The Resident is a medical show that hates the medicine industry, and there’s something weirdly captivating about that

In almost every episode, there’s one clear villain. It’s not illness or disease, or even really medical malpractice exactly – it’s the profit-seeking motive. People die because hospital administrators emphasise finances over patients, or because they don’t have the right insurance, or because they end up on the wrong side of a cost-benefit analysis. In one episode, Conrad performs an expensive, expressly forbidden medical procedure to save someone’s life; in the next, people die because the hospital is understaffed as a result of trying to balance the books after that operation. There’s a real vein of cynicism and disdain for what The Resident describes as the “questionable ethics” of its setting – in short, The Resident is a medical programme that pretty openly hates the medical industry.

It’s not that it’s entirely unique in addressing the failings of the American medical system – but, rather than it being the Act 4 obstacle in occasional episodes, the damage wrought by the profit-seeking motive is an inalienable fact of The Resident’s status quo. That’s what sets it apart, and why I’m still watching; if nothing else, I’m curious about where exactly it’s going to go. There’s a sense that the show is grappling with a problem it’ll never solve, albeit for obvious reasons; I can’t imagine any of the characters ever leaving to become universal healthcare lobbyists, or The Resident ever breaking with reality by depicting the sweeping reforms needed to resolve its central obsession.

So, this is an article that had a little bit of an interesting journey to it.

As I outline at the start of this piece, my plan initially was to liken The Resident to House, given the show itself seemed to beg such a comparison. Essentially, I was going to write a sister article to my earlier piece on how The Good Doctor moves on from House – discussing all the ays in which The Resident doesn’t, and how it struggles to do anything interesting with the ‘abrasive medical antihero’ format even as it tried to deconstruct it.

However! The people working on The Resident clearly realised there were some flaws with the pilot, and shifted focus to move the show in a different direction, meaning The Resident became something a little weirder: a medical show that openly hates the American medicine industry. It still wasn’t very good, and had a lot of weird stuff going on (the finale, because I ended up watching it for that long, had a very eek line about how doctors are the same as cops) but it was, as I said, weirdly captivating.

What you might also notice about this piece is that it’s in first person, which isn’t something I typically do with this type of article. (I do do it with reviews, though this isn’t the time to explain my internal review vs article distinction.) Mostly I just wanted to try somethign a little new. I’m not convinced it… not that it didn’t work, but I suppose more that it didn’t really make a difference. Which is either a good thing or a bad thing, because I don’t quite remember what the idfference I wanted it to make was, if indeed there was any.

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