The promotional material for ITV’s new medical drama, Monroe, wants to make one thing very, very clear: It is not House. It might sound a bit like House, but it’s definitely, really, absolutely, not House.
Well, no, it isn’t. It takes itself FAR too seriously for that sort of thing. James Nesbitt (Jekyll, Cold Feet) is the titular neurosurgeon, Gabriel Monroe. He talks very quickly and fires off pithy retorts with unfailing regularity, usually while navigating dizzying edits and striding meaningfully down atmospheric hospital hallways.
“I’m just indifferent to your twinkly self-regard,” states an irate cardiac surgeon at one point and, sadly, so am I. Which is rather a shame because on the most part I usually find Nesbitt quite watchable. Monroe however is just so jammed full of cliché there’s not a lot of space left for anything else.
Gabriel Monroe subscribes to the “You can’t be good at your job and have a successful personal life” variety of protagonist. He has a family he doesn’t know how to deal with, an antagonistic relationship with fellow surgeon Jenny Bremner, played by Sarah Parish (Blackpool, Mistresses) as well as a pair of overwhelmed, useless and narcissistic trainees he likes to insult and bamboozle with unanswerable questions. This first episode rather hammers home a theme of soul-deep-pain-beneath-my-facade, but then I’d be hard pressed to name a TV detective, pathologist or doctor who doesn’t have either inner pain or a substance-abuse problem as a central character trait these days. Some are just a little more subtle about it.
Don’t get me wrong, the show is diverting enough to plug a hole in the otherwise uninspiring schedules right now, and it’s stylishly directed by Paul McGuigan (Sherlock) which makes it very nice to look at. On the down side, McGuigan is perhaps a little too in love with using still photography montages this time around. It’s a technique that fit incredibly well in Sherlock‘s deductive process, but it seems a touch superfluous when repeatedly jagging around a hospital waiting room at high speed.
Really the biggest problem remains the formulaic content. It’s not great to start out with a plot so overtly by the numbers you can predict where it’s going from the outset. It’s a shame because the program’s generally paced well otherwise, and it certainly doesn’t hang around wallowing in emotional sentimentality. Over all, it’s easy to watch with half an eye whilst doing something else entirely and still feel like you didn’t really miss much.
Sadly, Monroe didn’t keep my attention as well as it might have. Tonally it occupies an idle sort of halfway between the hyper-dramatic medical soap Holby City while being simultaneously saddled with a taste of Silent Witness self-importance. It’s a slightly unfortunate combination, but one that I hope it manages to settle as the series progresses. It has potential, but for a first episode I was left underwhelmed.
ITV are capable of producing some genuinely interesting drama from time to time, 2008′s Lost in Austen was a particularly memorable delight, and their recent Downton Abbey has been garnering positive reviews pretty much across the board. Unfortunately, Monroe captures neither whimsy nor classicism and ends up landing squarely in the land of mid-range weekly procedural.
Oh, and the ITV publicity department is right. It’s definitely not like House.
Not once did anybody mention Lupus.
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Lady T
Lady T is a great lover of British TV, which is helpful as that's mostly what she gets to watch. She strongly believes that tea can't be made using a microwave, that children's programming really was better when she was a kid, and that there's nothing in the world that can't be solved with a liberal application of common sense. She very much enjoys reading but like most of the rest of the world would some day like to write a book herself. If she ever succeeds in doing so there's a pretty good chance she'll never shut up about it. She can be contacted at lady_t_220 @ yahoo.co.uk.
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