Doctor Odyssey

Don't expect a serious medical drama here or a laugh out loud comedy.

It's light-hearted. A balancing act with the cruise theme with related-medical situation(s) of the week and the dynamics of the different characters.

The characters are all fairly likeable and with enough diversity for a 30+ audience demographics.

As another reviewer wrote Joshua Jackson in the lead does his best "Clooney" and is charming. With Jackson and Johnson, they got the Baby Boomer, and Gen X covered. The new faces Soo, and Teale covers Millennials and Gen Z.

The ultimate question is given the demographic coverage, can the characters make meaning connections to the audience based on the story and their performance to keep the show going.

I personally enjoy it as a nice distraction from reality shows, and serialized drama that takes themselves too seriously.

So.... I'm in the UK and this show wasn't heavily marketed. I was of the belief this was a serious drama, but I watched the first couple of episodes, stuck to the screen as I couldn't believe how absolutely awful this show was.

The scripts, storyline and characters are all ludicrous and I couldn't believe the show had made it to screen.

But... by episode 3 the penny dropped. This is a Ryan Murphy wet dream. It's supposed to be this bad. It's a bit of fantasy full of beautiful people doing silly things. Once I understood that, I actually started to enjoy it.

It really isn't much more ridiculous than the Love Boat was back in the 70s and 80s. If you're able to suspend belief for an hour, you can relish in a bit of fun TV.

The show clearly has a decent budget. It looks rich on screen and the replica cruise ship they've built is fairly convincing.

I'll keep on watching.

Joshua Jackson does george clooney in the E/R on a boat. That seems to be the concept of this series. Joshua Jackson got the greyish hair, the george clooney voice and charm, heck he is a spitting image of george clooney, its quite amazing actually.

The other lead actors are miami vices Don Johnson and fresh face actors Phillipa Soo and Sean Teale. Acting is overall good, but the story has so far not made any room for anything challenging. Its been very simple, quick and superficial.

The story is as mentioned quite uncomplicated. Its slightly sitcom-ish and surrounds the emergency medical staff on a cruise ship.

The good of this series is its freshness and elegance. Its easy to digest.

The bad is that its too simple, too lighthearted. The characters are very much caricatyrs and not acting like real people. I for one prefer realness above actingness. This production also comes with 'the message'. Its everything from pro covid propaganda to, trans and other stuff.

Oh yeah, since the story takes place on a boat mostly at sea, the storyline is somewhat limited and most of the photage never give away that its played on a boat and it gets kinda stuffed and closed in.

6/10.

The Bacchanalia were Roman festivals of Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of wine, freedom, intoxication and ecstasy. With this series, that's what to expect.

I like the setting and the cast. The guest stars are awesome. The production is excellent. The handful of episodes I've seen so far... they've been interesting enough. A few good stories. The views are pretty (although the outside of the ship is pretty "meh" in the long shots).

But honestly - there's just too much debauchery and too many intimately contracted diseases being dealt with (eeew, right?). The stories could be played out without so many icky symptoms among the guests. I'll keep watching but I hope this series can find a way to tell fun stories without the ick factor.

This is actually terrible.

3 stars for the all-in game ness of the players, despite a script that should be pulped for recycled toilet paper.

Near the beginning of episode one, the new doctor onboard tours the Odyssey, a lavish 5 star cruise liner. We tour right along with him. It's a sumptuous, fantasy of a ship. At one point, the doctor is led down a hall of burnished walnut, walking in a kind of formation and I thought "Bones!!!?!'" . And 'oh, wouldn't it be wonderful if this show took a turn toward Star Trek or even The Orville?'.

Not only did Doctor Odyssey choose the path more commonly taken, the single first script was packed with every cliche, trope and bit of bad dialog it could scrape from the bottom of Ryan Murphy's shoe.

Ugh.

I watched the entire first episode and I promise you, it just gets worse and worse.

I feel badly for the talent caught up in this mess.