Newsletters: ‘This Is Going to Hurt’ Is the Best New Show of the Summer

‘This Is Going to Hurt’ Is the Best New Show of the Summer

with Kevin Fallon

Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture.

This week:

Ben Whishaw, always great!
Exploding penises, always a surprise!
Kate Bush ran up that hill, always an athlete!
Anthony Hopkins likes NFTs, always baffling!
Video stores, always nostalgic!

This Is Going to Hurt Is a Really Special Show

If there is one foolproof genre of television here in the U.S., it is, "Oh, hey, they already watched this in the U.K. and said it was really good and now it's coming here so we should watch, too."

It's a little long for a Netflix recommended section title, but it's unflappable.

This is a case where it's fairly easy to be an American TV critic. "Did the BBC already play it? Did people say it was good? Gotcha." Headline: You're Going to Love This Wry, Quirky Dramedy/Unbelievably Depressing Murder Mystery That's Finally Coming Stateside.

But the thing is, it's true. You're going to love the new series This Is Going to Hurt, which got across-the-board rave reviews from British critics and, now, is coming stateside.

The series is now airing on AMC+, which is a streaming service that I learned existed when trying to figure out how to watch this show. (Sorry to the people at AMC, I love you and I'm sure this streaming service is great.)

It stars Ben Whishaw, which was frankly enough for me before learning anything else about this show. This is Paddington himself, folks. This is the stringbean stud who manages to be both lanky and vascular, noodly and swashbuckling—the only human being who has ever looked good with unkempt hair and an oversized turtleneck sweater. He is also, as it happens, one of the most captivating actors working today (A Very British Scandal, The Hour, Brideshead Revisited, and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is my recommended sampling).

That unplaceable, almost contradictory appeal is key to the success of This Is Going to Hurt.

The series is based on a memoir by Adam Kay. It centers around the character of—would you believe it—Adam, a top doctor in the neonatal unit of a London hospital. There have been medical dramas before. (Grey's Anatomy, still airing!) There have been medical comedies before. (Scrubs, apparently coming back soon?) This is a mixture of both, and is filmed with a lot of style and creativity. But it also accomplishes something that those series do not: it actually feels real.

I don't mean that necessarily in the sense of realism, though its frank and unflinching footage of childbirth and C-sections didn't not make me feel so close to fainting that I crawled to the refrigerator and chugged orange juice out of the bottle as a life-saving maneuver.

I meant that in the sense that it actually feels like what it must actually be like to be a doctor. It turns out it's not all walking dramatically through the hallways on the way to save a life while a song by Snow Patrol or The Fray (probably titled "How to Save a Life") plays and you celebrate with several tequila shots afterward magically without getting hungover and then have hot sex with another hot doctor. It actually, I would surmise from this show, kind of sucks.

Adam is tired, folks. In the first shot of him in the series, he is fast asleep in his car. You think, for a second, that he might be dead and this is one of the series that starts at the end (said death) and then chronicles how we got here. No, he's just so exhausted that when he got off his shift at the hospital the night before, he fell asleep in his car before he could even turn on the engine. When his phone rings and he's woken up, it's time for his next shift.

Before he even makes it from the parking lot back into the hospital, he encounters a medical emergency on the sidewalk and is sent back into adrenaline-inducing doctor mode immediately.

Back on the floor, he encounters a trainee who is afraid to do real work. Everything is broken, to the point that an emergency alarm goes off several times an hour so reliably that the staff only reacts as if it's an emergency if it goes longer than they've programmed themselves to tolerate the shrieking siren for. He gets blood and other bodily fluids on his clothes with such regularity that he goes through his employee credits for replacement scrubs—because apparently an unlimited supply is out of the question—and must fish through the laundry bin for used, lightly tainted scrubs to wear for his next surgery.

When a patient is an obvious white supremacist, he's the one who gets in trouble for calling it out. Oh, and he makes mistakes. Even in the line of life-and-death and when you are the most talented doctor with the best intuition, you make mistakes, and in this field of work, those mistakes are not forgiven.

It also turns out that when you're working back-to-back 18-hour shifts, it's not great for your life at home.

Adam has a partner who couldn't be more supportive, but who also asks for the barest of bare minimums in return—we're talking, like, the bottom of the barrel is barely visible at this point—and Adam can't even give him that. How long is his boyfriend supposed to be understanding? And there are also the still majorly fucked-up politics of being a gay person in an expert field and dealing with the assumptions that you are straight for purposes of small talk and cozying up to corporate execs and wondering what would happen if you ever stopped playing along and actually corrected them.

The thing that I like most about This Is Going to Hurt is that it is so bleak. It is not shy about how dismal a life this is, noble as it may be—and how we as a society may have deluded ourselves into believing there's such reward in saving lives and, in Adam's case, bringing new ones into the world that it absolves the absolutely wretched quality of life we've saddled these people with. That's not the case at all. Adam's life seems objectively miserable.

But the show is also not only bleak. In fact, it's incredibly funny. Whishaw's natural dry wit punctuates every encounter. There's a Fleabag element, where Adam makes asides directly to camera, that is used sparingly, effectively, and hilariously. It also, in the age of TV shows with bloated running times that play like the world's most insufferable slog, has a fast clip to the pacing that can, as dark as things might be, make the episodes feel like somewhat of a jaunt, improbably.

