It's either set in the not-too-distant future or an alternative universe where the NHS has really good funding, I haven't figured out which yet.
What makes Critical so great? A couple of things. First is the medical accuracy. It's good. Really good. You can almost, sort of, get away with justifying a weekend-binge watch as revision.
Secondly, it's not for the faint of heart but it is for those who want to get an idea of what trauma surgery actually looks like. If you're not great with blood and guts you'll probably need to make yourself a cup of tea / check your e-mails / remind yourself how brave you are more than once during an episode.
Each episode is set around the "critical" 1 hour in a major trauma response centre. See what they did there?
As with most hospital dramas, the characters live in a part of London where no one is questioning why such unique once-in-a-lifetime cases are coming in every week. Not once does a character ponder "okay, last week it was that guy with a dog still attached to his arm and this week it's a guy impaled on digger spikes, someone needs to write to the local MP".
As with most hospital dramas, the characters live in a part of London where no one is questioning why such unique once-in-a-lifetime cases are coming in every week. Not once does a character ponder "okay, last week it was that guy with a dog still attached to his arm and this week it's a guy impaled on digger spikes, someone needs to write to the local MP".
Why doesn't it have a better rating on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes? Sadly, I think they tried to appeal to too many people with this one and tap into the "I love watching Doctors have messy love lives!" market too. This means you get a great 10 minutes of brilliant almost documentary-like medical scenes followed by 10 minutes of very poorly written dialogue. Now maybe I've not been to enough dramatic hospitals, but I've yet to see two of my seniors have an argument about their relationship in the middle of a trauma call. Critical, however, manages to show me a world where these sort of life and death topics are discussed over something as trivial as someone dying on a table. Thankfully, the medical accuracy trumps this fatal flaw in the series and makes it watchable.
Even if you did worry you were going to become addicted to it, it's only got one season. The "future" technologies are believable and not that far-off, it's well shot, the acting is great, it's got the Mum from Outnumbered in it (Claire Skinner) who is fantastic in a non-comedy role. The second season, if it were to ever exist, would be vastly improved by dropping the underlying story-line and, instead, the addition of the kids from Outnumbered in a glorious family improvised comedy plus gruesome drama mashup.
I found all of Season 1 over on Amazon Video. Enjoy!
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