Forget all you know about medicals drama, ’cause The Resident is so far away from our comfort zone; far away from E.R., Grey’s Anatomy, Chicago Med or The Good Doctor.

Fox‘s new drama is a pessimistic and cynical look of what, luckily not so often, goes on in corporatized  healthcare.

What makes The Resident even more interesting is that in it you can found it all: from dramatic medical emergencies to wild hookups in empty break-rooms.

Matt Czuchry (Gilmore Girls’ Logan Huntzberger; The Good Wife’s Cary Agos) is the handsome senior resident Conrad Hawkins. Conrad is an excellent doctor with the worst attitude you could ever imagine. He is a renegade who doesn’t play by the rules; he runs by the hospital with an eleven o’clock shadow and a hoodie, drinking energy cans and trowing their contents on expensive cars parked without rights in handicap parking spots.

In the pilot that premiered on Fox Monday January 22nd, the new resident Devon Pravesh (Manish Dayal, 90210) has the opportunity to know of his own experience the worst of Conrad.

If Matt Czuchry leads the show, we have a marvellous male wingman in Bruce Greenwood (Young Justice, Mad Men). The first scene of the pilot shows exactly what The Resident is going to be. We are in a surgery. Chief surgeon and local star that his face hovers on billboards and buses around town, Randolph Bell is doing a routine appendectomy while his staff takes selfies by the operating table. But Randolph is hiding something all seems to know about his health…a quick tremor of his hands and in a heartbeat (sorry for the pun) the team finds itself to deal with the dying patient’s blood flowing like the water in the Niagara Falls. Bell finds a plausible explanation to cover-up his mistake on the spot and…well, he is the boss so all the team pretend to believe it. Bell leaves the surgery leaving bloody footprints behind and this seems to make even more real the nickname the younger surgeons gave him: Hodad (Hands of Death and Destruction). He is a despicable blackmailer who makes very clear his medical philosophy: he runs a hospital, a hospital needs money to survive; so he’s willing to do whatever it takes to make money.

But Conrad idea about what means being a doctor is different and from the end of the pilot he engages this inner battle with Bell. By Conrad‘s side is the nurse and ex-girlfriend Nic (an extraordinary Emily VanCamp, Revenge, Everwood). Through their relationship and the one between Conrad and his patients, we start to look at him with different eyes from the 2nd episode: The Independence Day.  We meet a man who is generous and giving with his cases and who is trying to win his significant one’s heart back.

Matt Czuchry (The 19th Wife, Friday Night Lights, Swimming Upstream, Young Americans) as Conrad is the new Maverick. Czuchry‘s charming screen presence is well known already. But the way he can engage the audience with his character from the beginning is unbelievable as much as rare in recent TV’s drama. And Emily VanCamp as Nic is the best leading actress we could wish for.

“It’s not easy. If it were, everyone would be a doctor because it’s the best job in the world, despite everything, because of everything. I’ll see you tomorrow.”