Over the course of the early episodes, we realize that no one Adam works with knows he’s gay, not because he is exactly in the closet, but because he shares nothing of his personal life with them, just as he refuses to tell Harry anything but the most cursory, innocuous details of a job that so often feels like a waking nightmare. It’s just a moment - which is all that Whishaw needs to sell the notion that Adam does care about the job but struggles to remember the good parts of it due to the overwhelming challenges of the rest of it. He has so many things to do, but he lets his gaze linger on them as if he needs the image to stay in his head long enough to motivate him through the rest of his shift. This leads to something akin to an action sequence (or, at least, a very good ER set piece) that includes Adam and Andrea having to leap off a paternoster elevator in motion, and Adam and Andrea sharing a gurney so he can keep her baby from coming out the wrong way before they make it to an operating room.Ī few scenes later, Adam stands in the OB-GYN ward, trying to adjust to the usual chaos, and he spots Andrea holding the healthy baby he helped deliver. He finds a woman named Andrea in labor outside the wrong entrance to the building - and, worse, realizes that her delivery is in the midst of going awry. He is overworked and underpaid, introduced sleeping in his car in the hospital parking lot because he was too tired to make it home to his boyfriend Harry (Rory Fleck Byrne).
Adam Kay (who has spent the last decade as a British TV writer, including penning all the episodes of this series), This Is Going to Hurt follows the fictionalized Adam through a few very rough months in 2006.
But the primary antihero of the series turns out to be the UK’s National Health Service, which on the one hand provides free medical care to all who need it, and on the other does so via a relentless, precarious infrastructure that can turn providers like Adam into exhausted shells of humanity who are only barely capable of caring for themselves, never mind others.īased on a memoir of the same name by the real Dr. Gregory House, the general sentiment surely was, many times over.)Īdam is, indeed, guilty of a hazardous self-regard - and is played by Ben Whishaw, who is always so convincing as this type of smug jerk that it’s a wonder he’s also the voice of Paddington.
(If that exact sentence was never said to Dr. Ordinarily, this is the kind of sentiment hurled at the protagonist of a modern antihero drama, or at least the main character of a slightly complex network procedural. Adam Kay, the British obstetrician at the center of the UK limited series This Is Going to Hurt. “You think that you are the cleverest person in the room, and that makes you dangerous,” a colleague tells Dr.