Netflix’s Lenox Hill, The Cure For The Common Coronavirus*

*At Least, The Cure for America’s Politically Divided Version of COVID-19

Wading into a cool pool of water, hungover.

Bringing a Miller Lite and30mg of CBD into a shower after a long afternoon of yard work.

Entering an air-conditioned room on a 90 degree day.

That’s what Netflix’s Lenox Hill is for the soul.

Are all those metaphors heat related because it’s been getting hotter and hotter in Minnesota and I’m a Pole who wilts in the heat like so many of our famed sausages?

Yes.

But all that heat, that hard work, that hangover, is life. Particularly so in 2020. Lenox Hill is the antithesis. Watching it feels like the opposite of watching the news.

The docuseries – which just added an addendum, COVID-focused, episode – follows “two brain surgeons, an emergency room physician, and a Chief Resident OBGYN” around the only hospital in New York City to be in America’s Top 100 Hospitals in 2018, one of the years in which it was filmed.

While it is heart puncturing in its most emotional moments – and there are plenty of those – the overall tone is calm and peaceful; the eye of the storm.

A Blue Ivy Aesthetic

There are no narrators in the halls of the hospital where Blue Ivy was born.

The lights of the hospital are a cooling blue.

Handheld cameras float behind the characters of Lenox Hill – the warmhearted Chairman, the savvy-but-sincere experimental neurosurgeon, the kind, sparky commander of the ER night shift, the resident on the rise, calming to birthing mothers – as they talk directly to us: in between patients, through hallway conversations with other doctors, on trips, during surgery (I didn’t know doctors did this), down to the pathology lab.

The spacing in the dialogue, also known as “talking”, is natural. The pauses are contemplative, giving the show a tranquility that isn’t found in the overly dense, often overwritten, rapid-fire conversations that fill most television scripts in 2020. (News read from teleprompters not discluded).

There are no direct-to-camera interviews removed from the work place. Because of this, we the audience become the camera, the physicians talk to us as if we were shadowing them.

In real-time we are told what these doctors are thinking, the considerations they’re weighing, the reasoning behind their decisions.

It’s comforting to be a disemobided spirit floating around a hospital while smart people tell you what they’re doing.

It’s even more comforting to know that people who really care, who do the hard work of giving a fuck day in and day out, are out there helping the most vulnerable among us.

Leadership

When Governor of Minnesota, Tim Waltz started holding daily briefings on the coronavirus outbreak I remember thinking, “why is the governor telling me this?”

I couldn’t get over the fact that Walz, a non-doctor, was giving me a lot of doctor-like information.

It was a situation I had never encountered before: a leader leading in a true emergency.

My second thought was that this must be what leadership looks like: a person with power organizing the best and brightest people needed to take on the situation at hand.

Organizing is the key word there. No one else in our society can organize talent and resources at such a high level, at such a rapid rate.

I’ve never lived in such an emergency.

I’ve become accustomed to politics and the news being something I can think about, have an opinion on, debate.

But in the case of the initial coronavirus outbreak, over those first few weeks when life was changing, there was no amount of information gathering that I could possibly do on my own, that a person in power – like a governor, or, god forbid, a president – couldn”t do much better.

The actions of the governors of America during the coronavirus outbreak have had a crystallizing effect on my understanding of the responsibilities of power.

The president’s actions – a photo-negative inversion of the governors’ – have had that same crystallizing effect.

When those in power don’t take responsibility, those below them scramble, dividing themselves along pre-existing divisions. In America’s case, political party lines.

Watching Lenox Hill is watching compassionate, responsible, capable, leaders leading in compassionate, responsible, and capable ways.

Even when those leaders are telling a patient’s families that their child died during an experimental treatment, even when they’re making the decision to end a new mother’s natural delivery and move her to the OR, even when they’re long-term patient, one you’ve grown to root for, passes away, the leaders at Lenox Hill convey a reassuring knowledge: that not only is there good in the world, but that that good is really smart and really capable.

This reassurance, along with a blue-light, contemplative vibe, make Lenox Hill the perfect ending to a long day in COVID America.