The latter is played by the great Harriet Walter, who sharpened her caustic mothering skills on Succession. He hides his work-related PTSD from his charmingly chill boyfriend Harry ( Rory Fleck Byrne) while simultaneously keeping his love life secret from both his hospital colleagues and his mother.

We are Adam’s only confidantes as he stumbles through the gory and gooey pandemonium of his life. With my second kid, unnoticed scraps of placenta stuck in my uterus triggered weeks of hemorrhaging. Few of us gossip publicly about the aftereffects of childbirth, which can include scars, vaginal tearing, hemorrhoids, infections, and pelvic pain. He’s seen up close the toll that pregnancy can take on the body.

The focus is very much on the doctors holding the speculums, rather than the women with legs in stirrups.īut Kay understands as well as anyone who’s given birth or had gynecological maladies how precarious the medical system is. Adapted by Adam Kay from his 2017 memoir about working in the U.K.’s National Health Service, the show stars Ben Whishaw as Adam, an exhausted ob/gyn struggling to do the best he can for his patients in an underfunded London public hospital. Not that This is Going to Hurt is a feminist show. Wade and anti-abortion advocates suggesting that forcing people to carry unwanted pregnancies is no big deal, the AMC+ series This is Going to Hurt hits a raw nerve. With the US Supreme Court preparing to overturn Roe v. What a time for a dramedy about gynecology.

This is going to hurt memoir