This week:
- It’s a holiday weekend! We’re busy, like, sleeping for once. But we wouldn’t you abandon: Here’s our biggest recommendation for what to watch while home for the holidays.
The Ship of Dreams, and of Nightmares
This week, I took a break from really holding space for the lyrics of “Defying Gravity” and feeling power in that to finally catch up on an absolute marvel of broadcast television: the new show Doctor Odyssey.
This series has been airing all fall, meaning I was blessed with the opportunity of bingeing eight episodes in a row during my recent weekend of “laying down on the couch and not moving until my alarm goes off to go to work Monday morning.”
This show is a triumph of nonsense. A masterpiece of ridiculousness. Worthy of the Peabody in the special category of Brilliant Outrageousness.
It turns out to be exactly what I needed right now.
The series is co-created by Ryan Murphy, and is a spiritual sister to fellow “what lunacy is about to unfold this week, bafflingly acted out by some of our greatest thespians” series, 9-1-1. It’s, at its core, a procedural drama about a doctor and his two nurses on a cruise ship, with each episode having a “case of the week” format. If you’re a Ryan Murphy fan, it will remind you of Nip/Tuck, and yet surprise you by somehow being wilder than even that show.
Joshua Jackson, forever heartthrob, plays Dr. Max Bankman, a doctor with an impressive résumé that includes stints at the best hospitals in the country, pioneering research, trips with Doctors Without Borders, and citations from the U.N. But he got COVID, and now wants to have more fun in life, so he applied to work on a cruise ship. (I’m not kidding. “I had COVID, so…” is his backstory.)
Over the course of this first batch of episodes, he bristles with the ship’s nurses, Avery (Phillipa Soo) and Tristan (Sean Teale). Then they become friends and confidantes. Then they all bang each other in a threesome that changes the course of all of their lives. I don’t understand why all television programs don’t take this narrative route.
In the midst of navigating the choppy waters of this dynamic—get it, waters…because it’s a cruise—they have to deal with the craziness that happens during each cruise’s themed weeks.
During Singles Week, a walking ab of a passenger gives the clap to nearly the entire cruise ship. In Plastic Surgery Week, someone’s newly tweaked nose literally falls off. In Gay Week, John Stamos plays the recovering alcoholic gay brother of the ship’s captain (Don Johnson), and shocks everyone with the news that he and his partner (Cheyenne Jackson) are now in a throuple (Johnny Sibilly as the third). After the doctor and nurses figure out that what had presented as a drinking relapse was due to new medication, everyone is healed and united through the power of a drag queen performance.
In one of the most recent episodes I watched, Amy Sedaris played a Gwyneth Paltrow/GOOP-style wellness celebrity who accidentally poisons all her customers, and Kate Berlant and Margaret Cho guest starred as smoothie entrepreneurs/acupuncturists who loathe each other, Death Becomes Her-style.
And while all of this is happening, Joshua Jackson performs surgery while flying through the air as the boat careens side to side in a hurricane. His patient is his nurse who he and his colleague later have a threesome with. MASTERPIECE.
There’s something really gratifying about a show like Doctor Odyssey, which is sexy and silly, but also earnest in its execution of bonkers medical storylines. I’m not kidding when I say that I reliably cry during every episode. The genius of the show is that it gets performers like Margo Martindale and Loretta Devine to be the guest stars acting out the weekly medical cases. There’s a general rule in showbusiness: When Loretta Devine cries, we all cry.
I don’t know what it is, but I’ve found myself gravitating towards a very specific brand of television: new broadcast procedurals. My self-care right now is comedy series or reality TV, it’s marathon-watching episodes of Kathy Bates’ Matlock, Elsbeth, Found, and Doctor Odyssey. Part of it is that there’s a comfort watch element. But I also think that these procedurals are so much better produced and acted than we’re used to. They’re just good shows.
After about a decade of having to be satisfied with 47 spin offs of Chicago Fire, Law & Order, NCIS, and Grey’s Anatomy, it’s nice to have procedurals with their own identity and creative voice. I can’t wait to keep setting sail with Doctor Odyssey.
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What to watch this week:
The Agency: This cast is stacked: Michael Fassbender, Richard Gere, Jeffrey Wright, Jode Turner-Smith, and produced by George Clooney. (Now on Paramount+ with Showtime.)
Beatles ’64: Have you heard of these guys? (Now on Disney+)
The Seed of the Sacred Fig: One of the best international films of the year. (Now in theaters)
What to skip this week:
Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story: This is either your most anticipated pop culture event of the year, or the bane of your existence. (Sat. on Hallmark)
