15 Best Medical Shows Of All Time, Ranked

In its eight decades of existence as a medium, scripted television has been mediated by certain bedrock genres. There’s the family-centric soap opera, the crime drama, the workplace sitcom … and there is, of course, the medical show, which has proven in those decades to have virtually inexhaustible appeal for both comedy and drama.

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With a good team of storytellers and a strong cast of actors in tow, the sky’s the limit to what depths of feeling and engagement can be drawn from the experiences of medical professionals and their daily efforts to care and do no harm — and TV, with its structural affinity for individual “cases,” may just be the ideal medium to mine those depths.

To prove it, we’ve compiled a ranking of the 15 greatest medical shows of all time. Because this is a universal genre pretty much wherever there are TV studios and networks, the list’s only rule is being limited to English-language shows.

It’s impossible to talk about the history of medical shows, or about the history of primetime soaps, or about the history of American television, period, without talking about “Grey’s Anatomy.” There’s a reason the Shonda Rhimes-created series has been going for a whopping 21 seasons (as well as a couple spin-offs), enduring through massive cast and crew overhauls, changes in the television landscape, and all highs and lows experienced by ABC in that time. Few other shows in any genre have ever stoked such affection between their characters and their audience.

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During the show’s prime — roughly corresponding to the first six seasons before Katherine Heigl’s Izzie Stevens left – following the various dramatic events and the web of interlocked relationships at the Seattle Grace Hospital felt like checking in on family, every apocalyptic twist amplified by the weight of shared history. Even as the seasons went on and numerous fan favorites joined and/or left the cast, that sense of history endured, as did an impressive measure of quality control for a show that could well have exhausted its own possibilities 10 years ago. Thankfully, it largely remains addictive, emotionally compelling character-driven TV.

The environment of a hospital emergency department is one so fraught with risk, tragedy, grief, exhaustion, and necessary desensitization to the daily grind of keeping watch over human life that a medical show like “Nurse Jackie” — a dark dramedy in the kind of risk-taking, no-holds-barred spirit that was taking over television at the turn of the 2010s — would have been almost inevitable.

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Yet, far from coasting on the inherent pathos/humor balance of ER life, the Edie Falco-starring Showtime series proved itself one of the most compelling, incisive, and underrated shows in the dark antihero boom of the late 2000s. Over seven seasons, “Nurse Jackie” offered a portrait of addiction and the process of wrestling with one’s demons that never quite settled into comfort or easy viewing, yet always rang true. 

Falco’s Jackie Payton went down as one of the most fascinating and thrillingly multifaceted female characters in all of 21st century television, and the ensemble cast around her met her at her level every step of the way, with Merritt Wever (who found emotional depth in dating a duck on Apple TV+’s “Roar”) shining especially bright in the role of Zoey Barkow.

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The groundwork for all contemporary medical shows was, like many things in contemporary television, laid in part by David E. Kelley. Specifically, Kelley’s 1994 hospital-set ensemble drama “Chicago Hope” played a major part in establishing a blueprint for slower, more patient, less crisis-driven medical series with a strong emphasis on character development, complex themes, and the medical substance of the cases themselves.

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Following a team of brilliant, top-of-their-field surgeons at a fictional Chicago hospital, the CBS show was often cast under the bigger and more successful shadow of NBC’s “ER,” which aired its first six seasons concurrently with it. But “Chicago Hope” ultimately managed to stand out thanks to its first-rate writing and acting. It’s a show that pioneered the idea of the medical problem as a stage upon which the characters could act out their personal crises, worries, and conflicts, revealing more and more of themselves by the means through which they chose to assess each case — a concept pulled off with the help of a truly legendary cast, many names out of which have since deservedly become television royalty.

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If ever a show stuck to a formula from episode to episode with almost ritual consistency, it was Fox’s “House.” But the genius of “House M.D.” in its best episodes was not dissimilar from the genius of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” novels, which similarly followed certain patterns, and from which the David Shore-created series drew more than a little inspiration: In both instances, the fun was in the riffing.

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Watching Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) lead his team of diagnosticians in cracking a different bizarre medical mystery each week shouldn’t be so persistently enthralling, and yet it was. There were endless reserves of fascination to be had in wondering just how the show’s writers would keep one-upping their own labyrinthine scenarios, creating puzzles that would somehow reveal insights about character and morality and interpersonal conflict as they were gradually solved and unsolved and solved again. And Laurie, of course, held down the fort with one of the most imperial, attention-commanding, hypnotically abrasive performances in TV history, getting viewers to care about every little step, however tenuous or fruitless, in the possible spiritual salvation of a near-irredeemable man.

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It is not always mentioned, when we look back on the history of American TV and the various breakthroughs that took place within it as society changed around it, that the first show to be centered around a Black woman who was not a servant or slave was a medical series. The trailblazing nature of NBC’s “Julia” didn’t stop there, either: Diahann Carroll’s Julia Baker was also a widowed single mother working to provide for and raise her son (Marc Copage).

