“Courage Under Chaos.”
With a stellar cast and an engaging premise, Code Black is addictive from the very beginning. The new CBS drama, debuting this Wednesday, is a fictional adaptation of Ryan McGarry’s documentary of the same name, which tells the story of a group of doctors working in the emergency room of the real-life LA County Hospital.
The TV series is set in the same hospital, where the amount of patients being admitted sometimes outnumbers the resources needed to care for them. That situation is called Code Black and, predictably, the show has one in its pilot. But if there are story moments that are expected, none of them feel rote. The fast-paced storytelling required to create a world where it only takes seconds to lose a life allows Code Black to make every moment of its pilot count.
Benjamin Hollingsworth, Luis Guzman, Melanie Kannokada, Bonnie Somerville and Marcia Gay Harden in Code Black.
The cast is led by the fantastic Marcia Gay Harden (The Newsroom, Trophy Wife), who is well-deserving of her leading lady status. She plays Leane Rorish, a residency doctor at LA County Hospital who lands four new first-year residents. Leane treats the ER like the wild west and she’s its sheriff, and viewers learn in the first episode that a recent tragedy set her on her current path.
Joining her in the ER are Luis Guzman (Narcos, How To Make It In America) as Jesse Sallander, a senior nurse and Leane’s closest confidant, and Raza Jaffrey (Homeland, Smash) as Neal Hudson, an ER physician who sees how much Leane has changed and sometimes questions her approach. The trio make a solid core of the series as they lead the newcomers through their high-stakes first day in the ER. As one resident notes in the pilot, he saved one life, but almost caused two deaths – and that’s just an average day.
The four first-year residents are Christa Lorenson (Bonnie Somerville), Malaya Pineda (Melanie Chandra), Angus Leighton (Harry M. Ford) and Mario Savetti (Benjamin Hollingsworth). Though all of them have time to make an impression in the pilot, it’s clear that Christa — an older resident who has her own sad personal story — is the one audiences are meant to respond most to.
It’s easy to see how these characters will weave together to make a procedural as consistently interesting and engaging as CBS’s other flagship dramas, CSI and NCIS. Though some of the notes the pilot hits are a bit familiar, the cast’s great performances and the real-life backbone of the series keep it grounded.
Code Black breezes through its pilot, and it barely gives the audience a chance to catch its breath as the show moves from story beat to story beat. Given the series’ concept, it shouldn’t be an issue for Code Black to maintain that level of intensity during the course of its first season. But the show also shouldn’t forego character and story development for the sake of an adrenaline-filled hour, and also could be a bit more subtle when hitting some of those emotional moments.
What Code Black could and should do to set itself apart from other medical dramas of its kind is offer some sort of critique of the medical system. The Code Black documentary delves into some of the many problems the LA County Hospital deals with in needing to turn patients away and dealing with extended ER wait times, and the TV series could easily touch on the same difficulties. The CBS drama proves in its pilot that it’s prepared to deal with the real-life issues doctors and nurses face in the emergency room with honesty, so it should go that extra step to be more than just an addictive medical procedural.
Code Black is the perfect show for CBS’s drama line-up: it’s fast-paced, has great performances and by the end of the pilot you’re hooked. Its biggest problem could be sustaining this fast-paced momentum, but that also could be its greatest strength; when you’re spending most of your episode speeding through intense medical cases, your character and story development better be very deliberate.
Code Black premieres Wednesday, September 30th on CBS.