It's a really special show. If I figured out what in the world AMC+ is, you can too.

I Can't Believe This Scene Is Real

Every once in a while, I dabble in a little Boys. The Boys.

A superhero series isn't ordinarily something I'd be into, but I like to be a generalist when it comes to pop culture and sample the series that other demographics (the straights) are into.

Little did I know that this series was apparently made exactly for me.

This is a series that features hot superheroes making fun of the idea of superheroes (but while still being hot and superheroic) and also a massive penis set piece and a tiny naked man scaling mountains of cocaine.

No, a bot that was meant to mimic the content of Gay Twitter didn't write that. It's an actual plot description of the first episode of The Boys Season 3, which is easily the craziest thing I've ever seen on TV.

I recognize that I'm prone to hyperbole and slapping superlatives on mediocre entertainment for the sake of…fun. But this is the one case that it's true. This is actually the craziest thing I've ever seen on TV. And just months ago, Tommy Lee's penis came to life and began talking to him.

Here, I will write a very plain description of what happens in the premiere of The Boys Season 3.

Termite is a superhero whose powers are much like Ant-Man in the Marvel universe, which is to say he shrinks down to insect-size when strategic. During a drug-fueled celebration, his partner says what are familiar words in a sexual come-on: "I want you inside me." Termite does a line of cocaine as his partner pulls down his pants and jumps onto the table.

He shrinks down to a size so small that he has to leap over the lines of coke. His partner's comparatively massive penis sits on the ends of the table, the hole at the end of it resembling a monstrous cavern. "No, this isn't where this is going…" you think, as it goes exactly there.

Termite leaps into the hole and climbs into his partner's urethra, spelunking for his prostate.

As he traverses the, uh, tunnel, his partner starts writhing with pleasure. But then, oh no, Termite sneezes. He comes back to human size…inside the urethra. His partner explodes into blood and guts.

I have, out of journalistic curiosity and no other motive whatsoever, watched this screen roughly 75 times this week. I have googled every article about it. I learned important things, for example that The Boys actually built a usable giant penis that actor Brett Geddes could climb into for the scene. It was 11-feet high and 30-feet long, so it would appear to scale. Believability is important.

This is all to say that The Boys is clearly the best show on television.

How Big Was Kate Bush's Hill?

I, like any cool elder millennial, have loved these past weeks of pretending I have forever and always been Kate Bush's biggest fan and definitely listen to her music all the time and am a ride-hard longtime obsessive who can definitely name other songs she's sang besides that one in Stranger Things.

Our generation is finally having its moment! I laugh at you, younger Gen Z children and youths who are pitifully only finding out about her now. I scoff!

The news that "Running Up That Hill" went to No. 1 on iTunes thanks to its prime placement in Stranger Things has been really fun. Snark aside, I love this for Kate Bush. You ran up that hill, girlie!

It also made this piece by Rich Juzwiak at Jezebel all the more interesting. In "Going to No. 1 on iTunes Isn't the Big Achievement It Sounds Like," he explains using data why, well, going to number one on iTunes isn't the big achievement it sounds like. It's a really interesting glimpse into what the music business has morphed into and how wild—and easy—spin has become. I recommend reading it!

Anthony Hopkins Is Into NFTs Now

I like to imagine a world where Anthony Hopkins—excuse me, Sir Anthony Hopkins, a CBE knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, an Order of the British Empire—sent this tweet (any tweet, really) with his own two thumbs.

"I'm astonished by all the great NFT artists," he wrote. "Jumping in to acquire my first piece, any recommendations?" He then tagged the unholy trinity of Snoop Dogg, Jimmy Fallon, and Reese Witherspoon, the celebrity terrorists who have inexplicably been pimping NFTs any chance they get. It is all accompanied by a photo of his character in Westworld, surrounded by faceless, skinless androids waiting to be anthropomorphized—as on-the-nose a metaphor for a celebrity promoting an NFT scam to the masses as there possibly could be.

I don't love the fact that some member of Anthony Hopkins' team accepted some sort of deal to promote NFTs, easily the stupidest thing to have become a capitalist phenomenon in a very long time. It's possibly the worst celebrity branding that there has ever been. "We want to prove how hip and cool NFTs are, kids, so here is Sir Anthony Hopkins to tell you all about it."

That said, I would pay more than I would pay for an NFT to hear Anthony Hopkins stopped on the street, caught off guard, and asked to explain what, pray tell, an NFT actually is. I feel like it's been ages of this nonsense and I really, truly still do not know.

I Love This Video So Much

My 10-year-old ass going to Blockbuster Video every Friday to rent The Big Green for the 13th time and, I hate to say it, forcing my poor father to agree to own Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants when I was in high school because I kept telling him I was going to return it and never did and the late fees passed the purchase price might have cried while watching this montage of scenes at video stores from movies.

The supercut was made by Don McHoull and it's really good!

Queer as Folk: It's Pride Month. You're forced to. (Now on Peacock)

For All Mankind: Guys, this show is really good. Get on it. (Fri. on Apple TV+)

Evil: The most delightfully weird show on TV. (Sun. on Paramount+)

Jurassic World: Dominion: My apologies to Laura Dern. (Fri. in theaters)

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‘This Is Going to Hurt’ Is the Best New Show of the Summer

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