Season 1, Episode 1
Date of airing: June 21, 2011 (Global TV)
Audience viewership information: 1.963 million viewers
story by: Jinder Oujla-Chalmers, Douglas Steinberg, Daniel Petrie Jr.
teleplay by: Daniel Petrie Jr.
directed by: Iain B MacDonald
It was a sunny day in 2011 and I had absolutely nothing to do when I found this television show on a list of recently premiered TV dramas and figured that this is a good opportunity to put it on, in the hopes of finding something great to watch among the new drama entries. COMBAT HOSPITAL was a medical drama from Canada, produced in Toronto on a set, a 185,000-square-foot replica of a military hospital, that was the largest set of any Canadian TV show, with episodes climbig up to $2 million per episode when it comes to the budget. But this show already had me at "medical drama." It is one of the genres I would love to watch more of (and I would not be sad if it’s the last remaining genre left on broadcast network TV), so the show already had a couple of bonus points in my bank before the opening scene even played. Ever since the end of ER, broadcast networks and their audiences were looking for the next great medical drama. Would COMBAT HOSPITAL have been a contender?
It turned out I was extremely turned on by this show, both from a casting perspective and from the way its stories were told, all while the rest of the world of television pundits found time making fun of it and ridiculing its “GREY’S ANATOMY in a warzone” premise. It was proof to me that everyone can hate a particular TV show, but there will always be one viewer that loves it, wishes for it to continue with a second season, and is sad that it got canceled because no one was turning into the first season. You can make fun of the third season of HEROES all you want, and a lot of people did (including me), but some people figure it was the greatest season of television of all time. You can ridicule 2012’s WORK IT all you want (while forgetting that it was essentially a more masculine remake of BOSOM BUDDIES), but there was someone who loved watching the sitcom and cried themselves to sleep after ABC canned the show following the second episode. People believe that TWO AND A HALF MEN with Ashton Kutcher was better than the same show with Charlie Sheen, and other people can argue that THE SOPRANOS is the worst show that ever won awards.
Well, I am one of the people telling you that COMBAT HOSPITAL is a fine show and a proper medical drama, trying its best to emulate the chaotic nature of ER and mostly succeeding in it. Granted, it was not the best show out there in the summer of 2011, but it is not the worst and I hope I can tell you why that is, and why the chance for a fine medical drama outside the realms of hospital romance and soap opera was only a deliverable idea when Canadian producers and writers were working on the idea. Twelve years ago, nothing prepared me for COMBAT HOSPITAL to become my favorite show. What can I say? Welcome to my world of what I like and don’t like.
 |
| The enemy shows up while you're in the operating room. |
COMBAT HOSPITAL is a medical drama that decided early on to focus more on the happenings in a warzone than the soap opera elements of a hospital show (putting the writers into a field where they could eventually marry the war genre with the soap opera genre – something never seen before on television). ER went down the route of melodrama at the same time GREY’S ANATOMY premiered in 2005, so the world of American TV was filled with thoughts of doctors in love in between treating and operating on ill patients. This Canadian show brought the genre back to its exciting and action-packed roots of the 1990s, although it needed a twist like any crime procedural needed an angle to have the lead detective solve homicides more excitingly and uniquely. COMBAT HOSPITAL was therefore set in Afghanistan, at a multi-national base in which everything seemed to happen simultaneously, with characters from multiple countries involved in the same scene, and with proof that the medical side of the war in Afghanistan is more chaotic and tiresome than a mass casualty event in Chicago or Seattle.
That doesn’t mean COMBAT HOSPITAL was free of any soap opera character drama though. The show opens with Rebecca Gordon, portrayed by a very fine and extremely attractive Michelle Borth, trying to take a home pregnancy test during a combat landing, and the episode continued with her efforts to keep her phone away from the misery that would come with answering it, as if the writers actively tried to tell the audience that no, this will not be a melodrama, and boyfriend/girlfriend stories will be thrown on the ground and smashed to pieces under a military boot, as Rebecca did with her phone by the end of the episode. Repeatedly, that ex-fiance from a distance tried to make contact with Rebecca, but she was too annoyed, too scared, too busy, and too tired to answer the call, and with that, COMBAT HOSPITAL turns into a show without a lot of soap opera drama and instead some character-focused storytelling here and there.
