We Must Not Let Them Take Doctor Odyssey From Us

ALSO: Racing Wienermobiles and a rumor confirmed

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: This is an emergency

Doctor Odyssey is in trouble. The show, I mean, not the character. Although the character has also been in a lot of trouble. There was an episode where most of the cruise ship’s crew unwittingly ingested psychedelic-laced taffy made by Amy Sedaris as the boat careened into a hurricane. There was a two-part episode we thought was going to be about sharks but was actually about orcas that had surrounded the boat after it had been left powerless in the ocean because one of the sharks chose to commit suicide by going kamikaze into the propeller rather than be defeated by the orcas. Also, and I promise I’ll move on in a second, the character isn’t actually named Doctor Odyssey. Odyssey is the name of the boat. The character, played by Joshua Jackson, is named Max Bankman, which sounds like it should be the name of a finance bro who suffers an unlikely but very funny medical malady in an episode of Doctor Odyssey. Something like “breaks his penis during vigorous intercourse,” but not exactly that, because literally exactly that already happened less than 20 minutes into the show’s very first episode. On network television. In primetime. It’s a special television program.

Which is why this next part is so upsetting: ABC went and renewed a bunch of its shows earlier this month (High Potential, Will Trent, etc.), but said… nothing… about Doctor Odyssey. The show isn’t “canceled” yet, but it’s not renewed, which has left it in limbo, which is weirdly kind of perfect given the thing where there’s a fan theory that the whole show takes place in purgatory as Max Bankman flutters between life and death in a Connecticut hospital as patient zero of the COVID pandemic back in 2020. Perfect, but still bad. According to a report in Deadline, a combination of the show’s sliding ratings as the season progressed and its high cost to produce — big names, big action sequences, etc. — could be enough for ABC to set it adrift.

And to that, I say: NO. Absolutely not. You can’t just give the world one season of the most deranged sea-based medical catastrophes in the history of television and then take it away because it costs too much. OF COURSE IT COSTS TOO MUCH. THAT’S THE POINT. A CGI SHARK SWAM FACE FIRST INTO A PROPELLER TO ESCAPE A CGI POD OF ORCAS. MARGO MARTINDALE AND JOHN STAMOS GUEST STARRED. THERE WERE TWO SEPARATE PREGNANCY SUBPLOTS. ONE OF THEM INVOLVED A THREESOME WHERE THE FATHER’S IDENTITY WAS UNKNOWN AND THE OTHER IS AN AS-YET-UNRESOLVED SITUATION WHERE SHANIA TWAIN IS CARRYING DON JOHNSON’S BABY. YOU CAN’T HAVE ALL THAT FOR FREE, PEOPLE. JESUS CHRIST.

I’m sorry for yelling. Kind of. I’m just upset. We get truly original things like this so rarely, especially on broadcast television. I just really like that it exists. I like that there’s a show on television that allows me to say things like “Joshua Jackson plays his own twin brother” or “one character on the show got iodine poisoning from eating too many shrimp and then a few episodes later a different character almost died from eating too many sweet potatoes.” The show isn’t even good, really. It’s a mess. But that’s the point. We need an ambitious and goofy mess every now and then. If you won’t listen to me, listen to John Oliver. John Oliver gets it.

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In a functioning society, one in which we valued art and the artists who make it, Doctor Odyssey would be funded entirely by the government or by a generous benefactor who was willing to eat the financial loss to give the people something beautiful. The Medici family did this during the Renaissance and it got us works by the masters that we revere today. This sentence almost certainly makes me the first person to compare the works of Michelangelo to a television show produced by Ryan Murphy, but, in my defense, Michelangelo never created a piece of art where someone’s surgically-altered fake nose fell off their face after doing cocaine on a cruise ship.

Bring it back.

FOUR: RACING WIENERMOBILES