In the US: Mondays, 9/8c, Fox. Starts tonight In the UK: Not yet acquired.
Watching this, I could have sworn I’d mysteriously tuned into CBS by accident. No way could this be a Fox show. It has CBS fingerprints all over it.
But, no. It’s on Fox. It’s a procedural. It’s efficiently made, efficiently acted and has high production values, just like a CBS show. It has no need to be a procedural – as with CBS’s A Gifted Man which was originally a show about a haunted doctor, this has medical procedural grafted onto it. But a procedural it is, with My Boys‘ Jordana Spiro as a doctor who – in between being brilliant and saving lives – has to do some medical work for the mob, it being Chicago n’all, because her brother was in trouble and she now owes them a debt that she has to pay off.
Then, one day, a mob informer comes into her hospital for an operation and the mob want her to kill him while he’s on the operating table or else they’ll hurt her and her family. What’s a surgeon to do?
And actually, that’s not the show’s biggest ethical dilemma, because somehow – I know not how, particularly on Fox of all networks – one of the patients who comes to her is a teenage girl. Who’s had sex with her boyfriend. She’s now pregnant. It’s going to ruin her life.
And to its credit, despite every other unremarkable, uninvolving aspect of the show, The Mob Doctor not only countenances the idea of letting this girl have an abortion, the doctor goes ahead and performs ‘the operation’.
