It’s Rivals at sea! It’s House on a boat – it’s Houseboat! Which is to say it’s Doctor Odyssey, the latest truly bananas offering from Ryan Murphy. It’s so bad and so fun. I commend it to you utterly and must equally advise against squandering a minute of your precious time on earth watching it.
So! To floating, sun-drenched business! We are on a luxury cruise liner called The Odyssey. The captain, Robert Massey, is Don Johnson, playing avuncular, because apparently we have all lived that long. Nurses Avery Morgan and Tristan Silva (Phillipa Soo and Sean Teale) are resentfully awaiting the arrival of the new doctor, whom they are assuming from his CV – Yale, peace corps, UN humanitarian prize winner – will be an arrogant old man who will treat them like skivvies. Ladies and gentlemen, who walks in but Pacey from Dawson’s Creek (Joshua Jackson), all grown up and now going by the excellently absurd name of Dr Max Bankman.
At first, he is a bit cocky and dismissive of patients. But the captain tells him people have saved up for years for a cruise: “We are tending to their dreams … Our mission is to keep these dreamers safe.” Not for the first, and far from the last time on our odyssey with the doctor, Harrison Ford’s comment to George Lucas about the Star Wars script – “You can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it” – floats across your mind like a dreamer in a top-deck swimming pool. But this pep talk, and missing a diagnosis of iodine poisoning by shrimp that Avery and Tristan work out (“I just didn’t know that a person could eat that much shrimp”) humbles him and brings him into his full George Clooneyesque kingdom.
You get three or four medical crises a show. As well as iodine poisoning, the first two episodes alone yield a penile fracture, a punctured windpipe and clavicular relocation (“He needs advanced thoracic surgery!”), near fatal Covid in flashback, the resuscitation of a man overboard, an outbreak of venereal disease, a dangerously dehydrated Venezuelan woman Analisa (Kassandra Cruz) picked up from a life raft, broken-heart syndrome and cardiac episodes brought on by diet powders. Truly, all of human life is here. I want you to understand – this is a show with Shania Twain as a guest star playing a character listed as “Grandma” on IMDb (Kayla Compton is “Granddaughter”) and the source of the VD outbreak is Glee’s Chord Overstreet playing “Syphilis Sam”. I cannot convey Doctor Odyssey’s essential nature to you better than this.
Amid all the medical drama, during which the three medics become a team (we know this because in the second episode as they tend to Analisa, Dr Maximum Banknote stops his vital work to announce “Becoming some kinda team, huh!”), we also learn that Avery wants to become a doctor, that Tristan is in love with Avery, that Avery and Dr Manbank fancy the Bankypants off each other, and that the captain is a widower still mourning his wife but not averse to letting Shania Grandma take his mind off that for a bit. We learn, too, that the slo-mo reunion of a couple, as one half disembarks a ship, has returned to the screen as a thing that can be done.
It is all, as I hope I made clear at the start, terrible and fun. It is discrete set pieces bunged together on a boat. Characters do not develop, shifts in relationships make no emotional sense. The scene in which Avery discovers the cruise line offers med school scholarships is … I have no words. But at the centre of everything, it has Joshua Jackson performing some kind of miracle; playing his part in absolute good faith, pitching it perfectly no matter what new narrative or tonal bonkersness is unfolding round him, grounding it somehow, and yet transcending it at the same time. It is a wondrous thing. I can’t take my eyes off him. It’s the greatest, most extended magic trick ever. Maybe it is worth 13 hours of our precious time on earth. Five stars for him alone. Without him, none.
• Doctor Odyssey is on Disney+ now.
