Heartbeat (2016)

George is the reason to tune in. She’ll be the reason why you keep coming back.

I’d ask for a script doctor, but it’s time to call the code and be done with it.

Some of it might have been written by a computer, sure, but a better class of computer than sometimes is hired to write for TV. The cast, which also includes D.L. Hughley as a psychologist, Maya Erskine as a nurse and Jamie Kennedy as an unkempt, somewhat obnoxious doctor (softened in later episodes), is pleasant company.

All of Alex’s quirks (she has a tendency to spit while talking) and surgical brilliance (practically on a whim, she pulls off a heart transplant procedure that only four others have managed before her) can’t mask the grim fact that she’s ultimately a collection of threadbare drama-series clichés. ... Even worse, the show’s supporting characters are all some combination of bland, unbelievable, and/or reprehensible.

The relationships are paint-by-numbers predictable as are the plots and Alex's I-know-better-than-everyone-else reactions. Heartbeat has a pulse but just barely.

Heartbeat is, sadly, a show without much of a pulse.

Heartbeat feels like it sprung to life from a computer program that had been fed the scripts of every medical drama in the last two decades. It has no pulse.