How 24 Hours in A&E killed the medical drama ...0

Doctor Danny Simms a third-year resident. She’s got a troubled past, a violent father, a sexual harassment allegation complaint in against a colleague who appears to be her ex-boyfriend, she’s just been promoted – but the boss doesn’t approve – several injured teenagers are being wheeled in after a bus crash and a hurricane is about to hit the hospital.

“Did you watch a lot of Grey’s Anatomy growing up?” the serious, beautiful, talented doctor asks a bright-eyed, inexperienced young rookie as she navigates the chaos. “Try to unlearn that”. If only Pulse, Netflix’s shamelessly derivative new medical drama, followed its own advice.  

Look: I understand why people love medical dramas. Hospitals are the frontline of humanity – the place we are all confronted with life and death. Medicine is a profession we mere mortals still respect above all others, these are the people in whom we must place all our trust, and from whom we expect the most, and whose failures are most devastating. There is no riper place for storytelling than this, with all its urgency and pressure and tension and politics and relationships and characters and emotion.  

I have watched all 15 seasons of ER at least four times. It has had a demonstrably negative impact on my own health but in terms of groundbreaking stories, grit, human drama and high stakes I can think of no other medical show that matches it. Not the aforementioned Grey’s Anatomy, a glossy rip-off that has for 20 years flatlined into an anaesthetising millennial binge watch. And certainly not Pulse, from a streamer whose USP is anaesthetising millennial binge watches, and whose first episodes are so laughably predictable I could have written them myself.  

Handsome, not-so-secretly well-connected surgeon with a dark past? Maverick junior who goes rogue with a risky but life-saving decision? Feared female boss with a soft side? Relative of senior staffer rushed into the emergency room in critical condition? Token flirtatious Brit with a big ego? Shower sex, crisis of confidence, extreme weather emergency? This is so formulaic it feels like it was written in 2002, no matter how many “pioneering” procedures or times they mention TikTok.  

But formulaic TV can be magnificent: in fact, it is this that has rendered the medical drama obsolete. For all the twists and trysts and medical miracles, few scripted dramas can really capture the feeling of uncertainty and the perspective on life that illness or emergency force. 

Yet it is almost impossible to watch one episode of 24 Hours in A&E, into its 34th series on Channel 4, or Surgeons: At the Edge of Life, into its seventh on BBC Two, without being moved to tears, without considering your own mortality, without thinking about that fragile line between life and death. 

Here, on full display, are the doctors’ towering authority and their human fallibility; here are the real patients who, astoundingly, allow themselves to be filmed at their most vulnerable and most scared – having a stroke, after an accident, weighing up the risks about whether to undergo surgery when the decision must be made, immediately. Here are the families, watching, fearing, grieving, healing, each of them with their own traumas, each of them with their own past pains and losses that returning to a hospital reminds them of all over again.  

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Medical dramas once triumphed because they paint their doctors as heroes. They get it wrong sometimes – and it takes a toll, usually on their personal lives – but everything they do is intended to be a reflection or contrast to their perception as perfect and omnipotent.  

But that superhuman perfection doesn’t impress us or move us anymore. We yearn to be shown humanity. The reason 24 Hours in A&E and all the other medical documentaries in its wake so move us is because, by abandoning that veneration altogether and instead drawing out ordinary people’s everyday drama and tragedy, it treats the patients as the heroes.

It is not glamorous, but it is more powerful, because each of us watching knows what it is like to be one. 

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