Have you climbed aboard? Have you hoisted the sail? Have you checked into your stateroom? Have you, like the greatest television-viewing minds in America, watched the show that is perhaps single-handedly keeping network television vital in 2024: Doctor Odyssey? Professional madman Ryan Murphy’s latest joint premiered on September 26 and combines the blue-sky good vibes of an aughties USA procedural with the batshit weekly emergencies of his 9-1-1 series. Murphy’s recent shows at his legacy home base, FX, have been muddled and baroque, but on ABC, he’s got the goods, as evidenced by the premiere episode of his new show set on a luxury cruise ship. It stars Joshua Jackson as a doctor (Dr. Max, but people literally call him “Doctor Odysseyâ€) with a less-than-mysterious backstory (he got COVID and decided to devote his life to having fun at sea) and Don Johnson giving off radiant Love Boat vibes as the captain.
This show is immensely silly, sunny fun, and the whole thing is refreshingly low stress, even if this one cruise ship is the site of more than enough emergencies to hold its own in ABC’s Thursday-night block, sandwiched between 9-1-1 and Grey’s Anatomy. It would really be a floating death trap if Doc Odyssey weren’t so gosh-darn good at doing elaborate medical procedures at sea. As each episode brings aboard a new cast of guests with their own slate of problems, we’ll keep track of every disaster that goes down on deck (and over the edge) all season long.
Episode six: “I Always Cry at Weddingsâ€
“Sleepy Sun Syndromeâ€
This week, a couple has chartered the entire Odyssey for a wedding voyage, and Margo Martindale is mother of the bride. But when she puts on tanning oil and lays on the top deck, she turns red as a lobster thanks to severe, blistering burns. Turns out she’s on an antibiotic that makes her photosensitive, but it’s nothing some tetanus shots and creams won’t fix. She even boasts to doc about her new “Riviera tan.â€
Penis CaptivusÂ
The crew has to leave Martindale red and roastin’ in the sick bay because they get a call to go to a cabin, where Bennett the best man got his dick stuck in the girl he’s hooking up with. What they’ve got is a case of “penis captivus,†meaning her you-know-what clamped shut on his you-know-what, and they can’t get it out because he’s still engorged. The female patient needs to relax so they can insert a balloon catheter, and the only way to accomplish that is for Doctor Odyssey to sit on the edge of their bed and tell them a rambling, stupid story from his childhood. Doc Odd’s oratorical power did the trick! But …
Best Man’s Got Rare Ringworm
Bennett the best man has a rare strain of ringworm that can lead to blindness, but since Doc Odd caught it early, they can pick up medication at port the next day. In the meantime, he’s got a cream. “And mate,†adds Nurse Tristan. “no more pulling tail.†Later in the episode, it’s slowly revealed that the groom and the bride also have the ringworm rash. The crew thought this meant that the groom was bisexual and sleeping with his bestie, but it was the bride who was sleeping with her fiancé’s best friend.
Prenuptial Pancreatitis
The day before the wedding, the bride-to-be has a fever, jaundice of the eyes, and is diaphoretic — that is, sweating profuseful. Margo Martindale tattles on her: turns out she had been doubling her Ozempic dose to fit into her vintage size-two Vera Wang wedding dress. “Unless you want this wedding to turn into a funeral, I need to admit her until I see a marked improvement to her health,†says Doc Odd. So she goes to a hospital and gets better but this happens offscreen so who knows what they did to fix her.
