Why ‘This is going to hurt’ is one of the essential series of the year

All the medical series that we have seen for decades have a bit of superhero series. In the mythical ‘ER’, available on HBO Max, ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, ‘House’, ‘Chicago Med’ or in the Spanish ‘Central Hospital’, doctors face extreme situations on a daily basis, save lives in at the last minute and solve impossible diagnoses while having exciting personal lives. They’re usually gorgeous too (one of them was George Clooney, for God’s sake).

We have seen many series of doctors, but none like ‘This is going to hurt you’, available in full on Movistar Plus +. Here the protagonist has no super speed, no omnipotence, no clairvoyance: he is a normal man overwhelmed by an inhuman workload, who walks the gynecology floor crushed by exhaustion and cynicism and sometimes makes mistakes with fatal consequences for mothers and/or babies. Ben Whishaw has never looked so ugly, with huge bags under his eyes and signs of malnutrition.

Another important difference is that this doctor works in a public hospital in London, a building that is falling apart and in which much fewer staff work than it should. Moving away from the stylized and idealized vision of American private healthcare (a country where people leave hospitals in debt), the creator and screenwriter Adam Kay teaches us, with a dark humor filter, the dangers and misfortunes that mistreatment brings to public healththat jewel that we have in many European countries and that is in so much danger (because, as we are discovering in recent years, the welfare state is not sustained by applause from the balconies but by voting for parties that do not want to dismantle it).

Kay knows what she’s talking about. The now comedian and screenwriter first dedicated himself to medicine. During his years working in public hospitals throughout the United Kingdom, he wrote diaries in which he gathered anecdotes and stories lived at work; many delusional, some heartbreaking. After having a traumatic experience in which he narrowly saved a pregnant woman but lost the baby, he abandoned medicine. Years later, he brought these stories together in a book entitled ‘This Is Going to Hurt: The Secret Diary of a Resident Physician’, which was a phenomenon inside and outside the UK, selling more than a million and a half copies and lasting 52 weeks on the internet. number one on the sales charts. It also inspired a national conversation about the state of the NHS, Britain’s public health system.

The series, co-produced by the BBC and AMC, turns that anecdote into a seven-episode story with Adam (Wishaw) at the center. A doctor who is not extraordinary but competent, and survives as best he can the long work shifts without days off, the contradictory and accumulated calls in the pager (the series is set in 2006) and the lack of colleagues and superiors who help him. help. Tiredness and pressure have turned him into a bitter, rude and self-enclosed man, who treats his inferiors badly. (Including Head Matron Tracy, who is a better professional and person than he is, and Acting Shruti, a dedicated budding doctor who spends her little free time studying for her latest exams and begins her career already feeling exhausted.) The few hours she spends at home with Harry, her devoted, supportive and cheerful boyfriend, she tries more to hide her work-related worries and traumas than to keep the connection between them alive.

A very black comedy that turns to tragedy

Although it is not recommended for pregnant women or for sensitive stomachs (it is full of very graphic images), ‘This is going to hurt you’ starts off being very funny. Kay imbues the series with the wacky, surreal spirit of her book’s anecdotes, and Whishaw compensates for her character’s antipathy and disappointment with charisma, charm, sarcasm, and lovable resignation. He sometimes breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the viewer, a dangerous and somewhat hackneyed device, but he rarely does it and it always works. Throughout the episodes, the comedy gradually fades as we see how Adam’s life and his mental health crumble.. It begins as a black comedy of doctors, something similar to ‘Nurse Jackie’ (an entertaining series from the era of Showtime anti-heroines that starred Edie Falco), but it ends up becoming a tragedy.

A tragedy in which self-sacrificing workers give their lives and their well-being, physical and mental, to a broken, despised and forgotten system. Caught between the dissatisfaction and anger of patients (sometimes rightly so, sometimes wrongly) and the indifference and unawareness of those at the top, managing and making decisions on which everyone’s lives depend. And not only do we see Adam suffer but, in one way or another, all his colleagues, but especially Shruti, that dedicated interim who learns through blows while she sees the corrosion in her boss and in herself and loses hope and the illusion before the life he has chosen. She is one of the unforgettable characters of 2022 and the interpretation of the rookie Ambika Mod, with that touching subtle strength that she transmits, should secure her work for many years.

When ‘This is going to hurt’ comes to an end, it is clear that the title was not an exaggeration. This is one of the series that is not easily forgotten. And we shouldn’t: Adam Kay is showing us that the people who have to take care of us are being neglected. Underestimated, abused and ignored. If we can take something for granted in life, it is that at some point something will hurt us, and they will be there to take care of us. Without sleeping, without eating and without enough time to attend to us, but they will. What remedy.