The cliches of a certain sort of medical drama are all there in Jed Mecurio's 'Bodies': the handsome, concerned junior doctor hero, the ghastly consultants and the worse management, the constant air of crisis, and alternating acts of brilliance and incompetence. In fact, Mercurio himself pretty much wrote the template with his own predecessor series, 'Cardiac Arrest', but there's an intensity in 'Bodies' that was lacking in the earlier work. As anyone who's seen his more recent series, 'Line of Duty' and 'The Bodyguard', could attest to, Mercurio is a master of tricksy plotting: there's some of that here, and I sincerely hope the script exaggerates (rather than playing down) Mercurio's own experiences as a doctor, but mainly it proceeds as a sequence of short stories, the everyday routine of a doctor's life. Much as I love 'Line of Duty', there's a sense in which it feels decreasingly grounded in reality; no-one could say the same of this series.
Review of Bodies
