‘Doctor Odyssey’ Sea-Emergency Recap: Pilot

Have you climbed aboard? Have you hoisted the sail? Have you checked into your stateroom? Have you, like the greatest television-viewing minds in America, watched the show that is perhaps single-handedly keeping network television vital in 2024: Doctor Odyssey? Professional madman Ryan Murphy’s latest joint premiered on September 26 and combines the blue-sky good vibes of an aughties USA procedural with the batshit weekly emergencies of his 9-1-1 series. Murphy’s recent shows at his legacy home base, FX, have been muddled and baroque, but on ABC, he’s got the goods, as evidenced by the premiere episode of his new show set on a luxury cruise ship. It stars Joshua Jackson as a doctor (Dr. Max, but people literally call him “Doctor Odyssey”) with a less-than-mysterious backstory (he got COVID and decided to devote his life to having fun at sea) and Don Johnson giving off radiant Love Boat vibes as the captain.

This show is immensely silly, sunny fun, and the whole thing is refreshingly low stress, even if this one cruise ship is the site of more than enough emergencies to hold its own in ABC’s Thursday-night block, sandwiched between 9-1-1 and Grey’s Anatomy. It would really be a floating death trap if Doc Odyssey weren’t so gosh-darn good at doing elaborate medical procedures at sea. As each episode brings aboard a new cast of guests with their own slate of problems, we’ll keep track of every disaster that goes down on deck (and over the edge) all season long.

Too Much Shrimp
Rachel Dratch and her husband, Frasier’s boss at the radio station on the original Frasier, end up in the sick bay after the sailing-away dinner. He’s presenting with an allergic reaction to antibiotics, only he isn’t on any. It’s Doctor Odyssey’s first night onboard and he is stumped. Nurse Practitioner Avery Morgan (Phillipa Soo), however, has worked aboard the Odyssey for years and sees this all the time: Dratch’s man’s got iodine poisoning from eating too much of the unlimited shrimp at the seafood buffet. This happens so often on the boat they’ve got a name for it: seal disease. These people are why Red Lobster went bankrupt, but then again, if I had a nickel for every time I ingested a medically problematic amount of shrimp, you know?

Broke Dick
It’s obviously a Murph joint when you’re only 16 minutes into an episode and a guy says he “snapped my pee-pee in half.” The medical team is called into a stateroom where a guy’s dick has been bent in two while he was, well, rockin’ the boat. It’s a penile fracture, something that normally happens when the girl’s on top and comes down too hard; Doctor Odyssey knows this from firsthand undergraduate experience. The team patches it up and tells the couple they have to lie low for four to six weeks, but Phillipa Soo, NP, tells the couple she knows a tantric-sex specialist in the next port who can teach them alternative ways to consummate their marriage.

Waterslide Throat Kick
Seemingly immediately after OD-ing on all you-can-eat shrimp, Mr. and Mrs. Dratch find themselves in another emergency. The couple went down the waterslide one after another, and when Rachel slid off she throat-kicked her husband to the point that he was knocked out and unable to breathe. Doc Odd does a penknife incision to the man’s neck (hate this) and brings him down to the sick bay to insert a tracheal tube and physically wrench his sternoclavicular joint back into place, which the nurses find very risky. Doc Odd goes against protocol, though, and saves this schmo’s life a second time in one night. When the Dratches disembark at the end of the episode, they say that despite it all they still had the best week of their lives.

Man Overboard!
By emergency No. 4, you start to learn a bit about how this show’s structure will work going forward. Medical situations escalate in severity and grow more serious in tone over the course of an episode. We’ll see how the situations occur, either in flashbacks (waterslide, broke dick, shrimp freak) or as they happen in the moment, as is the case with the young man who, after taking molly with his girlfriend at the on-ship nightclub, sneaks out with her to the upper deck, where he stands on the railing, does the “I’m king of the world!” thing, and immediately topples overboard. Cap’n Don Johnson is alerted at the brig (terminology check?) and orders the ship to drop buoys, informing us that only 15 percent of overboard cases survive. The medical team peels out in a speedboat to find him, and Doc Odyssey does what Male Nurse Tristan (Sean Teale) calls an “epic” dive to save him from hypothermia. All in a sailing’s work for Doctor Odyssey.

Emotional Emergency of the Week
Tristan confides in his new supervisor, with whom he has to work every single day, that he’s had a crush on his co-nurse for years. Dr. Odyssey immediately turns around and makes out with her. In Tristan’s face! While “Despacito” plays!

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated Avery Morgan’s title. She is a nurse practitioner.