Lethal Cold Feet
In the sick bay, the groom confesses to Doctor Odyssey that there’s a “darkness†in him, which Doc Odd misidentifies as sex addiction (projecting much?). The groom has a panic attack, the cure for which is the talking cure (which we know the Doc is great at) and an Ativan. Doc Odd sends him on his way, thinking the situation is resolved, but that night the groom dresses in his tux, leaves a note, climbs to the top deck, and throws himself overboard, all set to a slow indie cover of “Human†by the Killers. We learn the next day that he had been battling with depression. It’s very sad, and the medical team provides counseling to the guests. This leads our main trio to …
Emotional Emergency of the Week
Have a threesome because life is short! They do a midnight kitchen raid to eat the wedding cake of the deceased groom (reallllly dark), and while they’re all Champagne drunk, they share their bucket lists. Avery wants to perform. “I used to go to theater camp and do plays and musicals,†she says, just about sealsing the deal that yes, acclaimed musical-theater performer Phillipa Soo will be doing a musical episode. This, however, is less exciting than the threesome that fulfills Tristan’s fantasy, the one the fandom is already calling “Doctor Ody3.â€
Episode five: “Halloween Weekâ€
Girl Trapped in Cave
This episode starts with a cold open of a woman trapped in a cave that’s rapidly filling with water, her arm pinned between two large rocks like wet 127 Hours. We then flash back “48 hours earlier†to see her and her girlfriend boarding the Odyssey for Halloween Week. She’s excited for an offshore excursion that involves hunting for old pirate treasure. But she ventures off into a narrow cave, and as she reaches through a small crevice for a shiny doubloon, a large rock shifts and crushes her arm down, sort of like an Indiana Jones trap. The tide is coming in and threatens to slowly drown her but NP Avery is wet-suited up and on the case. She dislocates the treasure-hunting lesbian’s elbow and carries her out in the nick of time, and afterwards, she says “In the face of death, all you have to do is relax.†Cool.
Blood Sweat
A guy dressed as Wolverine (in sexy flannel Logan mode) starts bleeding out of his orifices while hooking up with a girl dressed as a bunny. The cause? Hematohidrosis, aka sweating blood, a rare mix-up of his fear/arousal response system. Yeah okay.
Zombie OutbreakÂ
Two couples on the cruise are in deep medical doo-doo when the husbands start acting like zombies: first falling asleep standing up, then sleepwalking, moaning, and displaying “abnormal aggression†(the “Hound†in a Fox and the Hound couples costume bites his wife’s arm and breaks the skin). They’re running fevers but bloodwork shows they’re not contagious; turns out they have African Sleeping Sickness from getting bitten by tsetse flies on safari. Sure!
Triton Tristan Trippin’Â
Nurse Tristan’s eternally futile dick-measuring contest with the hung and stallion-like Doc Odd continues apace on Halloween, as Max Odyssey keeps one-upping Tristan with accidentally identical Halloween costumes (first Jack Sparrow, then Poseidon.) Tristan takes Halloween very seriously and slowly starts going insane, and we discover it’s from a carbon monoxide leak in his cabin from too many spooky Halloween lanterns spreading white gas fumes. Yup.
Emotional Emergency of the Week
Cap’n Don Johnson hates Halloween because he missed all of his kid’s Halloweens growing up while he was away at sea. He lends Tristan his captain’s uniform to help him win the costume contest, and Tristan calls him his “sea daddy.†Aww.
Episode four: “Wellness Weekâ€
Cho Screws POOG with Blue Goo
This is a silly ep, even by Doctor Odyssey standards, and you know the tone is light because they brought in an all-star cast of comedic geniuses in Amy Sedaris, Margaret Cho, and Kate Berlant. The three absolute legends play Goop-y New Age wellness gurus partaking in the various classes and services on offer during the annual Wellness Cruise. This being a show about medical disasters, “wellness†is an oxymoron, as made immediately apparent when Berlant’s acupuncturist character Agnes Simkin is accidentally poisoned by Margaret Cho’s supplement-hawking Judy Riva via blue smoothie. As Riva lists off the components of her proprietary recipe, Doc Odd exclaims, “This isn’t cyanide poisoning! It’s not the almonds!†It’s in fact the taro powder, which is toxic to the liver (when raw, per Google). They fix Agnes right up with emergency dialysis.
Daffy TaffyÂ
Amy Sedaris’s wellness mogul character Bethany Welles gifts the captain and crew her special saltwater taffy … which turns out to have psilocybin in it, causing the first mate to trip balls just as the Odyssey finds itself in the eye of a hurricane. Luckily Cap’n Don Johnson himself did not partake. First Mate sobers right up with some espresso and all is well …
Appendicitis … at Sea!Â
… Except of course Nurse Practitioner Avery is struck down with appendicitis just as the Odyssey is steering through a hurricane. This leads to a sequence that totally makes good on the promise of a “doctors at sea†procedural: Doc and Tristan conducting emergency surgery while the boat violently lists back and forth. Emmy’s for everyone!
