Most shows, at least what you get from the pilot episode (Last Resort aside), can be summed up pretty quickly. Emily Owens, M.D. can be summed up even quicker than that.
Being a young doctor right out of med school is just like being in high school.
I’ll say more, but there you have it. You could read that line and have a pretty good idea what the show is about.
Here’s another way that I think is fairly good to sum it up. It’s like Scrubs without the jokes. It actually has a pretty similar sensibility to the with the camaraderie between doctors and the high school drama matched up with the seriousness of illness and death the doctors deal with every day. There’s even a speech given to Emily by another character about which doctors represent which high school cliques, and I really felt like I was watching Scrubs.
The main character is unsurprisingly Emily Owens (played by Mamie Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep, and yes, you can totally see it), a high school nerd/loser/choose your adjective here who thought that her life would turn around and she’d become who she always thought she would be and bloom post-high school, only to find out, yes, that doctoring is just like high school. This isn’t just me saying it by the way; multiple characters express this to her within the first few minutes of the show.
She’s spending her first year with a motley crew of colleagues including her med school crush, her old high school nemesis whose appearance unnerves her, and a friendly lesbian who turns out to be the big boss’s daughter. Owens spazzes constantly (spellcheck does not pick up spazz, but screw that) making lots of little, and one or two big, mistakes along the way, pissing off the doctor she came to this hospital to work under, but also making a couple of friends and partly redeeming herself along the way. All in her first day too, which the entire episode takes place during; I doubt that every day as a doctor can be quite this meaningful and frantic, but what do I know.
The boldest move, for both her and the show, in my opinion, which I appreciated the most, and will probably be the only thing I really remember from the show, is that she basically comes out and confesses her love for her crush (yes, we’re using crush; this is high school) right in the first episode, and gets rejected in the absolutely nicest way possible making it incredibly awkward for both her and the guy, which makes you feel terrible for both parties (worse for her, but still). As an awkward person, I did appreciate her completely believable amount of awkwardness, which seemed true to life rather than person-who-clearly-doesn’t-live-in-society level.
Other than that, well, there was nothing memorable about it. Nothing made my irritated or angry or offended or any of that bad stuff. There just wasn’t really much good stuff. It was a show, and well, if you liked Scrubs without the jokes, maybe you’ll like it (actually it was still less self-righteous and lesson teaching than those Scrubs monologues – boy did I hate those). You’ll probably forget about it within a couple of days of watching it though, like I’m predicting I will.
Will I watch it again? No, it wasn’t execrable by any measure, but it was forgettable, and for getting lost in a crowded fall schedule, that’s almost as bad.
Television, the Drug of the Nation 
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