Summary
Breathless struggles to reconcile two conflicting identities and does little to stand out within a genre crowded by better shows.
Grey’s Anatomy and New Amsterdam and a smattering of other medical dramas have a lot to answer for. Netflix’s Breathless is an imitator from Spain set in a Valencia hospital and combining a lot of what gave those shows such staying power. It also fails to offer much new to compete with them, instead providing a comfortingly familiar alternative.
Well, there’s a bit of made-for-streaming gloss, actually. Everyone in the show is inexplicably good-looking, from the residents trying to get their medical licenses to the senior doctors. There’s no particular reason for this other than it helps from a marketing perspective, but to be fair this could also be a Spanish thing.
But generally speaking, you’ve seen it all before. Across eight episodes, Breathless – known as Respira in its native Spanish – throws one medical calamity after another at us in a procedural fashion, while teasing out relationships between the main characters and the supporting cast who drift in and out of their ambit.
The medical drama shares space with sillier and soapier stuff involving the personal lives of the residents, all of whom are burning the candle at both ends. Naturally, their personal dilemmas often spill out into the wards and surgery rooms, and the point is supposed to be how an overstretched health service pushes its employees to personal and professional breaking point. It can often feel like that, but sometimes it does admittedly feel like the need for Breathless to be “Elite but in a hospital” – the lead, Biel (Manu Ríos), is even recognizable from that show – is taking precedence over storytelling logic.
But whatever, right? You tune into a hospital drama for exactly that – drama. However the show decides to get there is, to be frank, kind of the show’s business. There might not be a direct correlation between a ripped physique and medical ability, but they’re not mutually exclusive. And nobody really wants realism in this kind of thing. It’s like those people who complain about war movies not being “realistic”, not realizing that the realism would be the lead doing nothing for six months and then dying of trench foot.
At least the subject is always topical. Hospitals are brutally strained the world over, and underpinning all of the more exaggerated surface-level stuff is a worthwhile story about a floundering health service and the people who are underpaid and overstressed to keep it running. Breathless adopts a familiar device of beginning in medias res and then cycling backward to show how we got to that point, and the anticipated event is a strike that you just know is going to be earned on the back of a great deal of trauma.
Presentation-wise Breathless is familiar too. The natural beauty of Spain crops up now and again but most of the action takes place indoors, understandably. Scrubs and beds and bedpans and scalpels are all universal sights and they help the audience to feel like they’re in familiar territory. Gore-hounds will also be satisfied by a fair helping of blood and guts in the line of duty.
As reassuring as all this is, one does wonder if it’ll be enough, both to separate Breathless from a dense crowd of rival shows and to balance the more serious elements with the more YA-style nonsense. I’m not sure there’s as much overlap in these target demos as the show would like, but time will tell in that regard.
But it’s an easy binge-watch, at least.
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