24 Hours in A&E

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.

Documentary style production based on real life emergency scenarios. I love the realism, the pace, the way the narrator draws you into the story line. The way they produce and cut the stories to discuss with impacted family, doctors, nurses and loved ones is just perfect. Highly recommended to anyone who has an actual interest in medical prcedures and operations and not over dramatised american drivvel. Get connected with the patient, the staff and have a detailed view of real life paramedics.

This show is odd. It's either a hit or a miss-I'm not exaggerating. Some moments and episodes can be slow, boring, poorly edited, and overly dramatic. Others, however, are nothing short of masterpieces.

When this show gets it right, it tells stories of life, death, happiness, and sadness through what are essentially CCTV cameras. The shots are masterful, the editing is skillful and deeply emotional, and the overall execution can be among the very best in non-fiction TV.

However, some episodes can be painfully mediocre, almost as if produced by a different team. That's why I can't give the show a perfect 10/10.

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.

I've never given a 10 for anything I've watched. They could do a live broadcast of the rapture and I'd probably still not give it a 10. This show however I might give a 10 if it wasn't so impossible to watch in the US. Here, the idiots who own this production, make it as difficult to impossible as can be to watch it. Nine seasons (out of 26) you can watch on prime, and 6 more on tubi but that's it as far as I can tell. The first nine seasons were pretty easy to watch because you could start, stop and come back to where you left off but with tubi, if you don't watch continuously you'll lose your spot (otherwise know as 'continue watching'). Yep, it's gone, there's no history and so if you don't write down or remember where you left off, well you just have to start over. And there's ten seasons you can't watch at all after that. I would pay to watch these if it wasn't a big needle in the eye, but no, but far as I can tell, they don't care to make this watchable in the states. I guess it's an NHS thing or something. Ok, I'll go back to watch reruns of breaking bad instead.

Ok, so except for being unwatchable, the episodes that are, are pretty interesting. Of course it's tv, and specifically reality tv and so there's a lot of editing, and healthcare in the UK isn't the industry it is in the US. And, I've never met people like profiled on the show. If that's real life in england, I want to visit because everything about the show is moving, as much as any art you've ever seen in the way it captures the best. I don't believe it but I'd like to find out for myself.