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September 29th, 2009

NBC’s New Show Trauma.. Hit or Miss?

So last night was the premiere of NBC’s new show Trauma which is supposed to fill a void in the medical drama’s that ER left last year when it finally ended after 15 seasons. While yes, it is a medical drama, it needs a lot of work…
for it to be anything like the award winning show that its trying to replace.

Trauma is about a company of paramedics in San Francisco. The premise of the show is obviously the depth of their interactions between each other, much less the actual day to day experiences of paramedics. From being in the field of EMS, I can tell you that it is highly unrealistic and not representative of what actually goes on. This is to a much worse extent than ER ever was unrealistic of an emergency room. It’s like they didn’t even attempt to consult anyone in EMS before filming the show. Its also insulting to people who are actually in EMS that attempted to watch it.

The flight medic, “Rabbit,” is the worst kind of character if I’ve ever seen one. With the shit he pulled in the first five minutes of the show, he would have been pulled off the chopper and fired within minutes. Probably never would have been able to get a job ever again. Yet it continued on and on throughout the show. Anyone who spoke and acted like he did would have no respect from the other paramedics and would be fired before they could ever jeopardize a patient’s life like he did. His stunt in the beginning of the show when he called the wife of the guy undergoing CPR and said that he was going to be fine was way out of line and made me cringe. I felt like he had just violated every rule in the book. His partner, who was performing child CPR on a large adult, made me want to cry. This show was destroying any idea that it could be good that its commercials had presented.

The rest of the characters are not that interesting either. One female survived a horrible crash that “Rabbit” also survived. Their african-american partner has problems with his wife and tries to pick up a chick at an MCI by offering her a flight on a Medevac. That was quite unbelievable being that Medavac helicopters usually do not fly non-priority patients. It also could have potentially taken the medevac away from another priority patient somewhere else. What I also found interesting was that it responded to the electrocution in the beginning of the episode and landed on the roof of the building that they were working on. What happened to an LZ? There was definitely not enough space there. Talk about being a little dangerous. But it was all for the TV show effect, so shouldn’t we forgive some of their gross violations?

The bottom line is that if the show fixes all of the egregious errors, makes the paramedics look and act a little more professionally, and adds some more accurate medical interaction then the show has a chance of being good. So it has potential. However, its effects on the perception of paramedics have stained EMS for years to come.