How Is Pure Genius From the Same Person Who Brought Us Friday Night Lights and Parenthood?

Whether it was via the personal triumphs of a small but passionate football-loving community on NBC and DirecTV's Friday Night Lights or the chaotic, interconnected lives of the large Braverman family in his adaptation of Parenthood, Katims has not only probably made you cry, but also likely made you a little proud to admit such vulnerability.

The series stars Augustus Prew as James Bell, a Silicon Valley tech titan who uses his wealth and access to brand-new technologies to create Bunker Hill, a state-of-the-art hospital with the goal of curing the formerly incurable at no cost to the patients themselves.

Because of Bell's background, Bunker Hill is a hospital that takes its cues from a startup, which is probably a pretty poor way to run a hospital, though I can't confirm this because I write about television for a living.

[...] in the world of TV, that somehow qualifies him to be the newly appointed chief of staff at Bunker Hill, a position that requires him to adjust his views of medicine so they're in line with the idealistic and futuristic version Bell's hard-working staff practices.

A number of other really, really good-looking actors (Odette Annable, Reshma Shetty, Aaron Jennings, Ward Horton and Brenda Song) round out a cast of top-notch doctors and employees who truly believe that the intersection of advanced technology, non-existent traditional rules and regulations, experimental medicine and fancy tablets that look like something Tony Stark manufactured are going to change the future.

By relying on the predictable emotional manipulation that accompanies life-threatening situations to deliver its drama, the series is forgoing the opportunity to build characters with personalities and in turn pull real emotion from them.