Hippocrates, Doc, This Is Going To Hurt : the hospital never ceases to inspire series that all alert to the need to take better care of caregivers. As Europe slowly turns the page on the coronavirus, the small screen shows through fiction the difficult daily life of emergency doctors, surgeons and nurses.
Season 2 ofHippocrates, broadcast in the spring of last year on Canal+, had presented a service that was ill-prepared for an influx of patients requiring emergency treatment after the rupture of a water pipe. The Covid only appeared there as an epilogue. Its creator, Thomas Lilti, told AFP that he is preparing a third season, which should be released “end of 2023” and which “the subject will not be the pandemic“.
Also on Canal+ and visible from March 31, This Is Going To Hurt (it might hurt), produced by the BBC, follows the setbacks of Adam, a gynecologist-obstetrician, who begins a career in the hospital hierarchy.
Season 2 of Doctoran Italian series from RAI, soon to be seen on TF1, recounts the misadventures of an emergency doctor’s team in a hospital in Milan, just before and after the first wave of the pandemic, but not during.
At the origin of the creation of these three fictions is each time a doctor who is inspired by his own experience, which undoubtedly explains their realism. In this, they are reminiscent of the American series of the 1990s Emergencieswhose screenplay was based on the own story of Michael Crichton, an intern in medicine before embarking on writing.
Such is the career of Thomas Lilti, a general practitioner before becoming a creator, director and screenwriter. He also returned to the hospital to lend a hand when the filming of season 2 ofHippocrates was interrupted during the first containment of spring 2020.
This Is Going to Hurt is based on the eponymous memoir of Adam Kay, who worked as a gynecologist-obstetrician in a public hospital before converting to writing with a multi-award-winning bestseller, translated into 37 languages.
As for Doctor, this fiction is inspired by the true story of Pierdante Piccioni, an emergency doctor who lost his memory after a car accident. He started working again with amplified qualities, such as empathy.
For Thomas Lilti, it was about Hippocrates to show the commitment of caregivers. “They are ready for any sacrifice. What angers me is the feeling that they are not protected enough“, he explained during a debate at Series Mania, the biggest series festival in Europe, which lasts until Friday in Lille.
This distress of the caregiver is particularly visible in the tragicomedy This Is Going To Hurt where we see Adam, played by Ben Whishaw (Skyfall, the new Q in the James Bond saga), on the verge of exhaustion, crying alone in the locker room.
According to the boss of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, Martin Hirsch, who was debating with Thomas Lilti: these series “distort reality a little by caricaturing it“.”Services are not chronically so dysfunctional all the time“, he believes. “On the other hand, I think that nothing is wrong: all the malfunctions that we see have existed at one time or another and are problematic“, he admits.
Thomas Lilti also criticized the way of selecting medical students in France: “We are going to have the most academic, the most studious students who pass the competitions. But they won’t necessarily be the best doctors“.