![]() The melancholy of this series feels not just like a depiction of doctors but truly of them, as if tunneling into their worldview. Asked if she can recall the president’s name to test her cognition, all she can say is that “some people like him, some people don’t.” As if to ensure his wife’s essence was not lost to the surgeon’s knife, her partner blurts, “But we like him!” “Lenox Hill” is also about the Trump presidency in that it’s capaciously about all the stuff of life, including work, family and love too politics sneaks in through the margins, from Little-Richardson, who is black, musing about America’s long history of family separation to a colleague before heading back to work, to the ongoing story of a Tennessee couple visiting New York so a young woman can have a tumor removed from her neck and skull. A rambling and bellicose call from his wife plays out without much comment in the first episode. When Boockvar is on-screen, the show is most itself, looking at a charismatic and complicated person in a frank, probing, unblinking way, but not creating incident that is not there. Boockvar in particular is a fascinating character, both charming and egotistical in the manner of someone who is so good at his job that he is rarely told no. Similarly, the stories of neurosurgeons David Langer and John Boockvar are told not through one mega arc but through carefully selected moments. This also provides among the most vivid examples of why the show’s extensive access and long time frame make for great drama of the pointillist variety: We see, in small moments, Little-Richardson argue to keep the baby’s sex a secret and then, eventually, get overruled by her husband more satisfyingly, we also see her finally lose her composure while giving birth, snapping at her husband to stop taking a selfie and actually focus. Little-Richardson, for instance, is a notably good patient, acknowledging and then moving past challenging news throughout her pregnancy and a partner who is perhaps less than optimally supportive. Both the latter two, ER doc Mirtha Macri and OB-GYN Amanda Little-Richardson, are pregnant, which provides a natural subplot for both. The show, directed by Ruthie Shatz and Adi Barash, follows four physicians - two neurosurgeons, an emergency doctor and an obstetrician - through months of work. It depicts a seemingly well-funded, competently staffed hospital in which the best of times are still grindingly tough, and introduces four characters whose un-reality-TV-ish aversion to high dudgeon makes their journeys all the more fascinating. Released into a world in which our understanding of the pressures hospitals face has been newly reinforced, “Lenox Hill” was shot before the COVID-19 pandemic. What’s so striking about “ Lenox Hill,” Netflix’s new documentary series and among the best shows released so far this year, is the way it shows the excitement and the stress of the utterly quotidian. The genre has long since entered its baroque period, larding on helicopter crashes (“ER”), medical mysteries (“House”) and bombs inside patients (the still-running “Grey’s Anatomy”) to gin up increasingly unsatisfying excitement and over-prove the case that working in a hospital is hard. That doctors have difficult jobs is among the points TV has made most forcefully throughout the medium’s existence.
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