The relentless nature of hospital life for doctors, nurses and interns is already physically, intellectually and emotionally demanding. It is a space in which interns are applying the medical training of their university years to actual human patients in life-or-death scenarios. Simultaneously, they are navigating the internal politics of the hospital: a hierarchy of doctors, outsized egos, well-established friendships and professional partnerships, and the architectural maze of rooms and beds.
In French drama series Interns, Alyson, Hugo and Chloé have their jobs cut out for them when they arrive at the public hospital where they work, deprived of the expertise and guidance of the doctors normally on duty. Emergency health measures have forced the doctors in the Internal Medicine department into quarantine for 24 hours, leaving the three unsupervised interns, a team of nurses and pathologist Arben Bascha to care for the patients.
Creator and writer Thomas Lilti’s multi-award-winning series takes a more comprehensive journey through the characters and their personal stories than his 2014 film Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor. Based on Lilti’s actual experience as a doctor, each episode of Interns (Hippocrate in the original French title) is gripping in its believability, stylistically poised between reality TV and polished drama (more ER meets Survivor than Scrubs, say).
Arben (Karim Leklou) and Alyson (Alice Belaïdi) under pressure in ‘Interns’. Source: © Denis Manin / 31 Juin Films / Canal+
The camera lingers on each of the intern’s visages as they contemplate possible disaster or urgently argue over how to save a life. But it also captures the sparkling moments where they laugh childishly, with relieved abandon perhaps, that they are together and they are doing this, despite the absurdity of the world.
Determined Alyson (Alice Belaïdi) arrives for her first day and meets Hugo (Zacharie Chasseriaud), who is both burdened and privileged by his mother’s job as head of the hospital’s ICU; ambitious, forthright Chloé (Louise Bourgoin), a senior intern who is hiding a major health concern of her own; and coroner Arben (Karim Leklou).
Chloé (Louise Bourgoin) in ‘Interns’. Source: © Hassen Brahiti / 31 Juin Films / Canal+
Every viewer will be drawn to one of the characters more so than the others, as is the nature of all human magnetism. Like finds like. It may be the overwhelmed, vulnerable Hugo, the quietly reliable and resilient Arben or the confident Chloe. Chloe is hard to shift your eyes from, a force of nature driven by hard-wired perfectionism, but also a fear of her heart defect being discovered, which could put her job at risk.
Both Chloe and Hugo can be cocky and impetuous. Sometimes, dangerously so. When a teenage girl is admitted following her sixth suicide attempt, Hugo glances at the report, declares it “looks like a sham attempted suicide” and casually, even cheerfully, says he can handle it. Alyson, by stark contrast, is out of her depth and incapable of disguising it. Her first patient in the geriatrics ward is dead by the time she goes to examine him. In a flux, she presses the emergency alarm and shakily dials ICU. An attending nurse gently feels for a pulse, then suggests Alyson ring his family, not ICU.
Their lack of awareness is forgivable to a degree. They are young and they are confronted by wards full of humans dependent on their knowledge and treatment. That’s an enormous existential pressure to operate under, and yet, they are the only lifeline these patients have.
Hugo (Zacharie Chasseriaud) and Chloé (Louise Bourgoin) face off in the cafeteria. Source: © Denis Manin / 31 Juin Films / Canal+
Dr Muriel Wagner (Anne Consigny), head of the ICU and Hugo’s mother. Source: © Denis Manin / 31 Juin Films / Canal+
“Aren’t the patients freaked?” Alyson asks her colleagues, when she is initially told that no doctors are present.
“They don’t know,” Hugo blithely responds.
In the second season of Interns, the young doctors face a new crisis: a pipe bursts in the emergency department, and patients and staff have to move to the general medicine area, creating havoc.
Dr Manuel Simoni (Eric Caravaca) helps the interns from quarantine at home. Source: © Denis Manin / 31 Juin Films / Canal+
Watch Interns for the drama, the humanity and the entertainment, but also for the insight into the medical world we are all likely to interact with throughout our lives to varying extents. We must never forget that doctors are fallible, they are human, but they hold our well-being in their hands and if we can’t trust that it matters to them, then both their lives and ours bear little hope.
