'This Is Going to Hurt': An honest look at how doctors suffer in a punishing system
The opening shot of the new series This Is Going to Hurt finds a man we will later learn is Adam
played by Ben Whishaw, asleep.
His mouth hangs open. We are so close to him that it's hard to tell where he is.
A distant sound wakes him enough that he tries to drag himself out of sleep, and the camera pulls back and rotates.
It retreats and turns disorientingly, until we see that Adam is asleep in his car, behind the wheel, and his phone is vibrating.
He never made it home to his partner the night before; he left work and went dead to the world for whatever hours of sleep he could scavenge.
And now it's time to do it all over again.
Adam is a young doctor on the OB/GYN ward of a hospital.
The series, made by AMC and the BBC and first shown in the U.K., is based on a memoir of the same name by Adam Kay, who spent several years as a doctor working for the National Health Service.