When the scalpels burst the screens

“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 Pitt”, new Max series broadcast from Friday on Canal+, will remind older or curious young people of the excitement of “Urgences”, with the evocative name, which appeared in 1994.

This matrix pushed the realism outlined by “St Elsewhere Hospital” (from 1982) further, with an empathetic collective through the wringer. Which does not exclude beautiful individuals, like Dr. Ross played by a beginner named George Clooney. “Emergencies” has become a school, from “Grey’s Anatomy” (2005) to “Chicago Med” (2015).

Another revelation from “Emergencies”, Noah Wyle – who however did not have the same stratospheric career as Clooney – therefore ensures the passing of the baton with “The Pitt”.

Far from the tie under the blouse of the young hairless lead of “Emergencies”, this 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.

“Brain tumor, she’s ruined, no point”: “Dr House” gets into trouble with a drunken, drug-addicted doctor. Behind the cynical remarks hides a sleuth of metabolism who ends up finding the invisible diagnosis on the scanner.

This acidic 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?”, her lover asks “Nurse Jackie”, an emergency room nurse addicted to chemical crutches played by Edie Falco from 2009.

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

And since Dr. House has often been compared to Sherlock Holmes, the series “Watson,” soon on CBS, comes full circle. 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.

Choosing a song like “Suicide is painless” for a fiction about surgeons sets the tone, tending towards black. This melody rocks the film “MASH”, directed by Robert Altman and awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1970. Feature film released in 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 AFP.