TV is the New Reading

USA’s ‘Royal Pains’

an entertaining,

thought-provoking

summer diversion

USA is taking this summer as an opportunity to explore the current state of health care in its new comic drama, “Royal Pains.”

A brilliant young doctor is blackballed by the bureaucracy of your basic grant-hungry Trauma-5 rated care facility. After bringing a friend into the emergency room with a heart problem on his day off, he was roped into treating a benefactor of the institution as well. He treated the benefactor and returned his attention to the friend.

To summarize, the friend lived, and the benefactor died, and the doctor, Mark Feuerstein as Dr. Hank Lawson, was maligned up and down the Eastern seaboard.

As he was unable to find work as a doctor, his fiancee left him and he fell into a month-long depression.

Enter his brother, Paulo Costanzo as Evan Lawson, a fast-talking accountant who, from the pilot episode, seems like he’s there partly as a comic foil and partly to explore the problems with the insurance system. Evan convinces Hank to join him for some Memorial Day revelry in the Hamptons and he reluctantly agrees.

Halfway through one swinging shindig at the Hamptons later, Hank is far too glum to enjoy the party, which isn’t his scene anyway. It was made clear early on in the show that one of Hank’s turnoffs was materialism, and deep in his own depression, he dismisses the attentions of all the pretty, material-oriented people.

Until he sees one of them collapse and the “concierge doctor” on location administering the wrong treatment. Hank’s sharp eyes catch symptoms the other doc misses through his assumption that everyone at the party is high and any collapse is due to an overdose.

In this case, the patient had reacted to some pesticide used in the garden. Hank’s correct diagnosis saves her life and his host is so impressed he fires the other doc, hands Hank a bar of gold bullion for his service and moves him into his guest mansion.

Life in the Hamptons

Hank isn’t convinced by the new arrangement but reluctantly agrees to stay because his services are in demand here, he can practice his skills and honestly, he’s got nothing waiting for him in Brooklyn.

As the show continues, he meets the hospital administrator and confronts the reality that not everyone in the Hamptons is rich. The waiting room is as scruffy as anything and the rich people need their concierge doctor because their random health concerns – harrumph! – aren’t emergency room priorities.

Some of them are, of course. As Hank makes housecalls around the Hamptons he discovers hemophiliacs in car crashes and people with undiagnosed food allergies. He also encounters uninsured diabetics who don’t want to take second-degree burns into the hospital to be treated and so forth.

As the series continues, I anticipate the show will explore basic talking points from all sides of the health care debate, not coming to any solutions but generally illustrating the disparity of care available to the very rich and the very poor. The administrator at the Hamptons general hospital, for instance, is trying to line up support to establish a free clinic. Her potential donors opt instead to spend thousands on lavish parties. Angry beyond words and very drunk – but still not wanting to burn any bridges – she points out a truism: “Free clinics aren’t free.”

Still, there’s enough comedy to keep it from becoming a morality play, enough medical drama to keep it from becoming a roundtable discussion on C-SPAN and enough character development to keep it from devolving into talking points. Feuerstein as Dr. Hank, for instance, has enough personal charisma to carry the show all on his own and is himself surrounded by capable actors and actresses in equally relatable roles.

And as the nation makes the decisions it makes this summer, “Royal Pains” might end up being one of the more entertaining approaches to policy discussion on the airwaves.

“Royal Pains” airs at 9 p.m. Thursdays on USA.

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