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A vanishingly rare early-period sitcom that completely dispensed with a laugh track, “Julia” was a lot more grounded, thoughtfully-written, and even cinematic than the average comedy series from that period. Carefully balancing a host of entertaining personalities around Julia Baker in her job as an aerospace company nurse, the show’s humor came from the development of conflicts and situations rather than from pratfalls or snarky punchlines. Yet “Julia” was no less funny or charming for that, and through it all, Carroll’s portrayal of a smart, skilled, compassionate, independent Black woman broke new, crucial ground in American television.

Created by doctor-turned-writer Jed Mercurio as an adaptation of his own eponymous novel, “Bodies” is notable as one of the TV shows to have dealt most directly, in all of English-speaking television, with the dark, agonizing reality of medical care under a strained system. Taking place in a fictional West Yorkshire hospital, the BBC Three show completely dispenses with any idealism and features sober and non-sensationalistic yet extremely graphic violence, all in the name of addressing head-on the horrors faced by National Health Service professionals at the time.

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Boosted by incredibly sharp writing and a cavalier frankness about the scale of negligence, corporatism and corruption affecting the lives of doctors, nurses and patients alike at the South Central Infirmary, “Bodies” was at times almost too dark to take, with each of its 17 episodes making up its own full-throttle descent into myriad different hells. Yet it was never anything less than crucial television — both as a corrective to any number of comparatively dishonest medical series released in the U.K. and elsewhere over the decades and as a callout of a broken system in urgent need of change.

Several American TV shows have endeavored to reflect on the Vietnam War, but few have done it as successfully as “China Beach.” Airing for four seasons and 62 episodes between 1988 and 1991, the ABC series was, in some ways, a kind of straightforwardly dramatic response to “M*A*S*H” and its irreverent antics, similarly using a U.S. army hospital as an extreme microcosm of the madness of war at large.

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Set on My Khe beach in Da Nang, Vietnam, nicknamed “China Beach” by Americans during the war, “China Beach” largely follows the staff at a fictional evacuation hospital, many of whom — including de-facto protagonist, army nurse Colleen McMurphy (Dana Delany) — are women. The show attentively follows as idealistic volunteers and begrudging draftees alike deal with the process of understanding war as an actual lived experience, and gradually reckon with its soul-draining toll. As if that weren’t enough to make it a brutal, sobering watch, “China Beach” also incorporates the bitter experiences of those who return, deeply and permanently altered, to the United States.

A show in the tradition of “Bodies” that somehow managed to go even further in scaring up intensity through a deglamorized view of medical work, the BBC One miniseries “This Is Going to Hurt” brilliantly adapts the eponymous nonfiction book by series creator Adam Kay, which consists of a series of diary entries written by Kay during his NHS medical training.

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Sticking to the same degree of no-holds-barred intimacy, the show follows a fictionalized Kay (Ben Whishaw), his friend Shruti Acharya (Ambika Mod), and the rest of the staff in an obstetrics and gynaecology ward in a constantly bustling NHS hospital. With a “Fleabag”-esque formal conceit in which the characters sometimes directly address the audience and discuss their problems, the show delivers heartfelt laughs by folding the various calamities of life as an overworked junior obstetrician — always depicted realistically and with minimal embellishment — into a taut, dynamic, nerve-wracking journey that nonetheless teems with scrumptious snark, irony, and dark wit. At just seven episodes, it is one of the most incredible feats of sustained fever-pitch storytelling ever to be set within the corridors of a hospital.

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Not every long-running TV series actually goes to the trouble of using its length in dramaturgically expedient ways, but BBC One’s “Call the Midwife” has been proving since January 2012 that quality television can be an endlessly renewable asset.

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Following the nurse midwives at an Anglican convent in midcentury London and their struggle to provide adequate healthcare to the impoverished East End community, “Call the Midwife” begins its story in 1957, and each of its 14 seasons proceeds to angle on a different year and a different set of social, political, and medical themes.

Incidentally, thanks to sharp writing and an ensemble of incredible actresses who understand their characters to the marrow, nearly every single one of those seasons has proved to be its own mini-masterpiece of crowd-pleasing yet artistically ambitious storytelling. Taken together, the whole of “Call the Midwife” has the feel of a great epic novel — a density of feeling, observation, and human texture that feels almost miraculous for a show that has become so popular and been going so long.

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Following a group of interns and physicians at the fictional Sacred Heart Hospital in California, NBC and ABC’s “Scrubs” was a show that somehow managed to split the difference between a goofy, delirious live-action cartoon and an emotionally searing account of the ups and downs of life in a hospital — an impressive high-wire act even before you take into account that it managed to do both things so exceedingly well.

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A defining early-2000s transitional show that would have never worked as a traditional multi-camera sitcom and helped usher the genre into the zippy, fast-paced single-camera era, “Scrubs” was amazing at simply scoring laughs. Its cast and writers’ room were uniformly locked into a precise, riotously entertaining wavelength of surrealist comedy that made each episode, each scene, and each gag feel like a foray into untapped possibility. 

But behind the gags, “Scrubs” was also amazing at dramatically situating each of its characters, charting compelling paths for them over the years, and telling heartfelt, occasionally gut-wrenching stories about the pain they were fond of evading through silliness and snark. Few medical shows in history have so thoroughly understood hospitals as fundamentally absurd, burlesque, tragicomic places.

