I t’s Rivals at sea! It’s House on a boat – it’s Houseboat! Which is to say it’s Doctor Odyssey, the latest truly bananas offering from Ryan Murphy. It’s so bad and so fun. I commend it to you utterly and must equally advise against squandering a minute of your precious time on earth watching it.
So! To floating, sun-drenched business! We are on a luxury cruise liner called The Odyssey. The captain, Robert Massey, is Don Johnson, playing avuncular, because apparently we have all lived that long. Nurses Avery Morgan and Tristan Silva (Phillipa Soo and Sean Teale) are resentfully awaiting the arrival of the new doctor, whom they are assuming from his CV – Yale, peace corps, UN humanitarian prize winner – will be an arrogant old man who will treat them like skivvies.
Ladies and gentlemen, who walks in but Pacey from Dawson’s Creek (Joshua Jackson), all grown up and now going by the excellently absurd name of Dr Max Bankman. At first, he is a bit cocky and dismissive of patients. But the captain tells him people have saved up for years for a cruise: “We are tending to their dreams .
.. Our mission is to keep these dreamers safe.
” Not for the first, and far from the last time on our odyssey with the doctor, Harrison Ford’s comment to George Lucas about the Star Wars script – “You can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it” – floats across your mind like a dreamer in a top-deck swimming pool. But this pep talk, and missing a diagnosis of iodine p.