‘The Night Shift’: Watch while you’re doing something else
He’s a hard-drinkin’, bar-fightin’, chopper-ridin’, rule-breakin’, authority-defyin’ son of a gun.
On a better series, he’d also be interesting.
TC Callahan (Eoin Macken) is the rebellious, rock star life saver at San Antonio Memorial Hospital on “The Night Shift” (10 p.m. Tuesday, KSNV-TV, Channel 3), which is not that better series.
It’s a series with a patient whose cat shredded his testicles.
It’s a series with a box of random objects, including a softball, a maraca and a “#1 DAD” trophy, that have been removed from patients’ rectums.
And it’s a series that would rather tell than show.
“TC is such a badass,” one intern (Robert Bailey Jr.) says to another (Jeananne Goossen). “Army Ranger. Battlefield doc. Top of his class at Johns Hopkins med. I Googled him.”
“The night shift is not like the day shift. It’s an undisciplined zoo,” the hospital’s new bureaucratic boss (Freddy Rodriguez) tells the day shift supervisor (Jill Flint) who’s applying for the same job on the night shift.
“Half the shift is ex-military, so, you know, they work hard and they play hard,” she responds.
And on and on it goes.
Ultimately, “The Night Shift” is like the medical equivalent of the network’s “Chicago Fire”: pretty people you barely care about saving the lives of less-pretty people you don’t care about at all while you pay bills, fold laundry or play with your phone.