Sunday, October 25, 2009

NBC’s “Trauma”: So Bad it Will Traumatize You

On Saturday night the AL Championship baseball game was rained out, and as my DVR was empty of any recorded programs, so I decided to give the new NBC series ”Trauma” a try. A previously aired episode titled “Stuck” was airing, and after 15 minutes of watching it, I too felt stuck – in TV hell. I watched for 5 more minutes before turning to my husband and asking, “Is this show awful or is it me?” I was relieved to know that it wasn’t just me. We quickly changed the channel, so my review will be brief.

This episode of “Trauma” contained a series of events where it seemed the writers wanted to outdo themselves on what kind of awful or gross scenario they can create for viewers. One guy had his arm severed. A rescue paramedics threw up in a helicopter as they were transposing a person who fell while biking on a hilly dirt trail. Another person was beat up after complaining that someone cut in line in front of him, and apparently had lost part of his tongue in the process. An insensitive EMS person goes looking for the guy’s tongue and was rambling off some stupid comments about it while he was searching. After being assaulted with horrible dialog delivered with the acting skill of the cast of a high school play, I realized that this show was doomed to fail. The scenes were so disjointed that the show seemed like a series of random activities, not tied together by anything except there was some sort of situation that required medical help. I had no reason to have any interest in these characters and there was nothing that made me want to spend any more time trying to find a reason to watch any longer.

Needless to say, I won’t watch Trauma again, and if you haven’t started watching it, don’t bother. This also begs the question – Why did NBC cancel ”Southland” which was 100 times better than “Trauma”? After watching 20 minutes of Trauma, I’ve come to the conclusion that whoever is making these programming choices at NBC need to be fired, stat.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

trauma is a good (maybe not great, but definitely good) show. however i feel like the characters and storylines really only make sense if you have seen the first episode. check it out on hulu or itunes or whatever, give it a second chance. however, from the sounds of your review it seems like you are fairly squeamish and/or not into that kind of stuff so maybe its just not for you

Anonymous said...

I Like to Watch TV - you were right on the money about this show. It just got canceled.

http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009/10/28/trauma-canceled-by-nbc-no-new-episodes-will-be-ordered/31930

Bola Odulate said...

I was too traumatized by the promos to consider watching the show.

Lisa said...

Not for me either........
I was also traumatized!
Cancel Trauma and replace with something good.