This week, the CBS medical drama Code Black, which aired on Wednesdays, finished its first season (no word on renewal yet). An exceptional first season it is.
In retrospect, the show loses momentum with too many cast additions and a distinct shift from the doctor’s proximity to (and impact upon) the patient to mundane, internal hospital melodrama and contrived social messaging. In its current status at season’s end, it’s too much like a soap opera. Tinkering in the last episodes detracts.
But every episode up until the freeway pileup climax (“The Fog of War”), makes Code Black one of TV’s best series. The premise of a team of residents learning at the discretion of a leading doctor everyone calls ‘Daddy’ (Marcia Gay Harden) and a tough, wise nurse who goes by “Momma” (Luis Guzman) at a Los Angeles hospital that’s chronically at or over patient capacity carries the season to greatness.
The family-themed hierarchy helps. It sets the tone of Michael Seitzman’s show, which is based on the documentary of the same name, and casts the strangeness of working in this uniquely unhealthy, demanding environment—the American hospital in general; the emergency room in particular—in the proper perspective. In every episode, there comes a stylized dawning that illuminates the darkest corners of the rooms, instrument trays and curtain folds of a place where lives are won or lost and changed or reborn. This moment when the sun comes up means that reality exists independent of everything you’ve experienced; the new day brings new trauma.
Let’s get to it, Code Black‘s arch team seems to say every week, without the smugness of NBC’s ER, which often depicted doctors as topical mouthpieces or CBS’ Chicago Hope, which often showed docs as eccentric windbags. Here, the team is mostly led by a stern, rational physician played by the excellent Ms. Harden (Grandma, The Hoax, If I Were You), challenged, needled and backed by Guzman’s nurse, and their personalities are secondary to the medical matter at hand. They each exist to serve the medical purpose of the moment and, while each character’s background and motives for working in this place becomes clear, it never comes at the expense of fixing, tending, saving, declaring the dead and, yes, curing. Code Black at its best stings with its wholeness of purpose: the time the cocky stud learns to handle a patient’s priapism, or to grasp what he has in common with a flamboyant, dying patient or to grapple with why he’s always alone.
Nothing feels fake or forced on Code Black, though there are cliches and contrivances, as there are in matters of life and death, too. When a resident discloses a past drug addiction, death of loved ones, sexual orientation or fear of failure, it’s relatively organic to the plot, which is liberally blended with any from a wide variety of medical scenarios with ordinary or morally loaded circumstances, such as a religious parent’s preclusion against medical intervention or a patient’s self-imposed order to not resuscitate. The situations feel like another day in a high volume hospital, the patients come off as realistic and so do the staff and yet everything retains both the steady intensity of today’s impossible medical bureaucracy and life’s—and especially health care’s—fleeting intimacies that flare up in color and fade to gray or, sometimes, black.
Watch for Marcia Gay Harden’s interactions with any other character for the soul of the show. Look for Kevin Dunn as an intelligent foil who makes good points and bends rules even though he’s a hospital bureaucrat. William Allen Young as intellectual Dr. Guthrie is one of Code Black‘s best characters and one of its first victims of mid-season tinkering—when personal stuff explodes in the hospital, which starts to gain uninteresting characters (Heather, Grace, Gina) and lose its involving aspects—and the cast of residents is fine, too. Raza Jaffrey as Dr. Hudson and Benjamin Hollingsworth as Dr. Savetti are also especially strong in roles that call for wide ranges.
The first 12 episodes are the best, striking hard, fast and powerfully with larger than life themes (“The Son Rises”) that may move the audience to tears. Even when an annoying patient character played by June Squibb (Nebraska)—in the same type of irritating role Squibb always plays—dismisses Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, it’s plausible that someone like her would fail to grasp something like that. Even in lower caliber later episodes such as the season finale with Paula Newsome (Black or White) as a politician’s wife, a superior performance elevates contrived, politically correct material. Code Black deserves to get better and it ought to get a second season. Only then does it have a chance to recapture its original and incisive dramatic contemplation of what it means to be a doctor and medical practitioner in a mad, sick world in which every day might also hold something glorious and good.