'Save My Life': Scary, Heartbreaking Medical Emergencies

Ken Tucker
·Critic-at-Large, Yahoo Entertainment
Updated
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The real medical emergencies on the premiere episode of Save My Life: Boston Trauma include a bullet to the brain and a hockey puck to the throat, and both of them are serious, potentially deadly injuries. The new documentary series, premiering Sunday night on ABC, comes from executive producer Terence Wrong, for whose previous work I am a sucker: I’ve watched every episode of his NY Med, Hopkins, and Boston Med, and I’ll probably watch all of Save My Life: Boston Trauma, although I have some reservations about this new project.

First, the good stuff. To be brutally frank, you can’t go wrong with a 14-month-old child who’s admitted to the ER with an allergic reaction to peanut butter crackers that nearly causes her air passages to close up. (Spoiler alert: She survives, or I wouldn’t be so cavalier about it.) Or the 15-year-old who falls 25 feet from the bell tower of a church, landing on a pew and breaking it.

Nor is Save My Life wrong to give as much camera time as possible to the man hit by a car while he was on his motorcycle. He turns out to be a middle-aged rapper who yells loudly and repeatedly for “a Motrin” and makes the nurses jump when he yelps from the operating table, “I got a bunch of money in my sock!” It’s the canny mixture of the dire and the comic that makes Wrong’s productions so right.

Now, my reservations. There are some reenactments — of a shooting, a car crash, and the hockey accident, for example. Reenactments are almost dealbreakers for me, not just in documentaries but also in any TV show that claims to be telling us the truth. They look hokey, artificial, and they simply are not what happened. When you combine the reenactments with an atypically florid title — Save My Life is a shameless eyeball-grab — I worry a bit that producer Wrong is feeling too much network pressure to goose the ratings. I also wonder if the new series is shying away from one of the most engaging things about NY Med: little glimpses into the private lives and opinions of doctors and nurses, perhaps because of the firing of NY Med’s charmingly tough-minded nurse Katie Duke after she Instagrammed an emergency scene.

Despite these reservations, I recommend Save My Life, and should add that a companion series, Boston EMS, from the same producer, will premiere on ABC July 25.

Save My Life: Boston Trauma airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on ABC.