guess how long it took a cruise ship passenger on Doctor Odyssey to suffer a broken penis

I am a serious entertainment journalist

Sep 29, 2024

Something incredible is happening on Thursday nights. ABC has decided to turn its entire primetime schedule over to Ryan Murphy and his stable of cartoonish emergency shows. You knew some of this already, I assume, because you have seen or heard or read about 9-1-1 opening its eighth season with a three-episode arc about a funnel cloud of bees descending upon Los Angeles, the first of which aired this week and also featured Angela Bassett in an airplane with the man who killed her fiancé many years ago because, look, if you’re already committed to a bee-nado you might as well do it all. Is there a bee-related in-flight catastrophe? Is there an unrelated perfume launch party that ends with a personal assistant in a pool hiding from the bees while trying to breathe through a garden hose that the bees are flying into? Does Jennifer Love Hewitt spend most of the episode fielding emergency calls about bees? I think you know the answer to all of these is yes.

And yet, somehow, that’s not the story here. The story here is that at 9 pm, immediately after that show ended, a show called Doctor Odyssey premiered. Doctor Odyssey is a show about a cruise ship doctor played by Joshua Jackson. This is where you ask me an important question: “Brian, is Joshua Jackson’s character named Doctor Odyssey?” And it’s where I tell you that there are two answers to that question. The first is that, no, Odyssey is the name of the cruise ship and his character’s name is Max Bankman, which is also awesome. But this brings us to the second answer, which is “kind of,” because the cruise ship captain played by Don Johnson — Don Johnson is in Doctor Odyssey btw — just starts calling him “Doctor Odyssey” about halfway through the episode for reasons that are as unclear as they are unnecessary to investigate.

Anyway, guess how long it took for one of the cruise ship passengers on Doctor Odyssey to suffer a broken penis?

No, really, please think about this. Come up with a number of minutes. Think about how much time elapsed between the opening shot of the series and the screencap I just posted. I’ll tell you the answer soon.

But first, a few other things you need to know about the first episode of Doctor Odyssey…

— Rachel Dratch shows up in the premiere. She plays one half of a disaster-prone married couple. When we first meet them, her husband has given himself iodine poisoning by eating too many shrimp at the buffet. Later, the same man has to have an emergency tracheotomy — I suppose all tracheotomies are emergencies — because he suffered a broken clavicle on a water slide. It was lovely to see Rachel Dratch on network television again.

— A surfing champion takes ecstasy and falls overboard while showing off for a pretty girl and Doctor Odyssey has to dive into choppy ocean waters to save him.

— Doctor Odyssey and a jealous male nurse have a beach dance-off to Despacito because they’re both in love with the ship’s nurse practitioner, who Doctor Odyssey kind of hooks up with in his cabin before declaring it wrong and unprofessional and, yes, one expects this tension will continue as the season progresses.

— Doctor Odyssey reveals that the reason he, a massively overqualified physician, took a job as a cruise ship doctor is because he was patient zero in America for Covid and almost died in a Connecticut hospital and he decided to live life on a hunt for joy and pleasure from that moment on, which you can tell because he wears Hawaiian shirts a lot now.

— Joshua Jackson is kind of doing like a “what if Dr. House was outrageously handsome and charming?” thing here, which I support.

— I strongly suspect Don Johnson filmed all of his scenes for the entire season in a single day on set and I respect this very much.

The answer is 15 minutes, by the way. That’s how long it took for a passenger on the boat to suffer a broken penis. Like, almost exactly 15 minutes not counting the commercial breaks. On one hand, this is just a ridiculously fast introduction of a broken penis on a network television show, and almost certainly a record. On the other hand, in hindsight, I’m kind of surprised it took them this long to get to it. Also, Doctor Odyssey reveals that he, too, once broke his penis during lovemaking. But you probably suspected that.

We will continue to monitor this television program.

STUFF I TYPED

— this week’s Slow Horses Incompetence Index for Vulture

— this week’s Five Spot, which opens with a section about Cristin Milioti doing mesmerizing psycho eyes on The Penguin

STUFF I CLICKED ON

— Vulture has you covered on the disasters of 9-1-1 that led us to the bee-nado

— Max Read wrote about the internet’s slop problem

— most of you have probably seen the thing where John Mulaney roasted tech dorks to their faces but just in case you haven’t

— Bridgerton scam

— great piece by Matt Gelb about Bryce Harper being a fun little chatterbox at first base this season

— John Oliver and his team did a nice job with this segment on how weird and bumbled this country’s disability programs are

— bologna seizure

— cocaine bananas

— please relax about Chappell Roan

— I like this blog about being a people person because I am one too

— LSU’s solution to the problems related to keeping a live tiger around for football games is to… get a second tiger?

— Alaska Fat Bear Week

— T.I. and Tiny won a $71 million lawsuit over some dolls

— Bill Murray bartending in Philly

— “Online Scammers Posed as Brad Pitt to Get Cash, Spanish Police Say”

— “Missing Chihuahua returns after sausage enticement”

— Demi Moore’s dog is very smart

— burglars with same name arrested for same crime

— Shrinking is a good show but I’m sharing the season two trailer mostly because it features Hollywood icon Harrison Ford saying the phrase “You want me to pull my pants down and make my ass clap?”