Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Temple’, A Spectrum Originals Drama About A Doctor Running A Secret Clinic In The London Underground

Unless you are a Spectrum customer, you can’t see any of the Spectrum Originals we’ve reviewed here. But they’re starting to build an eclectic roster of original shows, some of which were made solely for them (like the Mad About You reboot), and others that were international co-productions. Temple is in the latter category; it aired on Sky One earlier this year. It’s about a brilliant surgeon who runs an illegal clinic in the London Tube. Why would he do such a thing? Read on for more.

TEMPLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Glass doors at night. We see headlights shine as a car pulls up outside. A man unlocks the door and goes in with a backpack.

The Gist: Dr. Daniel Milton (Mark Strong) is a surgeon at the hospital, but he’s been on leave since the death of his wife Beth (Catherine McCormack). He claims he’s there to get a diary, but he’s really there to steal supplies. The same night we see a bank robbery in progress; it seems that it’s a precision operation, but Jamie (Tobi King Bakare), the group’s most inexperienced member, accidentally locks the crew in the bank and escapes with over £2 million of cash.

When a couple of cops stop him, though, he gets shot trying to escape. Jamie calls his friend Lee Simmons (Daniel Mays), and tells him that he can’t go to the hospital. So Lee gives Daniel a call, right as he’s talking to his daughter Eve (Lily Newmark) after Beth’s memorial service. At the service, we learn that Beth decided to kill herself rather than suffer when all possible treatments were exhausted. After the call, he has to leave, despite the fact that Eve never hears from him and, uh, he’s at his wife’s memorial service.

We learn a couple of things after that. In flashback, we learn that Daniel and Beth have had a bit of a rough time of it as a couple of late, and we also find out that Beth had been suffering from Lancaster’s disease mostly in private. She never told her parents, Daniel or Eve. She didn’t even tell her research partner Anna Willems (Carice van Houten), even though they were researching a cure for Lancaster’s.

The other thing we learn is that Daniel has been running an illegal underground clinic. It’s literally underground; created from service tunnels next to the Temple Tube station. Lee brings Jamie in, much to Daniel’s dismay, but the two of them work to take out Jamie’s spleen and save his life. What we don’t know is how he knows Lee and why he’s running this clinic.

At a certain point, Jamie wakes up long enough to tell Lee to “find the money!” Lee does and realizes it’s 3 duffels filled with cash. When he brings them back to the labyrinthine underground clinic, he’s discovered that Jamie has slipped on some blood and is on the floor bleeding out. Not knowing his blood type and out of O negative from the operation on Jamie’s spleen, Daniel calls on Anna to come to the clinic to do a blood transfusion.

Why does he put so much faith in Anna (and vice versa)? He flashes back to after Beth reveals she has Lancaster’s, and the two of them are sitting at a pub wondering if the affair they had with each other should have happened or not. It seems like there aren’t hard feelings, as both of them become focused on Beth. Anna eventually agrees to the transfusion (actually, Lee chloroforms her), and we find out a tiny bit more about why Daniel and Lee are in cahoots in this unusual operation.

Our Take: Temple is an adaptation of the Norwegian drama Valkyrien, adapted for Sky One and Spectrum Originals by Mark O’Rowe. It has an intriguing premise, especially when we see the final scene. This brilliant surgeon, who is obviously under some mental distress, operates this underground clinic to treat people who can’t go “to hospital” for one reason or another. In the case of Jamie, it’s because he robbed a bank. There’s another patient there, an older gentleman, who Anna runs into as she tries to find her way out.

But the first episode teases out Daniel’s situation to the point of madness. I’ve railed against this before, but when the premise of your show could be explained in a couple of sentences but your protagonist tells someone who wants to know what’s going on, “I don’t have time to tell you right now,” that’s a sign of a show that would rather manipulate the story instead of build character.

Even when we get the last scene, we’re still not 100% sure why he’s started the clinic. The guess is to practice treatments that he can’t at the hospital where he built his career. Strong, who’s great in action but whose emotional range consists of a furrowed brow and not much else, displays some caginess by having Daniel say that he’s got a “new job” to Beth’s parents, or saying that I’ve got “work to do” to Lee. But caginess only gets a show so far, and the first episode was getting very frustrating to watch as we sought out the logic behind what this man is doing.

The show does try to infuse some wit into the darkness, like a scene where two patrol cops argue if you can spot that a person is lying by their voice or other non-verbal characteristics, or when Anna says “What are you going to do? Chloroform me?” to Lee in an incredulous way. That wit does keep the show from being relentlessly depressing. But there was also a lot of dumbness and a bit of a head-scratching wonder at how such a complex setup could have been created undetected. But we hope the show reveals more about Daniel’s situation quickly instead of teasing viewers into turning the show off in frustration.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: We see Daniel go into the private room where he “does work,” and there’s Beth, lying unconscious in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines. Now we have an idea why Daniel started the clinic: To use experimental treatments to keep Beth alive.

Sleeper Star: Lily Newmark gives Eve some fierce independence in the few scenes she’s in. Let’s hope we see her figure out why her dad hasn’t been around that often.

Most Pilot-y Line: Lee looks all over Jamie’s car for the money bags, then spots some very bloody footprints that lead from the car to a dumpster. Not sure how he didn’t see those footprints to begin with; they weren’t exactly hiding from view.

Our Call: SKIP IT. We’re not sure we’re going to buy the drama of Temple, given the fact that the reasoning that the main character puts himself at such risk is faulty. And the show isn’t interesting enough to get past its glaring flaws.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Temple On Spectrum Originals