This has been featured or I would say almost "shoved down my throat" the past few days by the Netflix algorithm so i figured i would just humor them and go ahead and have a look. What I ended up with is basically Doogie Howser M.D. but with a guy whose autism affliction actually makes him a very great surgeon.
[src](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d5/89/8e/d5898e56c98902971071458d82bb2517.jpg)Shaun Murphy has severe autism and this has gotten him in trouble most of his life. He has severe social anxiety and doesn't really know how to handle most normal interactions with people. He does, on the other hand, have the ability to put together the pieces of certain things that most people cannot see and are not aware of including the other doctors and surgeons at his hospital.
I like the way that they present how Shaun figures things out and the first thing that came to mind for me was the way that he pieces things together in a similar fashion to the way that they did in Sherlock Holmes (both the British series as well as the films.)
He will recall things that he saw years ago in a textbook and be able to help out in situations that amazes senior surgeons with much higher levels of experience. At first, his boyishness makes the other doctors not want him around but after time, they tend to look to him for advice because more often than not, he is correct about things.
This is why the series, I think, is eventually doomed to fail. There isn't any real main story that we are moving towards other than for Dr. Shaun to gain acceptance from his colleagues and in order for this to remain that way, he needs to occasionally be incorrect and you can expect this to happen once ever 2 or 3 episodes. The rest of the time he diagnoses things that are not even in his area of expertise because of his affliction.
Watching this on Netflix can be a bit annoying because there are certain sections that were clearly designed to be commercial breaks but of course there are no commercial breaks on Netflix. So the screen just goes black every now and then.
Freddie Highmore plays the role of Dr. Shaun and is without question the main character in the story. He has received praise for his role but I'm gonna go out there and say that I disagree with that. He talks as if he is a robot a great deal of the time and while I don't know everyone with autism, I do know a few.... none of them are robot-sounding.
The individual episodes can be watched in any order, for the most part, prior knowledge of what happened before getting to this particular episode isn't going to affect your ability to understand what is going on in this one. So that is good I suppose. The bad part about this show is that it has been done before and is just an amalgamation of a bunch of different things. Also, there are certain sequences that are gonna gross some people out such as a scene last night where a tumor was being popped out of a brain in a manner that kinda still haunts me today.
Should I watch it ?
At this point I am going to go ahead and say yes because I have enjoyed all the episodes that I have seen thus far and think that most other people will as well. However, I seriously doubt that it has what it takes to go on for a long period of time because there are only so many hospital situations that someone can be put into and we have seen this happen with countless medical dramas in the past.
for now, let's see how I feel after the end of the first season