You get constantly reminded that COMBAT HOSPITAL is set in a warzone via patients getting choppered to the base for Major Rebecca Gordon, her new best friend Captain Bobby Trang, and her friendly and calm but tough boss Colonel Xavier Marks to treat and fix them up as best they can in a short amount of time, an enemy target getting the surgical treatment, a warning for an attack on the base, a snake in the operating room, and the continuous motion that will never stop because the people on this base are the only ones capable of saving your life. Unfortunately for future victims of roadside bomb explosions, suicide bombings, and Taliban assaults, this particular Kandahar base is very much understaffed and this episode made it as prevalent as the two-hour ER premiere from 1994 made it obvious that its characters are underpaid and overworked and would love to get some sleep. At least in Chicago, the doctors get to sleep at night, while in Afghanistan, crap is always hitting the fan somewhere and the men and women under Colonel Marks must always be on their feet to come to the rescue. Because not a single soldier can be spared. They all need to get back out there to fight the Taliban.
Get you someone like Colonel Marks to tell you crystal clear what he needs, what he is thinking about you, and how he is perceiving his surroundings. Rebecca is never too tired for surgery, and Simon is never too tired to be a British dick with a stash of fine vodka in his personal occupancy, but there is also Colonel Marks who is never too tired to give you compliments for the good things you have done today while in the same sentence also giving you crap for the bad things you have done at the same time. Marks is something of a fantasy figure in COMBAT HOSPITAL, turning this show away from realism, as I cannot imagine that a person like Marks exists in real life, even if it is an absolute necessity for someone in a warzone to keep a calm head amongst the breeders of chaos (it seems like Marks was based on a real person, according to Wikipedia). GENERATION KILL could have needed a lot more Colonel Markses than Captain Americas or Encino Men, while COMBAT HOSPITAL could have had an Encino Man among them, just to make it clear that no one is calm during a bombing alarm on the base, that there is always that one person taking his or her position as Major or Colonel too seriously and is being hated by the other soldiers. But I guess this is a hospital and it doesn’t help the patients in the first episode when a Robert-Romano-type character makes life difficult for the staff.
 |
| Still making life-and-death decisions after no sleep and during threats of bombs and terror. |
The show’s writers may have taken ER as their prime example when it comes to the number of storylines. There are fewer of them only taking a span of one scene (the enemy high-value individual getting a few crucial scenes, as was the story of a bombing and two injured soldiers, one of them unexpectedly meeting his Maker before the episode ended), but there are enough to think that this episode has been constructed out of multiple episodes, as a lot of stuff happened quickly and back to back, giving you a sense of constant action (which was helped by the notion of constant movements and rapid cuts). Keeping the characters moving, so the audience loses sight of calm and quietness where they can take a breather and a break, is quite a nice way to turn your drama into an action spectacle without ever having to fire more than one shot from a pistol or by letting things explode. And if you need your audience to take a breather for a second, there are still commercial breaks.
Character-wise, this episode almost had everything. With the calm
boss, the professional surgeon, and the new doctor already having been
established, the premiere episode is all about giving you a few more
medical talents, all of them capable of standing on their own feet
during an attacking threat. To remind the audience that COMBAT HOSPITAL
is not ER, after all, the potential must be created for a relationship
between Rebecca and hot-shot British doc Simon, her new alcohol
supplier. And let’s not forget that the nurses run a hospital, which is
why the nurses and techs in this Kandahar base have more knowledge about
what is happening than you do. Oh, and everybody looks fine as hell on
this base, so you better prepare to have romantic crushes on what looks
and feels like professionalism. Hot people doing good work – that’s
something you don’t see every day on TV. In this realistic series universe, there are no ugly people.
