Everyone needs to slow down on New Amsterdam: Series premiere recap

New Amsterdam’s series premiere changes the system, but does it change the medical genre? Here’s what happened in New Amsterdam season 1, episode 1.

The premiere of NBC‘s New Amsterdam has its titular hospital establish a new approach to the medical profession—but how much does it add something new to the crowded medical drama field?

Dr. Max Goodwin (Ryan Eggold, continuing on NBC after runs on The Blacklist and its short-lived spinoff The Blacklist: Redemption) is introduced as a different kind of doctor. Shots of patients on their way to New Amsterdam are intercut with Goodwin casually arriving at work, where he flies totally under the radar until someone comes looking for the new medical director.

There’s a quick spiel about how the place has had five medical directors in five years, and also has facilities for all kinds of purposes. It also has the usual eclectic staff—meet ED doctor Lauren Bloom (Salem star Janet Montgomery), who resurrects a woman declared dead, and Dr. Floyd Reynolds (Jocko Sims), who’s sleeping with Dr. Bloom.

There’s also the quirky psychiatrist Dr. Iggy Frome (Reaper‘s Tyler Labine), and Dr. Helen Sharp (that’s Freema Agyeman from Sense8 and Doctor Who), whose focus is on being the public face of the building.

“If she comes back, let’s keep her,” Goodwin quips to the bureaucrat who delivered the backstory before leading an all-hands meeting by revealing that both he and his sister were born here, and his sister died in this hospital, too. Oh, and he needs Bloom to perform a biopsy, because he may also be a patient.

There’s a lot going on in the first 12 minutes, and that’s not counting the moment where Goodwin fires the entire cardiac surgery department before several other people walk out. If Connor Rhodes from Chicago Med could see this, he’d be shaking his head.

Once New Amsterdam establishes that things will be different now, it presents a wide variety of cases of the week: the young man from Liberia who may have Ebola; the woman who wasn’t truly dead; the 16-year-old who’s better off committed to the psych ward than being sent back to the foster system.

Goodwin flits from storyline to storyline, whether it’s explaining proper Ebola procedures to one team of doctors, keeping the Russian ambassador from signing himself out early by mentioning “rectal bleeding,” or visiting Frome’s psych patient after she has a meltdown. He dispenses words of wisdom everywhere he goes, with the show’s underlying jazz score becoming overbearing.

And then there’s this:

"NYPD Detective: Your patient is now a terror suspect."

The young man from Liberia explains how he was told to come to America and find a youth hostel in Times Square, but instead went to New Amsterdam—the only hospital he’d ever heard of. The good doctor encourages the cops to look into his story, rather than write him off as another part of a terror plot.

He then finds out that the not-dead woman was repeatedly misdiagnosed and actually has a brain tumor, then pulls a fast one on Helen, ordering her to “come back in 48 hours or not come back at all,” clearly setting up a love-hate dynamic between the two of them. Multiple references are made to Goodwin’s speed, and New Amsterdam moves just as fast.

When informing the not-dead woman about her tumor, Goodwin learns she and her husband are in the United States illegally, and rushes back to the ambassadorial wing—so he can ask a favor of the Mexican ambassador. He then coaches Lauren through dealing with the crashing Ebola patient but realizes her glove has been punctured; she’s been exposed.

And at that exact worst moment, Goodwin’s wife Georgia (Lisa O’Hare) calls to tell him, “There’s something wrong with the baby.”

She’s rushed to New Amsterdam where the baby’s heartbeat is located after a few tense beats, before a cover of Coldplay’s “Fix You” plays out the remainder of the premiere. The teenage psych patient finds a new home with the estranged daughter of her first foster parent; the Mexican couple arrive back in Chiapas and reunite with the rest of their family; the Ebola patient finds out he actually has another virus that’s treatable so he and Lauren will both be fine.

As for Dr. Max Goodwin, he looks at an ultrasound of his unborn child—in the hospital room where his sister passed away. Helen returns, having decided to follow orders after all, and says he’s the reason she came back. But he needs to give it a rest, because he has cancer. And that’s why he has been pushing so hard all this time: he wants to make a difference while he still can.

Medical dramas are one of the most popular genres on TV, and with good reason. There’s drama already inherent, because the stakes are literally life and death. They show us smart people doing smart things that are for the greater good—saving a patient, delivering a baby, a transplant that offers a new lease on life.

But in such a crowded landscape, every medical series has to have something that shows us how different it is from all of its competition. Each one has a gimmick or a hook. For New Amsterdam, it’s this rogue medical director who’s going to change the way business is done. The problem is that hook is also a common theme in most medical shows.

Ninety-percent of medical dramas take place in a hospital that’s underfunded, overworked or some combination of the two; after all, if they were in a perfect hospital there’d be no tension. So there are regularly scenes on every show where a doctor fights for proper patient care, or decides to do something they shouldn’t because it’s for the overall good. And certainly there are medical dramas with romantic subplots (see again: Chicago Med, see also: Grey’s Anatomy).

The twist of Goodwin being both doctor and patient is interesting, but also not a total changer of the game. While that’s also been done before, it does create some possibilities for when that will inevitably come out to the hospital and/or the public, and how people will inevitably use that to challenge Goodwin’s authority. It sets up a dramatic end of season arc, and since cancer can go into remission, it’s not a choice that puts any kind of severe limitation on the show.

You can’t blame New Amsterdam for trying. Ryan Eggold has to be a favorite of someone at NBC, between leading the Blacklist spinoff, being brought back to the original show, and now being cast here—and this pilot makes very clear why. He has boatloads of charisma, and the way he plays Goodwin is about as perfect as it gets.

The compassion rolls off him in waves, and it doesn’t feel forced. When the cancer reveal happens, the audience doesn’t think, “Oh, he cares so much because he has cancer” — it’s, “Oh, this doctor who cares so much just happens to have cancer.” Eggold can play the humorous beats well, and while he doesn’t get a chance to flex much serious muscle because Goodwin plays everything off so casually, there’s a glint in his eye that makes you believe he’ll be good at that, too.

Maybe once New Amsterdam gets past all the necessarily clutter of a pilot (the backstory, the character setups, the throwing in one or two surprises that audiences have come to expect in all new shows by now), it will become a stronger series. It certainly has the cast to be an excellent show, but it’s still searching for what makes it stand out.

What it presents is nothing that isn’t familiar, and it moves so quickly that it doesn’t allow any of its stories to truly sink in. It needs to take Helen’s advice and slow down. If it wants to redefine the medical system, the first thing this new series has to do is define itself.

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