DO NO HARM

 

* (out of ****)

Nicely done, Do No Harm. You couldn’t even make it to when this review was due.

 

Do No Harm this week was placed in the TV Hall of Fame for doing something few shows have ever done before: not make it to its third episode. And it’s not hard to see why, as the pilot episode is one of the worst things I have ever seen.

 

Dr. Jason Cole, or as it says on the door to his office, Dr. J. Cole (you’ll see why that’s clever in just a moment), is a smart, successful doctor who works in a hospital in Philadelphia. Now I’ve never heard of a show that focuses on people who work in a hospital, but maybe Do No Harm can pull it off. Everyone, including his boss Claire Huxtable, likes Jason, because he is such a great guy. At least he is half of the time. The other half, specifically between 8:30 P.M. to 8:30 A.M., Jason becomes a monster. Not the type of monster we think of when we think of other Dr. Jekyll stories (read his name again. Hilarious, right?), but more like an aggressively douchey clubber. He drinks really hard, he sleeps with strippers, he trashes hotel rooms. That kind of monster. In one scene in the pilot, Jason wakes up coughing, and then sees his shoe on the nightstand, filled with cigarette butts. Mr. Hyde smoked all night. “Prick,” the overly clever protagonist says to himself.

 

The rest of the episode is spent planting seeds for future storylines when the front-and-center storyline runs out of steam. My guess is that that would have happened in episode 3 or so, but I guess we’ll never know! Jason likes a girl, so Mr. Hyde sort of rapes her. Jason has an ex-wife, who Mr. Hyde gave a scar to. It races around from plot point to plot point, hoping to God you pick one of them to care about. You don’t.

 

The biggest problem with Do No Harm is its tone, or lack thereof. It might be cool to have a modern take on the Dr. Jekyll story, while also showing us the problems dealing with personality disorder, or other slices of cray. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR, have a show closer to this premise, or closer to a genre show, and then pull your head out of your ass and stop taking yourself so seriously. But this mixed bad of dog shit was doomed from the start. I’m proud of you, America, from knowing this was going to be a steaming pile from the start, and not even bothering to tune in. I envy you.

 

 

MONDAY MORNINGS

**1/2 (out of ****)

 

Over on TNT we have…wait…another drama set in a hospital? Did they steal this idea from Do No Harm?

 

Creator David E. Kelly, a man who almost exclusively makes shit I hate, is back with Monday Mornings. The title refers to these secret meetings that surgeons have every Monday morning. Chief of Staff Alfred Molina sits in a classroom located in the hospital. He asks doctors to come up to the front of the class so he can grill them on patients that they killed over the previous week. I know this sounds stupid, even Illuminati-ish, but this is the most compelling part of the show. Molina’s character seems to believe that there no one should ever make a mistake when their lives are on the line, but he also seems to relish the fact that part of his job is tearing these young whippersnappers new ones.

 

The rest of the show couldn’t be more of a typical hospital drama if it tried. You can already see who is going to fuck who, fight who, etc. We have all of the different types of doctors here, the workaholic, the rock star, the OCD case. There’s even a doctor that’s so ridiculously Asian I had to look up whether or not he was played by Mickey Rooney. Nothing here is going to re-write the way television is done, or give TNT more credibility as a powerhouse TV channel. But I can’t bash on it too hard, either.

 

-Ryan Haley