The Mob Doctor

I really like this show, but - there is always a but isn't there, whoever is your "medical" expert needs to know what he / she is talking about. Episode 5. Yound girl is dying because she needs a new heart and is lying in bed with oxygen running. All is good and here comes the but. She does not have an oxygen mask on she has a CPAP mask on. CPAP masks look a lot worse than an O2 cannula and I think this is why they chose to use it. CPAP masks are used when someone is sleeping to keep them breathing, not when someone is awake and talking, also when someone is waiting for a new heart he/she is not pretty pink, but a horrible whitish grey color.

Thank you for your time, like I said I do like the show, you just have to get it more real when someone is sick, use the right masks, etc. I am sure if I saw this error a lot of people did.

I love the idea. Lead characters Grace and Constantine are well cast. BUT, it's just too hectic with too much drama and too many attempted subplots that detract from telling the story. The Michael Rapaport character is ridiculous. The petty conflicts with the Olivia character doctor whoever and are ridiculous and only last a few episodes for the artifice of establishing Grace's character before the offending characters simply have the "a-hole" gene written out of their behaviour, that's one way to remove an annoyance - just re-write the character. It wants to shoehorn an episode of the Sopranos plus an episode of House into each episode, but they really don't need these resident doctors to be super geniuses who are dealing with some bizarre medical diagnostic challenge every episode... what they need is to ensure Grace's workload at the hospital is not so overwhelming that she cannot possibly have a moment to be the mob doctor. I didn't tune in to watch House, i guess was hoping for the Sopranos with a twist rather than yet another hospital drama. I like the idea, but it's a bit too much soap opera for my taste.

I don't usually comment on TV series, but for this I had to.

There are a lot of doctor shows out there, but when you think of something that shows actual medical cases and real dilemmas, very few actually come up. ER and Grey's Anatomy type shows focus on the people and ignore the medical issues consistently and the likes of Dr.House focus on the brilliancy of the lead character and eventually come to avoid medical information altogether. Both types care more about the imaginary emotional problems of the main characters than for the actual characters. One could easily replace the doctors with high school hall monitors or street cleaners and not change a bit of the script.

Not so The Mob Doctor, where the lead character has to juggle her connection to gangsters and her usual high profile medical doctor job. She has both strange cases with limited resources outside of hospital and medical highlights inside, where all the equipment and tests are useless without a good doctor inspiration.

OK, the show is not perfect. The mob operations are ridiculously obvious and the way the doctor gets out of work without anyone raising eyebrows is also quite incredible, but overall the show brings a lot of the stuff that others ignore completely. This series is not bad and certainly did not deserve a cancellation after only one season, with no chance to improve.

The only cause I can find is that the female doctor in the show was not ravishingly beautiful and did not really have a romantic life. A professional that did her job well, discreetly and did not want to get into other's people business robbed the masses of their portion of gossip and monkey clan business and so they switched to the likes of Emily Owens. That's a shame, really.

With a lot of medical dramas out there, this one has a different take. Grace is a resident at a Chicago hospital and a respected surgeon. She is a likable character. She does what she thinks would be the right thing to do. It gives you very little of her background though.

Grace helps her brother out with his debt to the Mob. Now, she has to moonlight for them. The pilot did seem a little rushed. An extra half hour could have been nice to gather background information on the characters before throwing us into the Mob plot. The beginning and ending of the episode gave us a little insight, not much. It was a decent pilot and I hope the rest of the season turns out to be good.

Dr. Grace Devlin (Jordana Spiro) is forced into working for the mob to cancel a debt his useless brother Nate (Jesse Lee Soffer) incurred. Only her connection to the mob boss Constantine Alexander (William Forsythe) is actually much more personal than that.

It's impossible to zero in on one thing that was wrong with this show. It was a critical failure, a ratings failure, and filmed only 13 episodes. It was dead on arrival. Jordana Spiro is a nice comedic actress, but the character really had a limited range. Jesse Lee Soffer plays Nate who is probably the most annoying and frustrating character around. Then there is Paul Moretti (Michael Rapaport) who played the bad Mob guy. He's annoying. He disappeared for awhile and then returned. It was bad idea. They should either kill me off, or let him be a constant character. That kind of change really can screw up a serial show. The problems were just never fixed.