This is Going to Hurt (2022)

2022 · Biography,Comedy,Drama · workplace-prestige, contemporary-realistic

This Is Going to Hurt is a UK workplace drama-comedy based on junior doctor and author Adam Kay's memoir of his years in NHS obstetrics. Ben Whishaw plays Adam with a disarming combination of arrogance, gallows humour, and buried tenderness, as the show chronicles the grinding psychological cost of systemic healthcare underfunding on both patients and staff. The tone shifts between sharp dark comedy and devastating emotional blows with unusual precision, making the humour feel like survival mechanism rather than relief valve. It is explicitly political — a direct indictment of austerity-era NHS conditions — but grounds its argument in intimate human stories rather than polemic. Audiences drawn to prestige UK drama with a strong moral conscience and willingness to sit in genuine discomfort will find it exceptional.

From the reviewers

Everything rings painfully true, but unlike with so many fact-based dramas, there's a real story here, as well as a damning indictment of healthcare underfunding and worker exploitation.

the lacerating hellishness of it all is leavened, for us and just about for them, with precisely the right degree of darkly acid humour.

Ben Whishaw -- who is somehow able to make a character both unsympathetic, sympathetic, cold, warm, hostile, sweet, and every other possible human characteristic.

The cast is genius, black humor weaving with drama twists are just brilliant.

the script is as sharp as a scalpel and expertly delivered by a superb team.

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Name: This is Going to Hurt
Released: 2022

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This is Going to Hurt (2022)

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