The Mob Doctor

I am enjoying this show and it fills in the Fox Broadcasting hole that was left by the departure of House. The dilemmas Grace must face to fulfill her debt to the mob, stay under hospital radar when she needs to use their equipment and also follow her conscience to her oath as a doctor put her in some tough situations. Does she kill a mobster on orders from the people she owes? How does she fix up the guy that she knows just caused a family great pain and anguish and still live with herself? Grace faces all this and more. The show is gaining an audience in the 3 or so weeks it has aired. The cast is good and the show is well done. The premise is interesting and plot twists are not always expected.

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4.0 stars !

That's what this show was rated at IMDb a couple of days ago. Now it's 5.4 stars, and climbing. This also happened to "The L.A. Complex" (which is one of my favorite shows) and others. Seems like some group or person has hacked into the rating system here.

I don't usually like mob shows or movies, but the rating was so ridiculously low that I had to see for myself. And I was pleasantly surprised. I liked Jordana Spiro from "My Boys", and she's still gorgeous and did a good job here (s01e01) too.

As a fan of medical dramas (Grey's, Private Practice, Royal Pains, Saving Hope), I think this compares well. And I plan to watch at least a couple more episodes in the hopes that it continues to do as well or better that the first episode.

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.

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.

Time will tell, but it looks like a good show to me. I like medical drama/mysteries/suspense/adventure. This has it all with the mob twist that makes it interesting and even more intriguing and suspenseful to watch. Good Dr. "Grace" is a thoracic surgeon trying to do her best juggling the demands of her job and her obligations to mob in Chicago. There's no rule book-Grace must face a moral dilemma in each case as she goes along, always trying to balance her conscience with what is the right and wrong thing to do. The stress she feels lets the audience feel her pain and frustration which draws people in to this new TV show that seems headed for success.

9:00 PM Mondays on FOX