Dr. Max Goodwin (Ryan Eggold) explores the halls of New York City’s oldest public hospital, asking everybody who would listen — surgeons, nurses, custodians — a simple question: How can I help?
Max’s great inspiration as the newest medical director at the fictional New Amsterdam Hospital is that after years of medicine driven by the bottom line, he wants to prioritize patients. This isn’t a tremendous motivator, therefore his secondary inspiration is to leverage his position as the face of hospital bureaucracy to help carers through the power of crowdsourcing.
New Amsterdam isn’t all that bad, at least not in terms of execution. Some of the performances are pretty good, and the plot possibilities are endless.
While NBC claims that New Amsterdam is based in part on Dr. Eric Manheimer’s biography Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital, it instead feels artistically crowdsourced. It does not come off as a realistic take on institutional medicine in 2018, but rather as if someone toured the corridors of 30 Rock asking anybody who would listen — executives, pages, Jimmy Fallon — a not-so-simple question: How can I develop a medical drama that everyone will enjoy?
The New Amsterdam Hospital, as created by David Schulner, is pretty much all things to all people, or at least all plotlines. It has its own courts, a jail wing, a public school, and facilities for treating visitors from the adjacent United Nations. It’s an incredible organization, but it appears to be embroiled in such instability that the position of hospital medical director is nearly hard to fill or maintain occupied.
Max is the fifth medical director in five years, and he previously ran a clinic in Chinatown for five years. He wasn’t the first option for the job, and to be honest, more than a few viewers will have an easy time figuring out why he’s actually a terrible match for the role. It’s not only that he has no actual ideas other than asking people how he can assist — much like Teddy Ruxpin, who always asks if you want to be friends but never wants to hang out when you’re available. Max has a pregnant wife whom he continues lying to and promising to put first, even though we all know he never will, a quality the show finds perplexingly endearing. He’s also a poor match for reasons revealed at the end of the pilot in the unnecessary high-stakes drama equivalent of putting a hat on a hat.
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It’s odd how Max is introduced assuring Spanish-speaking nurses and janitors that he’ll help them as well, yet neither nurse nor janitor gets a regular speaking part beyond two episodes, and yet Max is repeatedly praised for his ability to speak minimal Spanish. I don’t think Schulner or the other producers saw Max as a white savior, but that’s the role he’s frequently cast in. For all of this, I believe Eggold would cut a more sympathetic and troubled figure if the program around him was more forthright in admitting his weaknesses. Crowdsourcing should have highlighted Shaun “The Good Doctor” Murphy and Gregory “House” House as series having a greater understanding of their protagonists’ flaws and strengths.
Oh, and no one has ever seen a medical drama and thought to themselves, “Geez, I hope I could get care from an institution that the administrator oversees.”
Max is keen to insert himself into the busy physicians’ tales in New Amsterdam, directed by Kate Dennis as a lively sequence of walk-and-talks, even though he doesn’t provide much other than a sympathetic ear, a pained grimace, and occasional pressure on an open wound. He’s attempting to get Dr. Helen Sharpe (Freema Agyeman) back into the operating room, even though the head of oncology likes to be on a constant media and speaking tour promoting the hospital.
Max is preoccupied with what is going on with Dr. Vijay Kapoor (Anupam Kher), the hospital’s head of neurology, and Dr. Iggy Frome (Tyler Labine), the hospital’s head of psychology. He’s even on the outskirts as Dr. Laura Bloom (Janet Montgomery) and Dr. Floyd Pearson (Jocko Sims) flirt in their own, largely separate, medical soap opera, which isn’t particularly good but must have been created in reaction to the eternal attraction of young physicians in love.
Yes, today’s hospital’s overcharge and serve embarrassingly bad food, and perhaps everything would be better if we treated each patient as an individual, but the two episodes I watched taught me that nothing is so broken that it can’t be fixed with a high-emotion musical montage in the final seven minutes. One of those montages is even set to “Fix You,” a strategy I’m afraid will need to be criminalized soon after I speak out against the show’s usage of “I Feel Good” as a morning wake-up song.
While not as obvious an example of a program blatantly concentrating on the wrong characters as NBC’s Manifest, New Amsterdam puts Eggold in the position of frequently being upstaged by his co-stars since they have active characters. Because Helen has a more detailed, delicate past than Max, and because the Torchwood (and The Carrie Diaries) veteran is successfully conflicted, without the pandering the program makes on Max’s behalf, Agyeman presents the most egregious “Wait, why isn’t this show about her?” regret.
A perfect New Amsterdam would have Agyeman at the center of the show, with support from Sens8 co-stars Kher and Labine, continuing a surprisingly welcome shift from sitcom shenanigans to ensemble drama gravitas, especially since Kapoor and Frome’s pairing in the second episode was perhaps my favorite part of the show thus far.
New Amsterdam is less glibly cynical than Fox’s The Resident and less completely forgettable than CBS’ Pure Genius, but it has many of the same “Here’s what’s wrong with medicine today!” moments. The strands of DNA. I couldn’t tell you anything particular about any of the instances our brave team of physicians handled without consulting my notes from episodes I saw a day ago. One of them included Ebola. One depicted an overmedicated child. Nothing jumped out in terms of medical technique or narrative style. It’s hardly much use having a hospital where virtually any medical case is feasible if every case feels like a poor replica of something that worked on another medical program.
