Genre Medical

Brilliant Minds

Zachary Quinto plays Dr. Oliver Wolf, a brilliant, openly gay neurologist loosely inspired by Oliver Sacks, who loses his hospital job for unconventional methods and starts a practice with a team of young residents at Bronx General, treating the strangest cases in medicine. The premise is House by way of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and the show commits fully to the case format: face blindness, alien hand syndrome, a woman who cannot recognize her own daughter, each treated as a puzzle with a human attached.

Doctor Odyssey

Ryan Murphy put Joshua Jackson on a cruise ship as Dr. Max Bankman, the new on board physician for the luxury liner The Odyssey, with Phillipa Soo and Sean Teale as his medical team, and the result is the most gloriously unhinged network drama of the season. Every week brings a themed cruise, singles week, plastic surgery week, a Halloween voyage, and every week the ship's compliment of medical catastrophes escalates from implausible to frankly supernatural. There is a throuple. There are multiple mass casualty events. The season ends on a twist about the nature of reality itself that made national news.

Best Medicine

FOX's American remake of Doc Martin transplants the grumpy surgeon to the fishing village of Port Wenn, and the results are exactly as mixed as every transatlantic comedy transplant before it. Josh Charles plays Dr. Martin Best, a brilliant Boston surgeon who flees to the small coastal town where he spent childhood summers, only to discover he has developed a phobia of blood, which is a problem for a country doctor. The premise survives the move; the tone is the question.

The Pitt

Noah Wyle returns to the hospital and reinvents the medical drama: one fifteen hour shift, one episode per hour, no flashbacks, no romance subplots, just the grind of a Pittsburgh ER. It is the most realistic show about medicine ever…