Stream It or Skip It: ‘Transplant’ on NBC, a Drama About a Syrian Doctor Trying to Navigate a New Job in a Canadian ER

Transplant, created by Joseph Kay (This Life) was a hit for CTV when it aired earlier this year, and it’s not hard to see why: a medical procedural that’s decently acted, with an appealing lead that has an interesting background, is the type of show that’s more or less bound to get a decent-sized audience. NBC already has a medical hit with New Amsterdam, so it seems logical that they imported this show to fill in their fall schedule while they wait for shows to come back. But does the show have the right formula to succeed here?

TRANSPLANT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A shot of a man working in the kitchen of a Middle Eastern restaurant.

The Gist: Bashir Hamed (Hamza Haq) is a cook at that restaurant, but you can tell from the start that the job is a temporary one for him. He gets what looks like some sort of contraband from one of his co-workers. He’s very observant when he sees a tired middle-aged woman walk in who’s on her phone and pulling out a string of hair that’s falling out. But when he sees a familiar face walk into the restaurant, he approaches the man and asks if he remembers Bashir. “Yes, you made my dinner,” the man says snottily. Right then, a bus crashes into the restaurant.

In the aftermath, Bashir pounds on the woman’s heart to get it started. He cuts his uncle’s eye to relieve pressure and preserve his vision. And he diagnoses the guy who he met once before with a subdural hematoa, takes a power drill and drills a hole in his skull to relieve the pressure.

Yes, Bashir is pretty obviously a doctor, one who is battle tested and has training in field triage and treatments. So why is he working in a restaurant? When everyone gets transported to Toronto’s best hospital. The man whose head he drilled turns out to be Dr. Jed Bishop (John Hannah), who is the head of the emergency department and a tough-as-nails doc who has no life outside of medicine. The doctors, including medical resident Dr. Magalie “Mags” LeBlanc (Laurence Leboeuf), aggressive surgical resident Dr. June Curtis (Ayisha Issa), and pediatric resident Dr. Theo Hunter (Jim Watson) notice that all the incoming patients have had crude remedies applied to them. Did Dr. Bishop treat them before giving himself a burr hole in his skull?

Bash, who’s hurt but not severely, makes attempts to leave the ER, but we’re not sure why. He runs into a cop investigating the accident, who immediately takes Bash’s attempts to leave as a sign of guilt. But Mags, in the process of talking to the patients as well as Bash, starts to realize that he’s more than just a guy working at the restaurant. The reason he’s actually leaving the ER is to do what he does every day: pick up his little sister Amira (Sirena Gulamgaus) from her ESL class. But she ends up going alone to the hospital, a 12 year-old who barely speaks English, to look for her brother.

Even as the cop eyes him with suspicion, he finds out that Bash is in Canada legally as a Syrian refugee. And the reason why he’s seen Dr. Bishop before? He interviewed for a job with the gruff doc, and eventually got turned down. But when Bishop wakes up, barking orders from his bed despite the hole in his skull, he decides to give Bash another chance.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In a lot of ways, Transplant is a pretty standard medical procedural along the lines of Grey’s Anatomy, The Good Doctor or New Amsterdam; but of course with the added issue of a refugee doctor who trained in a war zone mixing in with the more classically-trained residents.

Our Take: Transplant feels like two different shows: A gritty one about Bash’s experiences as a doctor in war-torn Syria, and how he brings his life experience to his job; and a standard medical drama with pretty people solving medical mysteries every week. And the two really don’t mix.

Let’s discuss how they don’t mix just from the first episode. The cop that’s so white that he has red hair and freckles automatically suspects Bash somehow drove the truck into the restaurant because he’s brown, has an accent and is a Syrian refugee. Never mind that his uncle, who is conscious in the ER, could confirm that Bash worked at his restaurant, as Bash said more than once. But that would have ended that part of the plot right then and there instead of showing Bash running from the ER as if he’s undocumented (like his co-worker who gave him the contraband turns out to be). Also, that contraband? A phone for his sister’s birthday. We don’t even realize that Amira is Bash’s sister until he says so; we are led to believe that she’s his daughter for the whole hour, for no apparent reason.

Never mind the whole idea that Bash bleeding and running through the ER with very few people noticing actually happens in real life. The whole first episode just didn’t gel mainly because we didn’t care at all about the archetype young residents trying to guess why the middle-aged woman’s heart stopped or… well, it seemed that was the only case they concentrated on besides Bishop’s case, doesn’t it?

Hannah will have his usual imposing presence as the gruff Dr. Bishop, and everyone in the cast does a reasonable job with the material they’re given. It just feels like marrying a refugee story with “pretty doctors diagnosing mysteries” show is the wrong idea.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: Dr. Bishop thanks Bash for saving his life, and says he should redo the interview that they had a few months back. “So, tell me about yourself,” he asks from his hospital bed to the still-bleeding Bash.

Sleeper Star: Torri Higginson plays Claire Malone, a senior ER attending physician who seems to know Bishop well, telling him after he wakes up that maybe he’ll try to have a life outside the hospital now. Wonder if they’re in a relationship or had one at some point?

Most Pilot-y Line: The daughter of the woman whose heart was beating irregularly was basically the standard generic disbelieving relative you see in every medical show. “You mean my mother needs a new heart?” she asks Mags and June when they present her with a consent to put her mom on the transplant list. “Is she going to die?” she asks over-dramatically.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Transplant could mesh its two sides well as the season goes on, but we bet that we’re just going to be annoyed whenever Bash is off-screen and the pretty docs solving medical mysteries are on-screen.

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, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Transplant At NBC.com