TV Review - Doogie Kamealoha, M.D.

If one remembers the premise to Doogie Howser, M.D. (1989), this series will be familiar. It's about a child genius who manages to complete medical school and actually be hired as a doctor before turning 16. It's about a teenage prodigy, juggling duties in a hospital with the experiences of still being a teenager. The 1989 series centered on a white boy living in Los Angeles. This one instead focuses on a Hawaiian girl living in the Aloha State. This series is another in an increasing trend of TV shows from the 70's, 80's and 90's that are getting remade with persons of color in the leads. Other examples include One Day at a Time (2017), Charmed (2018), Roswell, New Mexico (2019), Party of Five (2020), Fantasy Island (2021) and recently The Wonder Years (2021).

Most of these remakes have been with Latino and African-American casts. When it came to other minorities, such as Asian or even Native American casts, the trend was lacking. That is until this year. The CW's Kung Fu (2021) perhaps heralded a change in the winds of representation for Asian-American people. There still remains few shows in general with an Asian lead or a predominantly Asian cast, especially one that isn't about martial arts. Fresh Off the Boat (2015) was a welcome exception, particularly for Americans of East Asian heritage. What has been left out of the equation are Asian people from other parts, like Southeast Asians or Pacific Islanders. NBC's Young Rock (2021) was a step in the right direction in light of the AAPI hate crimes that the United States has seen in the past year.

Peyton Elizabeth Lee (Andi Mack and Shameless) stars as Lahela Kameāloha, a 16-year-old medical doctor. She actually works at the Oahu Health Medical Center where she treats actual patients, diagnosing them and even performing surgeries. She's a prodigy, a child genius who excelled to this point on her intellectual merits. She's very book smart and learned academically. However, she's not as smart socially and she can be a bit awkward or confused when it comes to interacting with her fellow teenagers. Her real education will come in her various social encounters.

Obviously, when a TV show is made about a professional, whether it's a doctor or lawyer or anything else, the default position is that the subject is the best professional of anyone else around them. This is true of Lahela. Yes, we need to know that she's a good doctor, in fact a great one. She would have to be in order to be 16 and working as a resident in an actual hospital. Clearly, she's an over-achiever. When it comes to her work as a doctor, she's almost perfect, never makes a mistake. Hopefully, one would want a hospital to be so good at their hiring and human resources department that every doctor working in its emergency room or anywhere else is top-notch. However, this series does so in a way that pushes the line of the "model minority" trope, a trope that NBC's Transplant (2020) was guilty of doing. Transplant was another medical series.

Kathleen Rose Perkins (I Am Not Okay With This and Fresh Off the Boat) co-stars as Clara Hannon, the mother to Lahela. She seems to be married and living with Lahela's father. Yet, she doesn't have the same last name. She's a great mom, but she's also a career woman. She's a doctor too. She's in fact the doctor that's overseeing Lahela's residency. She does have two other children. She has two sons, one that is older than Lahela and one that's younger. She feels a little bad about her work when she can't spend as much time with her sons. Her sons though don't seem too bothered by that. They more take after their father.

Jason Scott Lee (The Jungle Book and Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story) also co-stars as Benny Kamealoha, the father to Lahela. He worked as a stock trader, probably for Wall Street. He now owns a food truck that only sells shaved ice and flowers for leis. He's also an avid surfer. His food truck is parked near the beach and he seems to like going into the ocean on his board on a regular basis. He's very much a surfer stereotype, very laid back, very easy-going and very happy-go-lucky. He's also very much a model minority too.

Even the father to Leave It To Beaver (1957) made mistakes and wasn't so perfect and the show would frequently make that point. Benny is too bubbly and too perfect. With a supposed wife who's white, he could be accused of being a Manic Pixie Dream Boy. The only rebuttal comes in the seventh episode when Benny is told that he's too old to surf among the younger surfers in a surfing competition. He comes to doubt his ability to go into the water and perhaps be athletic in the water. In the episode, he's told that being 45 or older puts him in a senior category. In real-life, Jason Scott Lee is in his 50's, so it seems odd that he wouldn't have known about this distinction in the surfing competition. Even if Benny had just turned 45 and is just too youthful to consider himself a senior, the show shows the only other senior surfers as men being in their 60's, 70's or 80's, and Benny seems as though he's the only surfer in his 40's or 50's. Yet, the idea that he would be the only surfer in that borderline age group feels ridiculous. The idea that Benny doesn't know any surfers who are on that bubble age of 45 or his age feels preposterous.

Another preposterous thing is that this is a medical show that doesn't acknowledge the COVID-19 pandemic. I understand that this series is a comedy that wants to be light and fluffy. It's more the responsibility of medical dramas to tackle the pandemic, even though there are some medical dramas like ABC's General Hospital that don't acknowledge the pandemic. That show has always been criticized for its lack of hospital reality. This series is so much about getting this girl into the hospital that to see hospital scenes and nobody wearing a mask is a little disconcerting. Seeing how the pandemic has affected or is affecting teenagers would have been something different this series could have done, instead of aping some of the things from the 1989 series and other things from teen stories that are now cliché like her wanting to get her driver's license after she already has her medical license.

Putting the pandemic aside, there are other things that aren't really acknowledged. First off, Lahela works as a doctor, so she must get paid for her work. She must get some kind of salary. However, the series never acknowledges that she's making this money. Even if she just started her residency, there's no acknowledging what she's doing with her newfound income. I would imagine that a good chunk of it would go toward paying off student loans. Yet, it's unclear how she paid for medical school. In the third episode, she wants a car, but it felt absurd that she never considered buying one herself, especially since she could probably afford to get her own as a doctor.

The series goes out of its way to bring TikTok and other social media. However, in the second episode, she has to go through medical files that are on paper in boxes in a basement. It's a wonder why those files haven't been made digital or uploaded to a computer database at this point. The show always wants to show how brilliant she is, but, again, it's a little insufferable because the show occasionally makes the people around her seem really dumb by comparison. For example, Lahela, her brother, her best friend and her boyfriend go to an Escape Room, and everyone except for her are made to seem so dumb that they can't figure it out. You don't have to make someone seem smart by making everyone around them seem so dumb. There's even a scene where she pushes some lifeguards aside to perform a medical procedure, but the show makes the lifeguards feel like they're so dumb that they can't figure out what she's doing or why.

There are a lot of things in this series that reminded me of other teen comedies, but the one that came to mind the most was Love, Victor (2020). The second season of Love, Victor was much improved and much better than this one. Also, it must be pointed out that Alex Aiono who plays Walter, the love interest to Lahela, is basically a younger version of her father. Yet, no one ever points out that she's basically dating her dad.

Rated TV-PG.
Running Time: 30 mins. / 10 eps.

Available on Disney Plus.