Monday Mornings debuts on TNT tonight at 10p after Dallas and you don’t want to miss one of the best dramas to grace our televisions in a long time.
Doctors are responsible for saving lives and because of that fact some of them might become overly cocky. Monday Mornings is a show where you see these doctors doing get knocked down a notch when the messed up in a weekly meeting. In a way these meetings keep them humble and you wanting more.
Alfred Molina plays Dr Harding Hooten who runs these meetings. He is the one who puts his surgeons in their place whether they like it or not, and most of the time they don’t. But he is doing this for his patients’ benefits. And when you see him interact with them, you will see a compassion that you haven’t seen any doctor show before on television.
Could be because this show is co-created by CNN’s Sanjay Gupta. He has lived these experiences in his own life, so adding some fiction to them makes them seem so much real.
So real that I have seen some of these doctors in my hospital stays and such. One doctor that really brought back bad memories is Dr Sung Park, who barely has the English language down. He might be amazing at what he does, but he has the worst bedside manner you have ever seen. He tells patients get the surgery or dead because he has no time to interact with the talking patients and their family. While I have not had that experience, how many times have we seen a doctor who is so brunt with his diagnosis, you don’t know how to react and what to do? Well Dr Hooten will try to teach him compassion, but is he too thick skulled to get it? Keong Sim plays Dr Park and his portrayal is so dead on that I was shocked when I read his real life bio.
He isn’t the only doctor on the show, there is also Dr Tyler Wilson played by Jamie Barber. He will do anything he can to save his patients, but sometimes his inexperience will hurt them. He will be called out in these meetings for his mistakes.
Then there is his friend and colleague Tina Ridgeway (Jennifer Finnigan), she in a way is the one that keeps everyone calm. She is tough doctor who sees the potential in her interns. That will cost her, but yet she will appear to remain level headed and the one people go to talk to when they need someone. This is a role unlike anyone that Finnigan has played before and it is one she was born to play.
Then there is Dr Sydney Napur (Sarayu Rao), who you can tell is show co-creator’s Bill D’Elia and David E Kelley’s, baby on the show. She is the one that gives the speeches. She is the tough one. She is the one with ethics. She is the one you don’t want to mess with. And she is the one you want to look after you if you were unfortunately in the hospital!
There is one final doctor and that is Dr Jorge “El Gato” Villanueva played by Ving Rhames. He is the kind of the moral compass of them all.
I cannot express to you how much I love this show. D’Elia and Kelly have returned to medicine after several legal dramas and it has resuscitated how amazing these two show runners are in this field. They know how to bring heart to a drama. Unlike anything we have seen done with a medical show since their last one Chicago Hope.
There is a compassion with this show and a honesty that makes it so watchable. It is not a soap opera. It is not about a mad man. It is about doctors doing their job and not always getting it right. Unlike other ones they will not keep getting wrong in one episode until they get it right.
That is what I like most about this show. It shows that doctors are imperfect, but sometimes they are that way to make the person perfect again.
So watch this show every Monday night at 10p because paired up with Dallas, TNT has one of the strongest Mondays on television ever!
