A new Bravo series, Complications, explores how a seemingly powerless everyman manages to find his own power in the worldGuy D’Alema
Does the world need another depiction of a disillusioned suburban male who gets pushed to the brink and then decides to stop playing by the rules? Matt Nix, creator of Complications, certainly thinks so. His new drama, airing on Bravo in Canada, casts Jason O'Mara as Dr. John Ellison, frustrated night-shift emergency-room doctor at Samaritan Hospital. He's a solid family man marked by personal tragedy and a calm, caring, "everything is going to be okay" demeanor, though it's immediately evident he's ready to burst at the seams. He's the type to lock himself in his family-appropriate car for a screaming session instead of showing anyone else his genuine emotions.
When Ellison witnesses a drive-by playground shooting while taking a wounded squirrel to the vet (yes, a wounded squirrel), something inside him gives, and he picks up a stray gun and starts firing. By killing a gang member in order to protect himself and a wounded child, the journey deep into the good doctor's unravelling begins. He's a stereotypically upright guy thrust into a world of questionable – though noble – choices, catalysing the audience's pretty standard examination of the uncertain nature of good and evil.
Right off the bat, though, Complications does an excellent job of tapping into everyone's errant fantasies of vigilante justice – admit it, you've had them. Ellison has a blank ordinariness that makes him easy to identify with; an exhausted everyman who upends the system to do what's right and develops a bit of a death wish in the process. Nix has spoken publicly about how the show was inspired by a gang member breaking into his own house a decade ago, making the show a personal investigation of how a seemingly powerless man gropes to find his own power. The result is a more tantalizing and identifiable premise for everyday joes than superheroes saving the day or detectives cracking the case – Ellison ends up quelling dramas at bloody crime scenes, yet is still charged with the task of picking up milk on his way home.
It's ultimately revealed that the boy bleeding on the pavement after the drive-by shooting is 12-year-old Antoine Tyler, son of Easy, a powerful imprisoned gang member. Easy gives Ellison a call to let him know keeping the kid safe is now his responsibility, and a few subtle threats and Ellison's empathy for Antoine's plight force him to take up the task. As opposing gang members fill the hospital to hunt down a healing Antoine, Ellison solidifies his hero status by acting aggressively against the siege. He's enjoying his new cathartic role as punch-throwing badass, pointing a gun in the face of a would-be child murderer.
There's an interesting exploration of masculinity here, one that suggests we fail as a culture at giving men the tools necessary to express both rage and sadness in healthy ways. While the hospital staff celebrates Ellison's heroism with a cake, the doctor grapples with an acknowledgment of the violence he now knows exists within him. There's also the lingering spectre of the loss of his daughter to cancer a year earlier; his panic attacks suggest he's failed to process his grief, in the interest of helping his (not-so-faithful) wife and son get through theirs. By protecting Antoine and engaging with a world of violence, he's delving into the feelings he's been taught to avoid – and he's enjoying every minute of it, as are we.
The show does a believable job of prodding the doctor's escalation, incident by incident, throwing a few unrelated though equally disillusioning patients into the mix. (A domestic violence victim who lies to protect her violent partner; a sweet yet disturbed young man who commits suicide after learning he's losing his foot to diabetes; a young, pretty heroin user who disappears after learning she has a heart infection.) Rather than these "cases of the week" becoming a distraction from the show's overall storyline, they actually buoy and reinforce it, allowing us to see more robustly into Ellison's character. When he finally does publicly lose it in a dramatic blaze of glory, the "life is terrible" tension has been built up sufficiently to make the whole affair believable and satisfying.
Complications is more than a little clumsy in its depiction of race, though, with good-to-goodish characters trending toward white, and bad-to-baddish characters largely cast as people of colour. There's also a stark divide between Ellison's picturesque family's suburban milieu, and the nefarious characters who invade it. The show's bad guys are saddled with a boring cartoonish villainy that does the show no favours. Easy's speech about how he loves his son so much that he shot the family dog in the head after the child developed an allergy is so overdramatic it's worth an eye-roll. In fact, there's an increasing absurdity to the show's dramatic arc, putting Complications squarely in the realm of "silly but hard to stop watching." The question of "how the hell are they going get out of this one?" comes up multiple times an episode, which makes for riveting – if exhausting – TV.
As Ellison's therapist points out of medicine, "some measure of playing God is necessary to do the job." Complications looks at what happens when a moral man loses patience with a punishing system, and decides to invest himself fully in his own ability to rewrite the rules. Although a standup guy taking matters into his own hands is something we've all seen before, Complications makes for entertaining if ridiculous television – a fast-paced hospital thriller with a solid narrative, shoving cliffhanger after cliffhanger at us until, whether we like it or not, we're gagging for more.