If I’ve seen one medical drama, I’ve seen them all. No really, I’m fairly sure I have seen them all, or, at least, most of them — E.R., Grey’s Anatomy, Chicago Hope, Chicago Med — because medical shows fascinate me. I never did well in science classes, so I make up for that by watching fictional hospital dramas and then investigating what I see. That’s the same thing, right? Well, I hope so. Thankfully for me, the newest hospital drama to hit the air is Pure Genius, which follows the doctors in a cutting-edge, Silicon Valley hospital. And while the hospital from Pure Genius is not real, it still satisfies my medical-TV obsession just fine.
The hospital on the show is called Bunker Hill, and its medical center sits in the Silicon Valley among tech billionaires and the apps they call home. Tech mogul and billionaire James Drew has funded the hospital under the guise of wanting to be able to solve any medical problem. He has the funds to cure diseases, and by golly, he wants to do it. Bunker Hill is as state-of-the-art as state-of-the-art gets, and the treatments are provided absolutely free of charge. Oh, and his doctors? They’re mindlessly attractive, because Shonda Rhimes created McDreamy and McSteamy and all physicians must be created in their likeness forever and ever amen. Dermot Mulroney plays Chief of Staff Dr. Walter Wallace, who has a checkered past and a way with patients.
The technology of Pure Genius looks pretty cool — I know that the hospital is being funded by a tech genius, but I wouldn’t expect to be able to hold what looks like an Etch-A-Sketch over a pregnant woman’s torso and see the baby growing inside. The fancy screens and tablets that were added to Grey Sloan after all of the other doctors bought the hospital were impressive in my book, but this is more than a step up — it’s a mountain of elevation. I’m also very easily amused.
Sadly, though, Bunker Hill is not an actual, real hospital. In a land of rising insurance premiums and uninsured patients, can you imagine what it would be like to walk into a hospital and leave with no bills and no medical problems? That’s magic right there. While I don’t think that a hospital like Bunker Hill will exist soon, plans for something similar may be brewing. In September 2016, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced their plans to donate $3 billion (that’s billion, with a b) to, according to the Washington Post, “accelerate scientific research with the wildly ambitious goal of ‘curing all disease in our children’s lifetime.’” While their initiative is made up of a few drives, the biggest components involve creating technology to monitor blood for illnesses, creating a chip that can diagnose all (or most) diseases, and create so-called “virtual institutes” that “bring together investigators from around the world to focus on individual diseases or other goals.”
I don’t know about you, but that sort of sounds like the goal of Pure Genius, albeit on a much bigger field. Since Pure Genius was definitely in production prior to September, did Zuckerberg and Chan get their idea from a television program? Or did they just want to secure their legacy and do something great for the world? (I’m kidding — I’m sure it’s the latter and it’s a happy coincidence.) Pure Genius may have started out as a crazy idea, but here, life is imitating art.
Images: Sonja Flemming/CBS; Bill Inoshita/CBS; Colleen Hayes/CBS
