30 years after Emergency, hospital series still fascinate

When the scalpels burst the screens: Noah Wyle, revealed by EMERGENCIES thirty years ago, returns inThe Pitta new series in a hospital environment, a successful genre that is always fertile. Back to some essentials.

The Pittlast born of the surrogate mother “Emergencies”

“We’re in trouble”, “There are 52 in the waiting room and it’s not even 7 a.m.”, “Let’s go save lives”: these dialogues from The Pittnew Max series broadcast since this Friday, January 17, 2025, will remind older or curious young people of the excitement d’EMERGENCIESwith an evocative name, appeared in 1994.

This matrix pushed the realism outlined by Hôpital St Elsewhere (from 1982), with an empathetic collective through the wringer. Which does not exclude beautiful individuals, like Dr. Ross played by a newbie named George Clooney.

EMERGENCIES went to school, Grey’s Anatomy (2005) to Chicago Med (2015).

Another revelation fromEMERGENCIESNoah Wyle – who, however, has not had the same stratospheric career as George Clooney – therefore passes the baton with The Pitt.

Far from the tie under the blouse of the young hairless premierEMERGENCIESthis new character sports a beard and a hoodie covering the stethoscope. It’s up to him to supervise the next generation of emergency workers in Pittsburgh, an American city that resonates with the title.

Dr House, Watsondiagnostic detectives

“Brain tumor, it’s ruined, no point”: Dr House stripping with an undrinkable and drug addict doctor. Behind the cynical remarks hides a sleuth of metabolism who ends up finding the invisible diagnosis on the scanner.

This acid character, broken by existence – limping, leaning on a cane –, played by Hugh Laurie from 2004, never ceases to be emulated.

“Were you sleeping with me for my drugs?” “, asks her lover to “Nurse Jackie”, an emergency room nurse addicted to chemical crutches played by Edie Falco from 2009.

So much for the shady dependence aspect borrowed from Dr House. For the atypical side, we can cite the surgeon suffering from an autistic syndrome of Good Doctor (2017).

And since the Dr House has often been compared to Sherlock Holmes, the seriesWatsonsoon on CBScloses the loop. Or, in today’s world, the adventures of Doctor John Watson, while the famous detective has disappeared. This hero pushes his colleagues to leave the clinic to understand rare pathologies.

M.A.S.H., Hippocratesfrom the film to the surgical series

Choose a song like Suicide is painless (“Suicide is painless”) for a fiction about surgeons announces the color, tending towards black. This melody rocks the film M.A.S.Hdirected by Robert Altman and awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1970. Feature film released as a series from 1972.

Behind the bittersweet humor, the life of an American medical unit during the Korean War allows us to evoke that of Vietnam, which was current at the start of the broadcast, and to convey anti-militarist messages. The final episode attracted 106 million viewers in 1983, a record.

In the midst of all these American productions, a French project stands out: Hippocrates. It is first a film (2014) directed by Thomas Lilti, himself a doctor, then a series from 2018.

Here too, the subtext is important, particularly in season 3 broadcast from 2024, with doctors confronted with degraded working conditions in public hospitals in France. “What interests me is, on the one hand, the ultra-realism which allows me to do a political season, because it is a season about civil disobedience, and, at the same time, all of that is carried by the romance of heroic characters”, described Thomas Lilti to theAFP.

With AFP

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