A Gifted Man airs Fridays at 8/7c on CBS. It stars Patrick Wilson (Angels in America) as Michael Holt, a renowned high-end neurosurgeon. One night Michael runs into his ex-wife Anna (Jennifer Ehle) and they have a warm, affectionate dinner together. The next day he discovers she’s been dead for a week.
So this is the premise: Michael is super-surgeon, driven, cold, and he’s now being “haunted” by a ghost he loves. Anna had run a free clinic in a poor neighborhood. Soon her presence leads him to involvement in the clinic. The pilot episode was deft in not making Michael a sudden believer in spirits, although he cannot deny Anna’s presence.
There’s an insanely good cast at work here. Wilson and Ehle are best known as theatrical actors, although Ehle is familiar from the BBC Pride and Prejudice mini-series, where she helped make Colin Firth a star. Margo Martindale plays Michael’s assistant, and Julie Benz is on board as his sister.
The pilot and next two episodes were great. The show struck the right note of skepticism, while still incorporating mysticism. There’s even a shaman (Pablo Schreiber) among the cast regulars. Anna’s presence was meaningful, and yet Michael was still living his life. But problems were already developing.
Most medical shows have students of some kind, for a good reason. It’s irritating to have accomplished doctors explain medical conditions and procedures to one another. A Gifted Man has not conquered the biobabble problem, and it hasn’t found a way to make the surprise-illness-of-the-week seem fresh. Why does the illness need to be a surprise? The script thinks it does. It relies so heavily on dragging Michael out of his high-end practice down to the clinic because of an unusual case that nothing has a chance to flow.
Finally, the mysticism has become something of a third leg. In a couple of episodes, Anna actually appeared, said “I don’t know why I’m here,” and then left.
How could this show be saved? First, by allowing the mysticism to appear organically: You have a shaman (who’s been shunted into the role of carpenter, so he can dispense advise without being too shamanic), you have a ghost, you can focus some episodes, or parts of some episodes, on that aspect of the plot without becoming Charmed. Second, by mixing the available elements up: Instead of having every episode become some form of Holt is pulled away from Holt Neuro to handle something unusual at the clinic, allow some episodes to be clinic-focused, allow some to rest entirely in the world of high-end neurology, and still others to lean on ghosts and shamans. Finally, stop trying to hit every medical note. Not every show has to be House. One of the things that made Saving Grace a great show was that the murders were relatively easily solved. That show recognized that there were plenty of procedural mysteries on TV and its own strengths lay elsewhere. Similarly, A Gifted Man could fore-go the medical shenanigans and let the characters and inherent conflicts carry the load.
If I’d gotten this review written earlier, as I intended to, it would have been an enthusiastic recommendation. Right now, I still am deriving pleasure from this accomplished cast interacting with a deft sense of humanity. But the script has to rediscover its integrity or it’s bye-bye to the good doctors of Holt Neuro and Clinic Sonando.
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