Review of TV show "The Good Doctor"

Just when you thought there could not be another bad medical show, ABC TV presents “The Good Doctor.” It’s about an autistic young man going to California to become a surgical resident.

Just after he lands at the airport in San Jose, an overhead sign breaks and causes the unluckiest 8-year-old boy on earth to suffer three life-threatening injuries. The Good Doctor gives a bystander, who sort of sounds like a doctor but is not too confident, an anatomy lesson about where to hold pressure on a bleeding internal jugular vein. He then notices bulging of the left arm veins and diagnoses a tension pneumothorax.

He looks for a knife “with a seven-inch blade” at a TSA checkpoint, grabs a lesser knife, makes a chest tube and underwater seal from various supplies he finds in the airport, dumps half a bottle of whiskey on the kid’s chest, and inserts the makeshift tube. All of this happens on the floor of the airport concourse.

Of course the kid wakes up and starts breathing normally.

Meanwhile the board of directors of the hospital is debating the hiring of an autistic surgical resident. In this hospital, its president, who met The Good Doctor when he was 14, hires the residents, and the chief of surgery has no input. [Matching? What matching?]

A subplot begins with a male and female doctor being walked in on after having sex in the top bunk of an unlocked call room in the middle of the day. [Top bunk. I’m not making this up.]

In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, The Good Doctor notices the amplitude of the cardiac monitor waveform is slightly less than it had been and diagnoses a pericardial effusion.

When they get to the hospital, he tries to tell a resident that the child needs an echocardiogram, but she doesn’t listen. For some reason, he doesn’t identify himself and is removed by a security guard who thwarts his many attempts to get back into the hospital.

In the OR, the attending cardiac surgeon admires the makeshift chest tube and drainage bottle.

Then he notices a decrease in the waveform amplitude on the monitor. He wants to know why The Good Doctor suggested an echo, so he and the resident leave the patient to go find him outside the hospital. On his way out, the surgeon orders an echocardiogram and tells the rest of the people in OR to “keep him stable.” [Good plan.]

Within minutes the attending is notified by phone that the echo is normal.

The Good Doctor says it is impossible for the echo to be normal. They all go to the OR and look at the study which The Good Doctor reads as subtle pressure on the right atrium. The resident now decides The Good Doctor is right. She says a shard of glass probably migrated down the internal jugular vein and [somehow?] caused a pericardial effusion [affecting only a portion of the heart] and convinces the attending to operate. The Good Doctor watches the surgery from the door of the operating room in his street clothes. You guessed it; they find a small piece of glass. [Not sure exactly where it was and how it caused the effusion.]

Meanwhile after much discussion about the pros and cons of hiring an autistic resident, the board of directors of the hospital votes “no” on The Good Doctor. But it turns out videos of him placing a chest tube on the airport floor have gone viral and several members of the board pull out their electronic devices and view it.

I haven’t even discussed the flashbacks to The Good Doctor’s childhood revealing what made him want to be a surgeon, but I will tell you a bunny was involved and he once got a toy scalpel as a gift.

He finally gets the job. As he walks into the OR for his first case after scrubbing, a nurse ties his mask on for him.

That's not how this works.That's not how any of this works.

One positive. Freddie Highmore who plays The Good Doctor is excellent.

Almost nothing that occurred during this episode was remotely plausible. Of the many such medical shows I have reviewed, this is one of the least realistic. And that is saying something.