Code Black

It increasingly seems that hospital dramas are the little black dress of the series. Without beeping heart monitors and nurses running through the ER on Crocks with huge bags of O +, your wardrobe is apparently incomplete as a transmitter. Every year Shonda Rhimes puts a Grey's Anatomy script over the table that they can't say no to at ABC; at Global they have been trying with Remedy since last year; NBC does not like daylight and has focused on The Night Shift for a number of seasons (although patients can now also visit the channel during the day with Chicago Med) and CBS now also comes with eighteen episodes of vomiting, pus and other gushing misery. Yum. In the Netherlands we really only know Code Oranje. Code Oranje is when the KNMI says that we are all going to die of brutal natural violence, but the wind is ultimately not even strong enough to blow my girl next door off her tricycle. No, then the USC Medical Center in Los Angeles, they have Code Black there. Apart from the fact that Code Black sounds much cooler, it also means that the hell has really broken out. During Code Black, the hospital ER is so packed that the doctors would have even told Piggy's entourage to ask for tweezers at the front desk to get all those bullets out. The stress, the chaos, the body parts of complete strangers lying around, starting doctor Ryan McGarry seemed like a great starting point for a documentary, Code Black, and because “better stolen than badly conceived” is not only a saying in the Netherlands, went CBS then took it off with a series variant. I didn't quite have my series game in order when ER was broadcast here in the Netherlands, so to me Grey's Anatomy is the mother of all hospital series. Sure it has become more and more a soap over the years and all that stuff could meanwhile just as well play out among the staff of any hardware store, but still. Where Grey's now seems to be more about who is now back in the on call room, Code Black focuses mainly on the patients and their often dire situations. The only question is how long Statistics Netherlands can keep that interesting. We now know the trick of the doctor in training that, according to the parents of a blood-coughing child, is not good enough to make a correct judgment. The same goes for most of the injuries that the writing team deals with. Massive car crash? Been there. Lumberjack with half a stump through his chest? Seen. The only way to keep the viewer glued to his screen is to combine delicious freak accidents and give the main characters a face. The latter is still not happening enough at the moment. From episode six / seven you notice that there is more and more line in the story, which fortunately the writers cannot escape to further explore the characters of the different characters. If you've never watched anything with tubes and stethoscopes and don't feel like plodding through more than 250 episodes of (the fucking) Grey's Anatomy, then definitely give Code Black a chance. The basis is in place, the look & feel is certainly not wrong and now all you have to do is hope for more storyline, which will ensure that one episode at a time is not enough. www.gumstarr.com

It took a while for the first few episodes. Chaotic, busy, characters to get used to, but after episode 3 I was hooked. Have just seen the last episode of the 2nd season. Seen both seasons in 2 days. Can't wait for season 3