Monday Mornings is the best medical drama TV never appreciated

Medical dramas are one of TV’s classic genres, but Monday Mornings stood out from the rest. Here’s why you still need to watch the David E. Kelley series.

Medical dramas have become a TV staple. We can’t go through a TV season without a medical show somewhere. But six years ago, Monday Mornings got lost in the shuffle and the David E. Kelley drama deserved better—as we’ll discuss in this week’s Deeper Cut.

Chances are, you missed the series when it premiered on TNT in spring 2013. Or, at least, you weren’t watching it regularly, since it only lasted one season. The network gave the show the axe, along with Southland, when it pivoted in a different direction—and unlike Southland, it never got the critical acclaim to really stick in the popular memory.

And it was an utter shame, because Monday Mornings was David E. Kelley’s best work since his previous medical drama Chicago Hope, and remains the most underrated show on his extensive resume.

It started with the novel of the same name authored by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN‘s chief medical correspondent, who also served as an executive producer on the TV series. Gupta created a vivid world inside the fictional Chelsea General Hospital, while Kelley—who wrote or co-wrote every one of the show’s 10 episodes—and particularly an impressive cast elevated the material into something special.

The modern medical drama is increasingly missing the first part of that phrase. So many shows are more concerned with which doctors are sleeping with which colleagues, turning into primetime soap operas that just happen to take place inside emergency rooms and operating theaters. It’s more and more rare that a show seriously challenges audiences to consider medical, emotional and moral dilemmas beyond one or two episodes.

Monday Mornings was that rarity. Perhaps because its core concept was a moral dilemma in and of itself. The show’s title referenced the Monday morning “Morbidity and Mortality” conferences where the doctors were held to answer for their decisions in front of the entire hospital staff, and oftentimes ended up as their own worst enemies. Watching them was intense enough to make your skin crawl, and yet so engrossing that you couldn’t turn away.

The “M&M” meetings provided a backbone for the show and set the tone for what audiences were going to get out of it. Much like the sessions were about holding the surgeons accountable to both the rules of the hospital and their moral code, they also established rules for the series, too.

When a patient died or suffered an injury, the audience knew there would be consequences. There was no action that happened without a reaction. The main characters, although they were set up as the protagonists of the series, were not automatically heroes. The viewers were prompted to question them, and to see them as human, because they were basically being interrogated each week.

And there were the natural questions that followed: What would you do in that situation? Was that decision medically right, but morally wrong? Would you trust this person with your life or the life of a loved one? You were immediately pushed to actively engage with what was happening on screen, instead of just watching it and trying to simplify what is an incredibly complicated and messy, but also important and noble, line of work.

No other medical drama has been as incisive about what it takes to be a doctor—not just professionally, not spending too much time on personally, but focused on the intellectual, moral and emotional demands—as Monday Mornings was.

Then there were the characters. Monday Mornings had a diverse ensemble, not in just the team’s backgrounds but how they approached problems. Their points of view were different more often than not; unlike most shows where the characters always find a way to end up on the same page, or are portrayed as a family, this series was built on conflict and wasn’t afraid to end things on a more uncomfortable note.

Furthermore, it showed that disagreeing didn’t make people any less respectful or supportive of one another. When these characters challenged each other, it was with the intent of making themselves better, and for the betterment of their patients. And they weren’t simply at odds for dramatic effect; when they couldn’t agree, it was about something that mattered.

Material that complex and intense requires talent, and the series was able to communicate all it wanted to say because of the cast that brought the Chelsea General Hospital staff to life.

Every great medical drama has an actor who anchors it. Chicago Hope had Hector Elizondo, and Monday Mornings recruited Alfred Molina. The Tony and Emmy Award nominee gave one of his most intense performances as hospital chief of staff Dr. Harding Hooten, who held his doctors to the highest possible standard and never flinched. He was legitimately scary to watch at times.

Around Molina was an assemblage of veteran actors who immersed themselves in their roles and felt like an actual team; when they were in scenes together, no one dominated anyone else. They were impeccably balanced.

And they were a roll call of reliable names: Ving Rhames, Tony Award winner Bill Irwin (Legion), Jennifer Finnigan (Salvation), Jamie Bamber (Strike Back), Sarayu Blue (The Unicorn), Keong Sim, Emily Swallow (The Mandalorian), and recurring players like Anthony Heald, Jason Gray-Stanford (Monk) and Finnigan’s real-life husband Jonathan Silverman. You knew that no matter what the story was, they were going to find the truth in it.

We watched Bamber’s character Dr. Tyler Wilson struggle with the God complex that came with wanting to save everyone, while he was the one who ended up getting lost. There were no less than three different legal battles in ten episodes, which were treated seriously and not depicted as mere nuisances the doctors just wanted to get out of their way. And in one late-season episode, there was a powerhouse performance by guest star Ioan Gruffudd (Liar) as Dr. Stewart Delaney, a surgeon who was falling apart but too blind—or too scared—to see it.

Monday Mornings was beautifully acted, expertly written, and above all wonderfully human. It pushed past all the conceits and stereotypes of medical drama and cut to the heart of what it means and what it takes to be a medical professional. And it deserved a much longer life than it had, but at least you can still watch it on digital platforms. Because even now, we can all learn something from the stories it had to tell.

The complete series of Monday Mornings is available on iTunes and Amazon Video. Find the latest Deeper Cut every Wednesday in the Entertainment category at FanSided.