So far this fall TV season, I’ve checked out Matlock (a passable non-remake of the original), High Potential (gimmicky tripe), Rescue: Hi-Surf (standard beautiful-people-doing-heroic-things drama) and Murder in A Small Town (where there is a murder in a small town every week, until I assume the entire population is murdered).
All of these programs are, at best, passable diversions. But they’re all HBO-quality dramas compared to Doctor Odyssey, Thursday nights on ABC and CTV.
The premise: the Odyssey is an uber-luxury ocean liner, so luxurious it makes the Titanic look like a rowboat. Enter Dr. Max Bankman (Vancouver-born Joshua Jackson) as the ship’s new doctor. He is assisted by two attractive nurses (Avery, played by Grammy and Tony nominee Phillipa Soo, and Tristan, played by Sean Teale) who initially treat the new doctor with mild contempt. But Bankman wins them over with his roguish George Clooney-esque charm, to the point where he comes close to bedding Avery after a couple of days. This irks Tristan, who has the hots for Avery, setting up a will-they-or-won’t-they love triangle. Also along for the voyage is the ship’s captain, the original Miami Vice star Don Johnson, who would make a great Golden Bachelor contestant.
Bankman is wildly overqualified to be a ship’s doctor – he has United Nations and Peace Corps experience – but he chose this easy job because of his near-death experience from Covid. Turns out – surprise! – that being a ship’s doctor is not smooth sailing. His first patient suffers from iodine poisoning from overeating shrimp. The second patient suffers a broken penis, which the good doctor knows how to treat because he, too, has suffered a broken penis. Who hasn’t, right guys? If that’s not enough, a passenger under the influence of drugs falls overboard, resulting in a supposedly thrilling rescue. Yep, just another day on a luxury liner.
Doctor Odyssey was so stupid that I just had to watch another episode. It was essentially a repeat of episode one, just with different medical problems and a different theme. The captain appears to have a heart attack (turns out it was just a “broken heart”) and another passenger, a hot young woman, needs a defibrillator when her heart mysteriously stops. Oh, and there’s the horny guy who beds at least a dozen women who all require shots to fend off his weird skin condition, resulting in a sequence of hot women getting needles in the butt.
It’s not all fun and fungus, however. There’s another rescue at sea, this one of a refugee fleeing her home country. She is distraught because her fiancé is also lost at sea, but in an enormous stroke of luck, he, too, is found.
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Doctor Odyssey is in that rare category of TV that is so bad, it’s almost good. I had no desire to watch another Matlock or High Potential, but Doctor Odyssey is so ludicrous that it’s almost watchable.
But turn off your brain first.
