Code red! Code red! We have an emergency in the OR!
The patient requires a lethal dose of cancelation.
That’s the diagnosis for Fox’s new and very ridiculous drama, “The Mob Doctor,” a show so dopey that the pitch meeting must have required many prescription drugs.
Here we have the beautiful Dr. Grace Devlin (Get it? She’s good and evil, full of grace and under contract to the devil at the same time) played by Jordana Spiro, a resident at a busy Chicago hospital. No! You’re kidding!
But see, resident doc Grace is indebted to, yes, the Mafia! In return for her brother’s gambling debts, she must be on call 24/7 to the mob!
For reasons I can’t begin to explain, no one in TV has ever gotten beyond the Italian mob — and that well is drier than the Mohave by now. In TV land, there are no Russian, Chinese, Colombian or Chinese mafias. They are still obsessed with a mob that is now mostly impotent fat guys in bad track suits trying to find work as actors. Yawn.
Anyway, in one day, Dr. Grace, who works in a hospital where almost everyone is nasty all the time for no reason other than bad writing, manages to save a child’s life, lose a child’s life, get her boyfriend to lie on hospital records about a surgery so a teenager’s father won’t know she was pregnant, run to a warehouse to remove a screwdriver stuck in a gangster’s head, run from a murderous mobster who has captured her mother (Wendy Makkena) and race to another mobster’s house to witness a murder. Oh, and yes, she has sex in a closet.
Now I know why residents are the most overworked people on the planet.
This nonsense also stars on the good-guy side: Zeljko Ivanek as the kindly surgeon, Zach Gilford as the kindly doctor boyfriend, and Nadia Alexander as Grace’s wise and kindly nurse/best friend.
They tried for the tried and true, hoping they’d get “The Sopranos” meets “Grey’s Anatomy” while filling the hole “House” left in the schedule. And, like a camel, they ended up with an animal made by committee.