Which New Medical Show Is Right for You?

It’s not just The Pitt; we’re in the midst of a medical-show boom. The emergencies are fictional. The doctors are sexy. The emotions are palpable, but they’re also happening on a pleasantly individual scale. The trouble is there are so many new med series it’s hard to know which one to start. Here, we match you with the doctor who best meets your criteria.

If your ideal TV doctors are …

Almost always running frantically through the hallways yelling, “I need 30 ccs of epi STAT.” They should be in a swirl of medical crises, and people should probably be putting their hands inside someone else’s chest cavity on a regular basis. They should have complex interpersonal dynamics that you mostly hear about from within a thicket of medical jargon.

… Then watch The Pitt (Max)

This is the year’s best medical procedural and the Second Coming of a ’90s TV procedural, reborn in the guise of a streaming show. Densely plotted and emotional without veering into Shondaland melodrama, The Pitt follows a single 15-hour shift in an emergency department in Pittsburgh, 24 style. It’s the kind of show that gets nurses making TikToks about how incredibly realistic it is, both because of the pacing and the general attention to details. Noah Wyle as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch is not playing his character Dr. John Carter from ER, but he’s not … not that, either.

Reason this physician needs to heal himself: Untreated COVID-era PTSD.

If your ideal TV doctors are …

Living in a Ryan Murphy escapist-fantasy fever dream where all the doctors are hot, wear bright-white uniforms, and have threesomes. The medical emergencies should range from embarrassing to improbable with an occasional “Uh-oh, maybe this one is actually scary … Never mind, it’s fine.”

… Then watch Doctor Odyssey (ABC)

As head doctor on a luxury cruise, Joshua Jackson is anxious to keep everyone healthy while getting some time to unbutton his shirt and dance on a tropical beach. There are themed voyages like Halloween Week, Gay Week, and Plastic Surgery Week, meaning unusual ailments and weird props for people to get into trouble with while having hot cruise sex. You get Jackson in full daddy mode; guest stars like Kate Berlant, Margaret Cho and John Stamos; and Odyssey captain Don Johnson, who mostly stands around and makes his eyes twinkle while everyone parties.

Reason this physician needs to heal himself: Untreated COVID-era PTSD.

If your ideal TV doctors are …

Mostly bloodless but full of feelings. They have new cases that get solved every week, and the biggest and most unsolvable one should be the main doctor learning how to put her life back together after experiencing her own devastating medical crisis.

… Then watch Doc (Fox)

Molly Parker stars as Dr. Amy Larsen, chief of internal medicine at a large urban hospital who has a car accident and loses all her memories of the past eight years. Turns out eight years ago she was a good and caring person. But then her young son died and she slowly became a cynical, ambitious, damaged woman who alienated her family and friends rather than deal with her grief. The good news: She doesn’t recall any of that! The bad news: Her life is in shambles and the only thing she really remembers is how to be a doctor, which is awkward because it really seems like she shouldn’t be allowed to perform delicate medical procedures. It’s fine, though, because she cares so much.

Reason this physician needs to heal herself: Partial retrograde amnesia as a result of a traumatic brain injury that left a piece of skull permanently lodged in her brain.

If your ideal TV doctors are …

Detectives. They sit around in offices and talk about clues and paper trails and should spend most of their time discussing evidence and theories rather than interacting with patients. Ideally, they’re stuck in a literal Sherlock Holmes adaptation. They should also be hot.

… Then watch Watson (CBS)

Morris Chestnut plays Dr. John Watson, who loses his friend Sherlock Holmes (voiced by Matt Berry) and later realizes the evil villain Moriarty (Randall Park) is still out there causing mayhem. You can’t just be tracking down Moriarty, though, so Dr. Watson has hired a crack team of young weird-genius physicians to help him solve rare medical mysteries. Spoiler: A shocking number of the cases are solved after discovering that a patient’s parents are not who they thought they were.

Reason this physician needs to heal himself: A traumatic brain injury, suffered while attempting to rescue Sherlock Holmes after he toppled off the cliff at Reichenbach Falls.

If your ideal TV doctors are …

Detectives, except loosely based on real-life neurologists rather than fictional characters. They should solve medical mysteries but only about the mind, which is, of course, the most mysterious part of the body. There’s not a lot of blood, but there is a lot of staring at a chart or brain scan and murmuring thoughtfully.

