How taboo the perverse economic operation that the US health system does not support will be that not even a series like Emergencies: New York dares to put it at the center of its narrative. Everything else is. And all is all: This Netflix docu-series is so raw and to the point that one cannot accuse it of looking for easy impact. A miscarriage is like that, a brain tumor is like that, a teenager shot is like that, a morbidly obese American is like that, a hospital is like that, life is like that, death is like that.
In Emergencies: New York, Adi Barash and Ruthie Shatz continue in the line that they began a few years ago with Lenox Hill, a documentary series also centered on the prestigious New York hospital of the same name. Barash and Schatz now expand the focus and open it up to the healthcare network of the city of skyscrapers. They also do it in another era: Lenox Hill is pre-covid and instead Emergencies: New York portrays a post-virus world, if that exists. Its protagonists recognize that the pandemic changed the world forever and theirs, that of hospitals, in a way that was as abrupt as it was irreversible. That the entire world feared for its life because of a new pathogen did not erase the existence of previous diseases and day-to-day accidents. Emergencies: New York tells it with an almost magical serenity and elegance.
And he does it without the slightest morbidity. It does not exhibit but it does not hide either. An open wound is an open wound, liver jaundice is liver jaundice, and a person who risks being dependent on dialysis because the system has failed is a person who is risking becoming dependent on dialysis because the system has failed. And it will go wrong. And in ER: New York is doing badly.
I’m not going to hide either: this series makes a bad body. You don’t have to be a hypochondriac for something like this to generate all kinds of paranoia about appointments with specialists that you canceled, routine check-ups that you skipped, or that advice from the traumatologist (Alberto: lose weight) that you take with a sense of humor that Emergencies: New York becomes dangerously unconscious.
At the time, I have rarely felt healthier than after watching this series. Not so privileged to live in a country where what we see in the ER: New York is paid, for now, by everyone’s taxes. The sinister machinery of US citizens’ health insurance and credit ratings is one of the quagmire Adi Barash and Ruthie Shatz tread carefully. His series is not about that because if it were about that it would not be about anything else.
Although it sounds frivolous, we must add that Emergencies: New York is also very entertaining. It could well have given rise to (or be inspired by) the best episodes of ER, the series that revolutionized medical series. Emergencies: New York doesn’t want to shake anything up because it’s too busy trying to keep you from dying.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
