2023-11-14 20:44:05
White coats are legion on our screens. On TF1, doctors even parade all year round in an astonishing tour of American hospitals: The Residenton duty in the spring in Atlanta, gave way to the 19th (!) season of Grey’s Anatomy, anchored in Seattle. At the start of the school year, it was the turn of Good Doctorthe autistic surgeon from California, to operate before handing over the knife to the New York team of New Amsterdam. The vein seems inexhaustible.
On the production side, France is not left out and is even a pioneer. From the 1960s, Janique Aimée et Cécilia, country doctor featured caregivers, even if the plots mainly focused on their emotional problems. Then Night doctorscreated by Bernard Kouchner in 1978, Nina (France 2), the medical world has inspired a host of series. “In the last twenty1st years, health personnel made up the second“professional group of fictional heroes, just after the police”, notes sociologist Sabine Chalvon-Demersay, research director at EHESS-CNRS.
The hospital, object of fantasies
How can we explain this omnipresence? Isn’t the hospital, known to cause anxiety, a repellent for viewers after the pandemic? According to Thomas Lilti, creator ofHippocrates (Canal+), the appeal of hospital series is due to the fact that “we are all confronted, at some point in our lives, with this very institutionAnds powerful, whose codes we ignore and which is frightening”. In this “arena”, the object of fantasies, birth, death, pain and illness constitute powerful dramatic issues for the screenwriters, who add love stories or professional tensions inherent to any microsociety.
In Hippocrates, whose third season is currently being filmed, the director, a doctor by training, refuses to“use the hospital as a pretext to make comedy, soap or thriller”. Its goal: to create an ultra-realistic immersion in a failing public service. “How do we provide care when the tool is damaged and the institution is in trouble? How far to go to save lives? Does this deserve for caregivers to suffer? Questions at the heart of our contemporary societies. »
The human behind the disease
And Hippocrates resolutely places itself on the side of caregivers, other recent series offer different points of view. In Red Bracelets (TF1), it is the young patients who take center stage and the initiatory story, close to series for adolescents, would (almost) forget their pathology.
Time.news of daily life in a psychiatric hospital, the Australian series Wakefield, on Arte from Thursday, successively adopts the perspective of a nurse, his colleagues and those interned. His touching efforts to preserve human relationships, despite the lack of resources and the absurd rigidity of the protocol, respond to the distress of patients and their loved ones, shown unvarnished.
“The rise of care (Anglo-Saxon term that can be translated as care or solicitude, Editor’s note) in the series reflects the evolution of society and the awareness that autonomy and well-being are, ultimately, marginal in the life of an individual”, notes Sabine Chalvon-Demersay. Fictions also bear witness to “the increasing involvement of patients and their families in the management of the disease, due to the difficulties of the hospitalpublic hospital and the transformation of formerly fatal pathologies into chronic diseases”.
The whirlwind of illness
Everything is fineposted online on Disney + Wednesday November 15, shows the devastating impact of a child’s serious illness on those close to them. “How can we reconcile life, in its banal and joyful aspects, with this ordeal which physically and psychologically sucks people in? “, asks its creator Camille de Castelnau. Inspired by her own story (her niece’s leukemia), she did not want to create a medical series but a series about the family and its neuroses, taking care to balance the scenes in the hospital and in out.
If the emphasis is placed on these “helpers”, too rare on screens according to her, Everything is fine implicitly paints the portrait of the hospital as a place where “we don’t just treat bodies, where cutting-edge technology rubs shoulders with a deep concern for humanity”. “A vision faithful to reality and not watered down”, judge Ophélie Dlubala, nurse and consultant on the series, whose “semi-lightness” : “In a pediatric hematology department, we try to lighten daily life to preserve the childhood aspect of little patients. In the end, we laugh more often than we cry. »
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Series at the hospital
EMERGENCIES14 seasons on AppleTV+ (€2.99 per episode)
Grey’s Anatomyseason 4 currently being rebroadcast on TFX, Monday to Friday at 12:20 p.m., and on MyTF1
New Amsterdamseason 4 (22 episodes), Wednesday from 9:15 p.m. on TF1 (3 episodes per evening)
Hippocratestwo seasons of 8 episodes on Canal+
Everything is finea season of 8 episodes on Disney+
Red Braceletsfour seasons on MyTF1
Wakefielda season of eight episodes on Arte, from November 16 at 11:15 p.m. and on Arte.tv
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