Monday 2 June 2014

This is exactly the reason I have been careful to avoid success

The very first thing we see at the start of The Night Shift is an explosion, so I'm going to go ahead and prejudge (I know, it's quite unlike me) that we're getting one of those medical dramas where hunky doctors burst into shot at gory accidents to shout commands at people who don't understand that THE RULES AND REGULATIONS will not help this patient who's been impaled by a railing or whatever, so Dr Hunk (MD) - while fast music plays and the camera whizzes and swoops between characters - impatiently explains to people who quote THE RULES AND REGULATIONS at him why he doesn't need to keep the railing imbedded in the patient's neck until the ambulance arrives, no - what needs to be done is for the shard of metal keeping the man's blood inside his body to be torn out (close-up of gushing blood) and then Dr Hunk will repeatedly kick the man in the face and then urinate on him while racially abusing non-whites in the immediate vicinity, and the people around him will say something like "are you crazy?  That is insane and cannot possibly work!  And even if it does work I will report you to THE MAN IN A SUIT WHO COUNTS THE BEANS for not following established rules and regulations!" and then Dr Hunk will say that actually it's something he did IN IRAQ, because you cannot be a doctor of Hunkology unless you have been a combat doctor, even though being a combat doctor will make you do sadface in the pilot episode and have issues with commitment and/or expressing feels, possibly you will even use a carefully constructed facade to hide some kind of pain, like humor or an obsession to be "the best", which is where a mate of mine who was a combat nurse in Afghanistan went wrong, as he just cried all the time when he came home and eventually  killed himself after sleeping on the street for three years - clearly he was a pussy and could learn something from Dr Hunk and similar members of his master race.
I'll unpause this now and watch the rest of the episode before passing any judgement on it, as I think I probably need to watch more than the first 11 seconds.
Dr Hunk is doing medicine in a tent in the desert in an orange filter while being shot at, and then wakes up in the drunk tank and immediately gets on a motorcycle to drive at high speed while classic rock plays, his shirt billowing in the wind as he comes across an ambulance attending to a man who has - I swear to God - been impaled, but by a branch from a tree and not a railing so that's okay.  During the conversation with the paramedics, Dr Hunk impatiently tells them not to tell him the rules and regulations, then says he learned the technique he just used to save the man's life in Afghanistan - not Iraq, so that's okay.  Still - holy fuck.
In the hospital, someone's heart robot is malfunctioning, but the doctor can only look coldly down his nose at the patient and explain that despite her pain, the rules and regulations say they have to call her health insurance company to send a heart robot doctor over to fix things, but an attractive twentysomething lady doctor is having none of this and says that she's going to take away the pain no matter what it says in the rules and regulations.
Dr Hunk bursts in to the emergency room and announces that luck had nothing to do with the life he's just saved.  He tears off his shirt to reveal his taut, glistening body, and for a guy who has long floppy hair and stubble, he is remarkably hairless everywhere else.  Attractive Twentysomething Lady Doctor then berates him for not doing his paperwork because he spends all his time drinking and fighting, then paramedics burst into the room with a sick baby as fast music plays, prompting Dr Hunk to leap into action and shout the word "stat" so you know he means business.  Elsewhere, a comedy black man ends up touching things from the "things found in people's butts" box with his hands so people laugh at him, because things in people's butts is a funny concept.  A fat Southern man in a "don't mess with Texas" t-shirt calls a black nurse a bitch and then starts a fight before being taken down with a sleeper hold by a Male Twentysomething Doctor With An Unimaginative Haircut, then a man in a suit  tells Attractive Twentysomething Lady Doctor  that she can't have a man's job, especially not on The Night Shift because it's an "undisciplined zoo" where they don't respect the rules and regulations, or people who count beans.  Attractive Twentysomething Lady Doctor  tells the man in a suit that "they work hard and they play hard" and he tells her "WELL I DON'T LIKE IT" and then we cut to a man having his testicles stitched up while Comedy Black Man tries not to barf.  Cut to Dr Hunk being late to a meeting because he is busy saving a baby, which enrages the man in a suit even more than Obamacare does - and he does indeed single out Obamacare for criticism in this scene, just as he does Dr Hunk for saving a baby rather than sending it away to die.  Dr Hunk then disses the man by saying "is that your opinion, doctor?  Oh wait you aren't a doctor" and everyone goes "awwwwwwwwwwwww SNAP."
Then the credits roll and I tap out.  At some point during these first ten minutes, my brother entered the room and asked if what I was watching was some sort of "American medical drama version of A Touch Of Cloth."
I replied "No.  It's American television."

In order to help NBC with marketing the show, I have decided to offer my thoughts on a potential rebranding, first changing the show's name to Extreme Medics - my original choice of "Explosion Doctors" being taken already.

At this point I favor changing "medics" to a spelling that incorporates an "X", because X-Men or something and the show is being advertised during other shows like The 100 with logos and pictures of the cast that make them look like superheroes, but everything is cooler spelled with an x anyway, so two x's clearly makes it even cooler:

Now I decided to emphasise the X's by making them larger, and conflating the two words into one because "extreme" ends with "me and "medix" starts with "me".  Also it will look good for branding purposes to have a single word that people will remember.

Unfortunately it now looks like like a brand of really high-factor suntan lotion, so I separated the two words again, this time to emphasise the word "extreme", and to highlight the letters "ER", because the show is set in an ER.

I think the above logo now perfectly reflects the show I watched.

You're welcome, NBC.

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