Medical Drama New Amsterdam Puts a Talented Ensemble Behind a Premise It Rarely Interrogates

New Amsterdam ran on NBC for five seasons and 89 episodes, from September 25, 2018 to January 17, 2023. It was created by David Schulner and based on the book Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Eric Manheimer. Its premise is simple and, on paper, strong: a new medical director arrives at one of the oldest public hospitals in the United States and sets out to tear up the bureaucracy so the place can care for patients again.

The show’s answer to that premise is four words. Dr. Max Goodwin, played by Ryan Eggold, responds to nearly every problem, large or small, with “How can I help?” It is a good line. It is also, across 89 episodes, almost the whole character.

Trailer, via Rotten Tomatoes TV.

Max Goodwin and the Four Words

New Amsterdam wants Max to be a disruptor. The hospital is underfunded and underappreciated, and he means to return it to the glory that put it on the map. The staff have heard this before, and the show knows they have heard it before. That skepticism is the most honest thing in the series, and it is also the thing the series keeps resolving too quickly.

Ryan Eggold carries the role with a straight face, which is more than the writing always deserves. Max is written as instinctive rather than clever, and the show mistakes motion for reform. He breaks rules. He does not often explain which rules, or what breaking them costs, or who pays. The four words arrive, the room softens, and the episode moves on.

That is a structural problem, not a performance problem. A hospital drama lives on the gap between what a doctor can fix and what the system will not let them fix. New Amsterdam opens that gap in the pilot and then spends five seasons closing it with speeches.

Lauren Bloom, Floyd Reynolds and the Ensemble

The cast is the reason to stay. Janet Montgomery plays Lauren Bloom, Jocko Sims plays Floyd Reynolds, Tyler Labine plays Iggy Frome, and Sandra Mae Frank plays Elizabeth Wilder. Freema Agyeman and Anupam Kher were cast in lead roles in the pilot, announced in February 2018, alongside Montgomery and Labine. Eggold and Sims joined the main cast in March 2018.

Sandra Mae Frank’s path through the show is worth noting. She was announced in August 2021 as a recurring cast member for the fourth season, then promoted to series regular for the fifth and final season in May 2022. That is a real vote of confidence in a performer, and it is the kind of move a show makes when it has finally figured out who its most interesting people are. It took New Amsterdam four seasons to get there.

The ensemble does what it can. Sims gives Reynolds a steadiness the scripts rarely reward. Montgomery gets the sharper material and mostly lands it. Labine, a comic actor by training, is asked to play a psychiatrist and is given almost nothing funny to do, which wastes him.

Five Seasons, One Argument

Here is the shape of the whole run, and it is worth seeing plainly.

Eighty-nine episodes is a long time to make one argument. The argument is that a good man with enough nerve can push a broken institution toward better care. The show never really tests that claim. It tests Max’s stamina, and Max’s stamina is infinite by design.

Compare the two things New Amsterdam says it is. It says it is about a system — underfunded, underappreciated, neglected. It also says it is about one man who will stop at nothing. Those are different shows. The first needs a writers’ room interested in money, politics and burnout. The second needs a hero. New Amsterdam chose the hero and kept gesturing at the system.

The Hospital That Never Quite Exists

The setting is the show’s best asset and its most wasted one. America’s oldest public hospital is a specific place with a specific clientele, and the series treats it mostly as a backdrop for Max’s rounds. Patients arrive, Max helps, patients leave. The bureaucracy he promised to tear up is a recurring obstacle rather than a structure — it has no budget line, no board, no union, no press.

That is why the show’s emotional beats land but its political ones do not. You can feel for a doctor. You cannot feel for a bureaucracy that exists only when the plot needs a wall.

The casting history tells a similar story of drift. Margot Bingham joined in a recurring role on September 26, 2018. Sendhil Ramamurthy came aboard in a recurring role on November 6, 2018. Frances Turner was cast in a recurring role for the third season on April 19, 2021. Michelle Forbes, Sandra Mae Frank and Chloe Freeman were announced for recurring roles in the fourth season in August 2021. That is five years of adding people to a show that never settled on what it was about.

What the Score Says

New Amsterdam holds a 4.7 out of 10. Metacritic puts it at 47 out of 100. That is a fair read, and it is not a read of the cast. It is a read of a series that had a genuinely good idea — a public hospital as a moral test — and spent 89 episodes avoiding the test.

The four words are the tell. “How can I help?” is a question, but the show always already knows the answer, and the answer is Max. A drama about an underfunded hospital should occasionally let the hospital win. New Amsterdam almost never does.

What is worth watching here is the ensemble, and specifically the late promotion of Sandra Mae Frank, which suggests the show’s instincts improved just as it ran out of time. What is not worth watching is the reform arc. It is a promise the series makes in 2018 and never pays off, because paying it off would require admitting that one medical director, however relentless, is not the unit of change.

The published critical score is 4.7/10. That is the right number. New Amsterdam is a competent network drama with a strong cast and a premise it could not bring itself to argue with.

4.7 of 10.

medical drama · NBC · New Amsterdam · Ryan Eggold · Sandra Mae Frank · TV Review