6 minutes ago Caution: Spoilers for the series premiere of New Amsterdam lied ahead. NBC’s new medical drama dropped a sizable shocker at the end of its series premiere. In the final moments of its debut episode, Dr. Helen Sharpe reveals that Max has cancer: squamous cell carcinoma, to be precise. Throughout the episode, New Amsterdam had hinted at the news that Max had subtly worked to avoid hearing. In delivering this twist, the show has taken its lead character from wearing the hat of only a doctor to also a patient. It is not as if Max needed the news to go through the experience of being a patient to sympathize with being one. He heralds a great deal of change to the hospital where he is now the medical direction, all for the sake of the patients. As he shares when addressing the staff earlier, it is from this first-hand experience of his sister dying (due to an infection she acquired in the hospital) that Max’s passion for curing a broken medical system is strongly anchored. In the same scene Helen delivers the diagnosis, Max shares that the room they are in was his late sister’s. It is a moment that brings the pilot full circle. In revealing Max’s own health crisis, New Amsterdam has put its lead character in the midst of a battlefield he had a slight distance from before being hit with the news. Whether the show takes the ball and runs with the depiction… [Read full story]
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