24 Hours in A&E

I was having insomnia and looking for a limited episode documentary. Instead I fell head over heels for 24 Hours in A&E. This is just such a wonderful series. Much of it focuses on the staff at the hospitals and how they feel about their jobs and patients. Some stories are sad, some are happy but the loving care the doctors and nurses provide is the story. Highly recommend but you'll bespeaking with a British accent after a few seasons!

I just found this series and started binge watching it. I found seasons 1-6 particularly good. The doctors, introducing themselves to the patients by first name -- definitely not a practice in the U. S. The bedside manner of all the staff was just a treat to watch, so caring & friendly. I was also quite interested in how they mixed in the loved ones talking about their the injured person and how important family was to them. Really very well done. (though why they don't get the patients more pain killers when they perform a procedure is a mystery to me.) When they moved to another hospital in seasons 7+ the staff was quite different. Not as friendly, caring, not really bantering with the patient and the staff. And I do miss the staff at King's, who you get to know well.

Every episode filmed at Kings had me riveted and i binged on each season really craving more. Not sure what happened when they switched hospitals but the difference was impossible to overlook. Nothing about the other episodes even got much of my attention and they began to drag on so badly I knew I was soon going to abandon the rest of the series. The Drs were not as interesting, cases were mainly injuries, etc that most folks could easily figure out and maybe even fix things in a general doctor's office. No need to go sit for hours at a busy AE facility.

After all my complaints I hope folks give the series a try . No need to whine about blood, etc. After all you know that is coming. Gave it a ten several shows in then had to digress because the other facilities really dropped the ball. Will rewatch several seasons as I tended to miss things first round.

I enjoyed binging on this show over this past week. They really showed a good mix of health emergencies. The worker videos was a different aspect and it was great to hear things from their viewpoint. The family interviews/comments was also something other shows have not bothered to add to their documentaries. I liked looking at things from ALL the additional viewpoints.

I had binged through the first few seasons (on Amazon Prime) of the episodes made at King's and rated it an emphatic ten. The production was pitch-perfect: Continuity, the cases they picked, the engaging focus on nurses, doctors and staff. Waiting room conversations, patients and relatives. Wuth perfect timing, it was just right, amazing camerawork (with one excellent must-see behind the scenes episode).

A few days ago I caught an episode of what appeared to be a different show, 24 hours in Emergency, on free to air. At a different hospital, King George. And slowly realized with great disappointment that most of the things that I loved had dropped away. Summarized in one term: production values. Gone was the focus on the doctors, nurses and emergency teams at work, replaced with long and interminable patient and relative interviews, ruined by bad editing.

Editing which was suddenly like a bad music video, a mashup of disconnected shots every few minutes. Always a sign of desperation at knowing the quality is sliding. And an across-the-board mess-up of just about every aspect if the early eps. But so uniform that it gets hard to find a clear reason. It just went bad.

I hate that this has happened to a brilliant series, and I would still exhort people to watch it.

And stop when they switch hospitals - or a bit before, because I think the slide started before the switch. Maybe budget, maybe production team changes.

A damned shame.