If you want history, you'd watch a documentary. If you want period drama, you'd watch Downton Abbey or something similar. If you want comedy, you'd watch....well something that makes you laugh. This show has a crisis of identity because it wants to please us on 'a number of levels' and ends up becoming a rather feeble mish-mash of different genres.
Quacks centres around three medical pals, one a shwoman butcher surgeon performing his crude procedures to a baying audience, his sidekick dentist who discovers anaesthetics and an 'alienist' , the pre-Freudian psychologist.
Within this format, there is room for satire, dramatic action, slapstick and historical observations and it moves with pace and verve.
I found the production values rather impressive. the acting quite good and characters fairly vivid. But watch out for that 'rather', 'quite' and 'fairly' because it's telling you a lot about the strength of vision behind this show. Neither committed to an exposition of Victorian pioneer healthcare nor a script that delivers necessary drama or the expectant hilarity, Quacks stands as a promising premise that has lost its way in development.
It represents a trend in TV production for series that have humour but aren't funny, tell us something but don't really inform and create characters are just about sympathetic enough to carry off the undemanding plot requirements.
The result is interesting, it might hold your attention for while and deliver a genuine laugh in that time (mine arrived after about 20 minutes) but ultimately leaves you in a kind of puzzled limbo.
That laugh? It was a good one though. After proclaiming the new therapeutic tool of talking to mentally disturbed patients instead of hitting them on the head as the more enlightened way forward, our alienist found himself screaming to the jailer to hit the patient that was throttling him after he tried to read him poetry. Pythonesque? Learn from the masters the rules of satire if that's what you want to do but for goodness sake make up your mind what it is you want to do - and stick to it.
Review of Quacks
