NBC's New Amsterdam is a very dumb, medicine-flavored fantasy

Vulture

Ryan Eggold's Dr. Max Goodwin's surgeon role on the medical drama has become cliché -- "a Bad Boy Outsider who comes to Shake Things Up, questioning the conventional wisdom and breaking all the rules in order to do the right thing," says Kathryn VanArendonk. She adds that while the show attempts to tackle problems in healthcare, "New Amsterdam couldn’t be any less interested in the complexity, magnitude, details, history, or causes of those problems, nor does it waste time with the real mechanisms for their solutions. No, this show is about big sweeping gestures. Why fire three bad cardiac surgeons when you could fire them all? Why reduce wait times when you can eliminate the whole room? This is not really a medical drama. In the dystopian landscape we currently call medical care, it is a medicine-flavored fantasy." VanArendonk says she gets why "this kind of fantasy is appealing, but I prefer when it doesn’t masquerade as a heart-warming insight. And if we must have a fantasy where one good-hearted white dude shows up and saves us all, it could at least be better written."

ALSO:

• It's hard to take Ryan Eggold's doctor character seriously because he's such a hilarious version of TV’s long beloved “doctor who doesn’t play by the rules” archetype
• New Amsterdam was inspired by a doctor's memoir, but it feels like it was creatively crowdsourced to appeal to everybody
• New Amsterdam is achingly predictable, sickly sweet and emotionally manipulative
• It's heartfelt, well-meaning and dull with tearful bedside scenes and Bon Iver montages
• New Amsterdam producers wanted to make a medical drama rooted in "hopefulness"