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Back in the 1980s, the concept of dense, fully serialized dramatic television that took active effort and engagement to keep up with was still rather novel. Two shows that played a major part in changing that reality were NBC’s “St. Elsewhere” and “Hill Street Blues,” which took formats that usually lent themselves to low-maintenance case-of-the-week levity — the medical show and the cop show, respectively — and built epic, gritty, novelistic narratives within them.

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In the case of “St. Elsewhere,” it was a gamble that proved particularly fruitful, because no other show had ever explored the tragedy and the nuances of life in a hospital with quite the same frankness and depth. Set in St. Eligius hospital, a run-down Boston teaching hospital given the titular nickname due to its reputation as a dumping ground for patients who couldn’t be welcomed at better-equipped institutions, “St. Elsewhere” grappled fearlessly and intensely with the difficulties of medicine practiced under financial strain. Its weaving of intricate multi-season storylines involving a vast number of characters changed American TV forever by showing just how far the format could be taken with a little imagination — all the way up to a controversial ending that fans still argue about to this day.

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After decades of reiterations of the same basic formulas left the medical drama template feeling somewhat stale, Max’s “The Pitt” brought the genre roaring back into the center of the critical zeitgeist and emerged as the best new medical drama in years. Not only that, but by mining every possible drop of potential out of an ingenious “24”-esque real-time conceit, “The Pitt” has already written itself into TV history books with one of the most gripping and emotionally overwhelming debut seasons of all time.

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Created by R. Scott Gemmill and starring Noah Wyle leading an impressive ensemble cast, the show follows, on its first season, the progress of a single draining and chaotic shift at the emergency room of the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital, with each episode charting one of the shift’s 15 interminable hours. It’s a template that allows for a nearly unheard-of sense of immediacy and vividness in the exploration of the physicians’ conflicts, worries, and unattended demons. It’s still early to size up the impact and cultural importance of “The Pitt,” but, in terms of sheer brilliance of writing, acting, and direction, it’s already safely up there with the TV greats.

One of the most popular, iconic, successful, and influential TV series of all time, the endlessly groundbreaking anti-war sitcom “M*A*S*H” began its life as a spin-off of the eponymous 1970 Robert Altman film. Yet the shadow that the TV version of “M*A*S*H” cast over American culture was ultimately so great that it’s now arguably more common for the movie to be thought of as an appendage to it.

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Following the staff stationed at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Uijeongbu during the Korean War, the show veers liberally from light comedy to dark drama to the occasional high-octane action sequence, embracing full tonal chaos as a means of reflecting the sheer tragicomic folly of war. Indeed, during the first few years of its run, it was expressly intended as a biting commentary on the still-ongoing Vietnam War.

In 255 half-hour episodes (and one two-hour finale that still holds the record for the most-watched scripted TV series episode in U.S. history), it pulled off deeper and more indelible storytelling — with more alive characters, more memorable arcs, and greater cathartic exuberance — than the vast majority of straight one-hour dramas.

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Created by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, the prematurely canceled “The Knick” tells the story of the visionary yet troubled Dr. John Thackery (Clive Owen) as he leads the staff of the Knickerbocker Hospital in trying to establish an effective and humane medical practice with the limited resources, technology, and political liberty available at the turn of the 20th century.

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The show’s approach to period recreation is darker, more candid, and considerably richer than average, taking advantage of the laxness of Cinemax to explore all the grimier nooks and filthier crannies of 1900 New York City, and all the unspoken nightmares to which it subjected its citizens. The ensemble cast is stupendous, featuring such MVPs as Andre Holland, Jeremy Bobb, Eve Hewson, and Cara Seymour in a litany of layered, fascinating roles. But the real attraction that makes “The Knick” one of the greatest and most underrated shows of all time is the direction of Steven Soderbergh, who helms all 20 episodes across both seasons and renders each of them into a cinematic tour-de-force, fashioning a wholly original aesthetic out of the tense nexus between life and death, blood and white fabric, mud and electricity.

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Following its beginnings as a would-be Steven Spielberg movie, the Michael Crichton-created NBC drama “ER” kicked off in 1994 with a relatively simple and straightforward premise: Following life at the emergency room of the Cook County General Hospital in Chicago, IL (loosely based on the real-life Cook County Hospital), each episode focuses on the various life-or-death crises dealt with by the staff on a daily basis. It was a concept explored with maximum aplomb right out of the gate, producing some of TV’s finest, most emotionally stirring hours by prioritizing a sense of storytelling immediacy.

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Then, as the seasons went on, “ER” took a level in complexity by expanding its scope far beyond the County General corridors and following the principal characters on epic, globe-spanning journeys centered around the core subject of care for human life. It was a rare, seismic instance of a veritable ratings phenomenon using its popularity as a springboard towards greater and greater artistic ambition.

By the end of its record-breaking 15-season run in 2009, “ER” had definitively changed the face of television. No other TV series is the be-all-end-all of its genre to quite the same degree; to this day, every show set in a hospital is in some way channeling or responding to it.