Date of release: January 24, 2025 (Netflix)
Written by: Choi Tae-kang
Directed by: Lee Do-yoon
“This place is being run like a local deli.”
K-dramas and I are strangers. I haven't watched a single minute of a Korean drama before I picked up this show, and I only picked it up because it's a medical drama, and it sounded like it was attempting to focus on some realism in the genre, when a majority of medical dramas from South Korea were probably focusing on the romantic lives of their main characters, something I'm not into. ER being my all-time favorite show, I was hoping I could get a similar feeling out of non-English language shows of my favorite TV genre. And it seems I have just stumbled into what appears to be a medical drama about a character who could be the lead in a superhero graphic novel, with his superpowers being his egotistical charm, and his nemesis being the sheer incompetence of everyone around him.
Since K-dramas and I are such strangers, and I'm most attuned to English-language television, I will have to learn about the sensibilities of Korean storytelling, and that Korean audiences may be looking for something different than the realism and emotionally manipulative drama I'm used to. A scene like that of the nurse thinking that the man who has her in his grip is an assassin about to put a bullet in one of the patients makes me think that this is one of those elements that make a Korean TV show a Korean TV show, even if it's a scene that wouldn't even be written in an English-language show because the writers already know that the producers would never have the budget for such a sidetrack. Plus, this show looks to be more of an adrenaline-infused action comedy that happens to be in the medical genre, so I guess I can throw my expectations about realism right out the window.
I was impressed by the on-screen text boxes explaining the medical jargon the characters were using. But then the rest of the episode happened, and I got less impressed thanks to the idiocy of some of the characters – doctors who don't know what they are doing even though they should have learned in school; medical boards running hospitals that think they can rotate doctors who normally operate on buttholes (that is a specialty?) into trauma rounds even though it should be obvious that they wouldn't have a clue how to do a pericardiocentesis; anesthesiologists who think they can regulate anesthesia drugs without informing the operating doctors (that should be a fireable offense); and doctors who don't seem to know what the word “emergency” means. I know that all of that was part of the plot to make Baek Gang Hyeok the (super-)hero of the show, but damn, if this hospital is ever filled with people who didn't deserve their position.
Besides being a medical drama (in name only?), this show also seems to be an action show. The opening scene set in a war zone, sweet helicopter shots resembling money shots in X-rated films, characters running and being comically out of breath when they arrive at their destination... Now I'm expecting fewer medical procedures and more exploding bombs. In a way, this show should fit right into the time when American broadcast networks were trying to find the successor to ER when that show ended in 2009, and delivered one nonsensical soap-opera-heavy medical drama after another.
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| The new boss comes with an attitude and a broken knife. |
