Now that it's shown up on Netflix in 2022, we can check out the great Quebec francophone medical series TRAUMA, which was produced in Montreal from 2010 to 2014. Its main characters are a team of surgeons in the fictional Saint-Arsène hospital. They are trauma surgeons, so their territory is car crashes, motorcycle accidents, falls, stabbings, and horrible cuts and burns, often depicted in excruciating detail, although during those parts you can do what I do and just look someplace else. Although IMDB credits seem incomplete, the bulk of the series was written by its creator Fabienne Larouche, and directed by Francois Gingras.
To them we must attribute some virtuoso episodes, such as (unless I've miscounted), season 1 episode 9, with its expertly sequenced storylines, and the great bit where Antoine (Gilbert Sicotte) finds out why the angry trophy wife is so angry (part of Larouche's talent is that we can sympathize with the character's frustration, even as we laugh at the punch line).
Trauma (there are so many "Traumas" on IMDB that to find it I type in "Trauma 2010") is every bit as good as its U. S. counterparts ER and Gray's Anatomy - in fact, it is less sentimental than "Gray's" - so it is frustrating and a mystery that it ended so abtruptly with the fifth season. From the forms that Étienne (Yan England) is looking at, someone in the series is HIV positive, but who? Why is Julie (Isabel Richer) shafting her loving and supportive husband Mathieu (Jean-François Pichette), heading off on that extended trip with their young daughter? What will become of the flawed but likeable (although he is often the series' villain, we feel the pain of his self-awareness) Gilles Laprade (Luc Guérin), when a corrupt multimillionaire philantropist has hired a hitman to fly to Africa to take him out? We'll never know - all we can do is go back and watch the five existing seasons of Trauma again!
