It’s been a while since TV has seen a plain old ‘normal’ medical drama in a very long time on network television or almost anywhere else. Grey’s Anatomy has been past its prime for more than half a decade, and it never cared that much about medicine. The Good Doctor is still trying to argue it’s title character life over medicine. Chicago Med is about as traditional as anything Dick Wolf produces, and The Resident is fairly bland in almost every way.
Leave to our neighbors from the north to give medicine a different kind of look by being more or less exactly the same. Transplant focuses around Bashir Hamed (Hamza Haq) who comes into York Memorial as a patient. The chief of staff earlier denied him the ability to work here, but when he shows up suffering brain trauma, Bashir saves his life by drilling a hole in his head. The chief reconsiders his options, and offers to give Bashir an internship.
Bashir is a refugee from Syria who emigrated, we later learned, because he was an enemy of the state. He worked with the regime there as doctor, but when he was caught giving vaccinations to the disenfranchised, he was label dangerous and went into exile. Now, every aspect of his life which would be easier for almost any other resident is a mess. The regime will not release his transcripts because of his past status. He has to ask a fellow friend for transcripts, but this friend is undocumented, so soon he must go on the run.
More than that, the nuances that are in American and Canadian medicine don’t translate from abroad. In an early episode, he diagnoses a woman’s bruises as ‘suspicious’ using the context that they have ‘medically’ strange origins. Unfortunately, as too many hospital dramas have shown us, suspicious has a different connotation here, and it happens the patient’s daughter was already on the equivalent of Child Services. When Bashir realizes his error, he tries to retract it, but the system has already gone into effect. And he can’t understand that while patients in Damascus were in desperate need for vaccines, he is infuriated when a patient comes in suffering from measles because his parents don’t believe in vaccines – or medicine in general.
Haq does a superb job as the lead. It’s rare that any drama gives anyone of Middle Eastern descent a sympathetic role on any show, and it helps that everyone is more suspicious of him because of his experience than his religion, which is refreshing. A lot of the other characters are, unfortunately, cut and paste from so many other medical dramas that we’ve seen over the decades – though there are some subtleties. There’s the female intern who cares too much. There’s the resident trying to handle a long commute and family difficulties – though it’s a man, not a woman. There’s a similar gender swap for the surgical resident – and she’s a lot more aggressive than Peter Benton or Christina Yang would be. Asked to perform a emergency surgery on an old man who was in a hit-and-run that killed two people, she says: “I want him to live long enough to serve every year of his sentence.”
It helps a lot for this drama that most of the actors in the cast are unknown to us; the only name that was familiar to me was John Hannah as the chief of staff, and that’s because I stuck around with Damages to the final season. None of these characters will be known to American audiences, and it will make them harder to fit into boxes.
Transplant only came to American television because the fall season is being delayed because of a medical crisis that has taken over every aspect of our lives. That said, Covid 19 has not been mentioned even once in the four episodes I’ve seen, which is refreshing – and a little disturbing. The Canadians don’t do all television better than, say, the British can, but they can surprise us with their subtleties. I don’t know if Transplant will stick around after American entertainment returns to normal, but if it stays in Canada, I might track it down anyway on Amazon. How ironic it took a foreign country to remind us how well a traditionally American genre can be done.
My score: 3.75 stars.
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