Should You Greenlight Red Band Society?

What Is This Thing?

The young-adult patients at Ocean Park Hospital commiserate with one another about their various long-term, life-threatening illnesses while getting up to various kinds of mischief -- because a dying teenager is still a teenager. Watching over them are nurses -- two sassy, one new and naïve -- a gray-templed supersurgeon, and a rich, aging hippie benefactor/hypochondriac.

When Is It On?

Wednesdays at 9 PM on Fox.

Why Was It Made Now?

Some very smart person figured out that 2014 would be the year that teens would all abandon vampires and dystopias and embrace real-world stories of kids dying -- first The Fault In Our Stars broke social-media mention records, then If I Stay...also came out. Now this!

What's Its Pedigree?

Based on a Catalan show called Polseres Vermelles, this series was created by Margaret Nagle, who wrote Warm Springs, the HBO movie about FDR with Kenneth Branagh and Cynthia Nixon, as well as a couple of Boardwalk Empires; she's attached to write a screenplay about the Lost Boys of Sudan. The teen stars are all unknowns (at least to me), but the adult cast includes Griffin Dunne as Ruben, the old hippie; Dave Annable -- a.k.a. Brothers And Sisters's feckless baby Walker Justin -- as the gray-templed supersurgeon, and yes, the fact that he's now playing any kind of adult made me eat my service revolver; Wilson Cruz -- a.k.a. My So-Called Life's Rickie -- as Kenji, one of the sassy nurses; and Oscar winner Octavia Spencer as Nurse Jackson, the other sassy one, though she prefers to call herself as "Scary Bitch," at least to baristas.

...And?

Given how many hundreds of medical procedurals have gone before, I credit Red Band Society for finding a new angle on the hospital environment. Fortunately for me, I've never known any kids who had to spend an indefinite period of time in the hospital -- and, touch wood, I won't -- so it never occurred to me to wonder how that works on a practical level. The pilot uses the time-honoured pilot technique of introducing a new character (or two, in this case) to an established world in order to bring him or her and the viewer up to speed at the same time, and thus we get walked through a typical day -- the kids go to class; they hang out together in their funkily decorated rooms; they sneak out to buy beer; they throw an unsanctioned rooftop party (or, at least, a party they think is unsanctioned, but is actually facilitated by their adult well-wishers to let them blow off steam). I don't know how any of this version of long-term care for teenagers actually is -- would Leo really be allowed to paint the glass in his room like that? -- but I appreciate the effort taken to make a very old setting feel new.

...But?

Maybe it's that it's on Fox, and/or that the first character we're introduced to is a very bitchy cheerleader, but the show this reminded me of most was Glee, and that's not a compliment. No, it doesn't have any musical numbers -- yet -- but it shares its predecessor's shifts in tone and barely likable teen characters. The least likable is Kara, the aforementioned cheerleading bitch. I buy that this girl would be such a perfectionist dick that she'd alienate everyone else on the squad. But blowing smoke directly into the face of a TINY LITTLE KID IN A COMA?! No one is that cartoonishly villainous outside of high camp, and this is not a John Waters movie.

Unfortunately, Kara is the pilot's only memorable teen character. You've seen all these types before: swaggery Leo is Fault's Augustus all over again; salty Emma the ED girl calls to mind Emma Roberts's character from It's Kind Of A Funny Story. Even coma kid Charlie is like if The Fosters's Jude was unconscious. And he's the one who's narrating everything, and sending messages from the space between life and death whenever anyone else blacks out? Tweeeeeeeeeee.

Finally: this is what Octavia Spencer had to do instead of a Murder, She Wrote reboot?! Playing this total cliché of a nurse, and taking a back seat to all these kids? Not cool.

...So?

It takes a pretty special story to engage me in the carryings-on of #teens. This doesn't cut it. However, you should know this comes from someone who only barely let The Fault In Our Stars wring any tears out of her, so if you found that book and/or film very moving and effective, Red Band Society might work on you, too.