Title: Royal Pains
Starring: Mark Feuerstein, Paulo Costanzo, Jill Flint, Reshma Shetty
Directors: Jace Alexander, Constantine Makris, Michael W. Watkins, Don Scardino, Matthew Penn
Format: DVD
Released: 26/07/10
When a hotshot young ER doctor named Hank Lawson (Mark Feuerstein) saves a kid from dying after he collapses during a street basketball game on his day off, he still falls foul of having been found to have neglected another patient, who just happens to be a billionaire hospital benefactor. He is wrongly blamed for the benefactor’s death. He looses his job, his girlfriend and almost his license to practice medicine as well. Jobless and facing a number of court hearings he mopes around his place, unable to get a job, having been blackballed by every hospital in the city. That’s when his younger brother Evan (Paulo Costanzo) turns up and takes him on holiday to the Hamptons. No sooner than he has arrived and someone already needs his help and that’s when he realises that there are a lot of wealthy – and not so wealthy – people here that need his help.
Hank is all about helping people. Evan (an accountant) is all about the money. But when the local hospital administrator Jill Casey (Jill Flint) becomes Hank’s on-off girlfriend Hank develops an inside line to people in the Hamptons that need free medical assistance. So he is able to make money from those that can afford it and still give a free service to those that can’t. Divya Katdare (Reshma Shetty) is Hank’s Assistant Physician. She is very skilled and professional. The scenes with Shetty and Costanzo are some of the funniest as their characters clash the most.
After helping one of the local big players, Boris, Hank and Evan are invited to live in Boris’ home (well something akin to a castle actually) and Hank will work as Boris’ personal Doctor. He works for other clients as well as a ‘concierge doctor’ who performs house calls to the rich and famous – the type of people who don’t want to go to the local hospital and who tend to guard their privacy.
Royal Pains is a funny, enjoyable series that features some great supporting characters as well. Campbell Scott is excellent as the shady Boris Kuester von Jurgens-Ratenicz, while Andrew McCarthy is very likable (even though he shouldn’t be as he is a neglectful father who also has a secret drug addiction).as Marshall Bryant the father of a young haemophiliac, named Tucker (Ezra Miller).
The writing and direction are much better than average, in fact the storylines are impressive, weaving in two or three plotlines into most 40 minute episode. Hank’s ‘MacGuyver’ approach to medicine and treating patients in emergency situations is also fun to watch as well as cleverly devised, as he uses whatever he has around him to improvise, and/or to fashion medical devices to help him. The acting is also of a high quality, better than most US TV shows actually. It feels a lot more genuine than some of the other shows to come along recently. If, for example, you put this show up against something like the US comedy show ‘How I Met Your Mother’ you’d certainly see that the acting in Royal Pains is far less cornball in its approach. Of course this is not exactly comparing like-for-like but it serves as a reasonable comparison in terms of tone.
Royal Pains looks so good even on DVD (admittedly upscaling via my blu-ray player) that I’ve watched every episode believing it to be in HD, until whilst writing this review I actually checked. It looks amazing for a TV show. Extremely clear, crisp images, great colours and great tones. I’d actually say that it looks better than a lot of blu-ray films that I’ve seen.
Royal Pains is well worth your time. I just spent most of my weekend watching the first series of 12 episodes including the feature-length pilot episode, not only in order to get this review finished for the release date, but also because I was enjoying it! In fact I’m disappointed that the first season only had 12 episodes. Series 2 from what I can ascertain has 18. It’ll no doubt be a bit of a wait until that is available on DVD. Until then I’ll have to go back to watching repeats of ‘Scrubs’ or else start watching ‘House’, I suppose.
