomes. Yet, it also does not flinch from the sometimes untidy results of medical intervention. In one episode, viewers will see a pediatric heart surgeon perform a complex operation on a newborn that goes badly awry. In another episode, a veteran surgeon explodes at young residents who have put a patient on an unnecessary medication. And there is the ER doctor criticized by colleagues for failing to show leadership in a crisis.
“Boston Med” also examines the emotional toll that demanding medical careers exact on the personal lives of caregivers. Crushing financial debt, years of apprenticeship, and daylight hours spent in windowless hospital rooms are the normal rite of passage. Viewers will meet a resident who blames the break-up of her relationship on work. Another doctor fears that he is becoming emotionally cut off from his own family and patients. Even as they are called upon to heal and restore others to health, some of the caregivers in “Boston Med” are in mourning for the personal lives they have sacrificed.