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This Is Going to Hurt… honest portrayal of a junior doctor happens to be gay
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This Is Going to Hurt… honest portrayal of a junior doctor happens to be gay
This Is Going to Hurt’: An honest look at how doctors suffer in a punishing system
This is not your typical hospital drama often seen in the US.
In This Is Going to Hurt, Ben Whishaw plays a hospital doctor who is gay and whose experience of coming out to others is a protracted thing that creates continuing ripple effects through his adult life.
American viewers have seen plenty of medical dramas; for a time, you couldn’t get away from them. In fact, the specifics of the patient whose story opens This Is Going to Hurt and then hangs over Adam for the whole season will be familiar to anyone who watched ER. But this is a very different series, in part because it’s unrelenting in portraying the pace of Adam’s days and those of a trainee named Shruti (Ambika Mod, also excellent here) for whom he’s responsible. Shruti is trying to learn, but when the days are hard on Adam, he offloads his frustrations onto her – onto someone even less supported, even less cared for, even more vulnerable than he is.
It’s key to the series’ outlook that Adam is not consistently a pleasant person or a good doctor. He does things that you would not want your doctor to do; he does things that you would not want a friend to do. He is not an antihero; he is simply not a hero at all. He is one person being slowly and inexorably damaged by a job he loves, where he knows he is needed, where he knows he can help people.
“I think it’s really interesting what happens to you if you grow up thinking there’s something wrong with you because you’re attracted to a certain thing,” he says. “That takes a lot of time and understanding to get over.
And understanding doesn’t just arrive because you’ve been explicit and open to other people.”
This is a devastating, funny, sharp story about life and death and failure and success, and it’s well worth seeking out
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/this_is_going_to_hurt
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3 Replies
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Thanks. I probably would have missed this.
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Excellent series just finished watching all seven episodes.
The Ben Whishaw-starring AMC+ medical drama has all the dark humor
and visceral anxiety of not knowing the point where your job really
ends.“This is Going to Hurt” is defined by following life on a labor ward via
Adam’s experiences in an underfunded, overstrained National Health
Service hospital in the mid-2000s. It also focuses on Shruti Acharya
(Ambika Mod), whose regiment of training and studying for exams is its
own immense load.There are also frequent Adam-to-audience check-ins,
fourth-wall breaks brought on by everything from workplace rivalries to
unexpected delivery room developments to the constant demands of holding
strangers’ fate in his literal hands.“This is Going to Hurt” realizes that — even if it doesn’t involve
scalpels and forceps and bedside manner — work can be both the thing
that invites grief and a shelter from it all at once.https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-reviews/this-is-going-to-hurt-1235154204/
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