… Then watch Brilliant Minds (NBC)

There are multiple barely-remade versions of House on network rotation this year; this one stars Zachary Quinto as a fictionalized Oliver Sacks. In the first scene, he kidnaps a grandfather from a memory-care unit in order to make sure he can attend his granddaughter’s wedding — but, of course, what’s the point of kidnapping a grandfather unless he’s played by André De Shields and Quinto can zip away with him on the back of a motorcycle? He’s not a regular doctor. He’s a cool doctor.

Reason this physician needs to heal himself: Face blindness, familial trauma.

If your ideal TV doctors are …

Pretty much like the ones on The Pitt but German — and instead of saying “Welcome to the Pit,” someone should say, “Wilkommen bei KRANK.” The newbie lead doctor should be so overwhelmed that she has to go outside and scream (until she eventually pulls herself together).

… Then watch Berlin ER (Apple TV+)

It doesn’t have The Pitt’s single-shift structure but will scratch many of the same itches. This is a blood-and-guts medical-show model, in which everything teeters on the brink of catastrophe at all times and the doctors are adrenaline junkies approximately one shift away from a complete mental breakdown. New head of the ER Dr. Parker (Haley Louise Jones) is utterly at sea, and her experienced co-worker Dr. Weber (Slavko Popadić) has no interest in helping her out. The series has an occasionally bleak sense of humor — like when the exhausted, overworked EMTs have to staunch excessive bleeding from a guy who got stabbed in the ass — but its general mode is “This place will try to destroy your sense of humanity, and only the strong survive.”

Reason Dr. Weber needs to heal himself: Partied too hard at the club last night and showed up to work too hung-over to do the hip surgery he had scheduled at noon.

If your ideal TV doctors are …

Funny. The only way to deal with having a body that gradually falls apart — and medical care that’s administered by giant soulless corporate-profit machines designed to squeeze money out of desperate, sick, and disabled people — is through humor!

… Then watch St. Denis Medical (NBC)

A sitcom about a small regional hospital in Oregon. You get lots of the same character types as in the dramas: the overworked head nurse (Allison Tolman); the new nurse who knows absolutely nothing (Mekki Leeper); the senior physician who has seen it all (David Alan Grier); and the inane hospital administrator always looking to cut costs (Wendi McLendon-Covey). But here, it’s all viewed through a workplace-comedy format, which captures the kind of boring ordinariness of typical medical care while also getting at some of the big frustrations of understaffing.

Reasons these physicians need to heal themselves: Total collapse of the American health-care system.

If your ideal TV doctors are …

Living in a K-drama that involves huge action sequences, sometimes real and sometimes imaginary, in which they do things like fight gangsters. The hero doctor should call his goofy sidekick “Anus.”

… Then watch The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call (Netflix)

Former combat medic Dr. Baek Kang-hyuk (Ju Ji-hoon) has returned to Korea, after zooming around war zones on motorcycles wearing backpacks full of antibiotics, to take on the task of fixing the inefficient, undersupported trauma department at Hankuk National University Hospital in Seoul. All those other doctors? They’re cowards! Blowhards! Lazy department heads out of touch with reality! Only Dr. Baek really knows how to get things done.

Reason this physician needs to heal himself: His only flaw is that sometimes he’s too good.

If your ideal TV doctors are …

Hot. Their main priorities should be sleeping with and competing against one another and lingering in well-lit stairwells to summarize their traumatic memories. Their scrubs should be tailored. They should have odd and inconvenient foibles like an irrational fear of pregnant women. When they speak, at least a third of their dialogue should be rearticulations of previously explained exposition

… Then watch Pulse (Netflix)

In this obvious (but certainly less enojoyable) Grey’s Anatomy rip-off, resident Danielle “Danny” Simms (Willa Fitzgerald) has to fight through intrusive memories of sexual harassment by her supervisor while a hurricane bears down on her Miami hospital. Good thing her sister Harper (Jessy Yates) is on staff — though, shocker, Harper has her own source of traumatic story fuel. TV veterans including Justina Machado and Néstor Carbonell do their best, but don’t worry about getting overly emotionally invested. Pulse likes to keep a handle on the tension by perpetually skipping into a flashback as soon as it reaches an emotional turning point.

Reason these physicians need to heal themselves: Disruptive horniness, terminal obnoxiousness.

Related

• Joshua Jackson Could Make a Sailor Blush
• Noah Wyle on ‘The Pitt’ Duties, ‘ER’ Run As Dr. Carter