Hot Picks: Life Support

“The Pitt, but real” is the bold claim of Life Support, Brinkworth’s latest medical documentary series for Paramount-owned 5 in the UK. While the scale of HBO Max’s much-garlanded series is beyond the wildest dreams of the UK broadcaster’s drama budgets, a multi-layered factual series that drops in and out of simultaneous cases is an intriguing prospect.

Returning to Stoke’s Royal University Hospital, the home of established series Critical Condition, Brinkworth expands the precinct to multiple departments and deploys the language of heightened drama to tell intertwining character-driven narratives, rather than the usual procedural approach adopted by shows in the crowded hospital ob-doc genre.

Cliffhangers, character arcs, jeopardy, serialised stories and montages scored by commercial music are among the familiar drama tropes on the show, with scenes given a cinematic look. Shot with the integrity of a documentary – and none of drama’s luxury of retakes – it pushes hard on emotional engagement as it immerses the audience in a world where every decision has a consequence.

Stories last as long as they need to, with some demanding a narrative twist in a subsequent episode that the characters – surgeons, nurses, paramedics, junior doctors, patients and families – learn at the same time as the audience.

“We thought deeply about how to take one person, whether staff or patient, and see them go through a proper narrative journey of weeks, if not months, with real obstacles to overcome in each of those moments in time, where we can see genuine transformation and change,” says exec producer Xander Brinkworth.

“Hopefully, viewers will feel the sensibility of documentary slips away slightly, and they’ll live with characters they care about, whose stories won’t finish inside of one episode.”

For director Bart Corpe (Murder Detectives), who led one of two concurrent shooting teams over six months in the hospital, the key to unlocking the visual style was learning to tell these stories without a narrator.

“Voiceover does a lot of the heavy lifting in documentaries shot in complicated spaces,” he says. “We have about three stories per episode and try to link them, but not directly. We use a lot of intimate compositions that show events through the eyes of staff , patients and their families.”

Brinkworth says the team spent a lot of time deconstructing and mirroring how drama scenes cut immediately into these unfolding signifi cant moments. “That’s a really tight straitjacket because we have to shoot it in such a way that it could absolutely look like a drama, otherwise we’re just cutting hard into scenes without the right framing.”

Brinkworth is delivering the series to 5 later this year. The fi ve-part commission suggests a potential stripped scheduling – unusual for a documentary, but fi tting for a hooky drama. The company is also thinking about how to adapt the treatment to other precincts and places.

Brinkworth’s previous medical access series have sold to pan-regional VoD platforms and to territories include Australia, New Zealand, CEE and Africa. Thanks to Life Support’s character-driven nature, the company is seeing broader interest from buyers whose remit does not typically extend to medical.