Heavy Metal Amy Sedaris
Let this be a warning to the Liver King! Welles lands in sick bay with copper poisoning from eating too much raw organ meat. That’s why she read Doc Odyssey’s aura as anything other than fabulous when she first boarded the ship: She was seeing things due to the rust-colored rings around her irises. They flush out her toxins via IV and by disembarkation she’s right as rain.
Acupuncture Lung Poke
Berlant and Cho are sort of the Itchy and Scratchy of this episode, and now it’s Scratchy’s turn for revenge. While doing acupuncture on Riva, Simkin accidentally punctures her lung, which Doc Odd fixes by digging into her, fully conscious, while Berlant ad-libs in the background, “She’s fine! She’s better than ever, actually! She needed this!â€
Emotional Emergency of the Week
This episode was pretty light, although Avery is jealous of Tristan’s budding romance with the sexy chef who not only accidentally poisoned Welles with organ meat, but has also been hired to remain aboard as the new head chef. She says the raw meat was Welles’s thing and serves Avery a cassoulet.
Episode three: “Plastic Surgery Weekâ€
Bump of Coke Makes Nose Fall Off
It’s plastic surgery week aboard the Odyssey, which means everyone onboard is taking a cruise while recovering from plastic surgery. Luxury cruise ships IRL have medi-spas, but this sailing is all just people already Botoxed and bandaged up. NP Avery does not approve of cosmetic surgery, and declares it an epidemic: “What’s happening here is a disease.†Then a girl with a Love Island accent and recent rhinoplasty sneaks a bump of coke in the pool … which makes her nose fall off! She looks like Voldemort, the whole thing is absolute body horror, and it’s pretty much played for laughs. Doc Odd puts the nose on ice until the cruise gets back to L.A., so she’s just going to have to walk around noseless for a week. “The olfactory system is incredibly regenerative,†he says, unbothered. He also gives her a Phantom of the Opera mask to wear in the meantime. “There was a Broadway cruise a couple of seasons ago, it was the best I could do,†he says, implying a future musical episode.
Necrotic Boob Job
Gina Gershon’s personal shopper’s giant boob job is healing weird and she’s soothing the pain with ice, which has given her boob job frostbite. She’s supposed to be taking antibiotics, but doesn’t like putting synthetics in her body (har har) so later in the episode she’s unresponsive with necrotizing fasciitis all over her incision sites. They do surgery on her to remove the infected tissue and vacuum her back up, all while Gina Gershon is going “but HOW will this AFFECT her BOOB JOB!†This is an incredibly gnarly sequence and I had to cover my eyes but in the end they rescue her and her boobs.
Dead Ken
A reality-TV star who’s had plastic surgery to transform himself into a living Ken doll is onboard the cruise recovering from recent pec implants, the latest in many cosmetic procedures. It turns out Doc Odd is his biggest fan and they go on a “his and his†cryotherapy date where they talk about the affirmative power of cosmetic surgery in a kind of SOPHIE way (Doc Odd: “When I was a kid I wanted to be a Chesapeake Bay Retriever.†Ken: “There are communities for that.â€) Later on, Ken dies of sepsis peacefully in his sleep, and we finally see how death is handled aboard the Odyssey: The medical team wheels the body out of the cabin under a curtain on a room service trolley so as not to disturb the passengers, then uses the flower shop walk-in freezer as a morgue. Doctor Odyssey is heartbroken by this, and we learn that when he was isolated in the hospital and near death with Covid in 2020, all he had for company was Ken’s reality show on the TV. When the ship docks, Ken’s friends “Barbie, Skipper, and Malibu Ken†thank Doctor Odyssey for trying to save Ken, and he thanks them for saving his life. This is all weirder than it looks on paper.
Tristan’s Mom’s Huntington’s
Nurse Tristan’s semi-estranged mommy is onboard recovering from plastic surgery, and during an argument with Tristan her hand shakes, she says “oh, my heart!†and she collapses. Tristan says she has the “memory of a goldfish,†they see she’s been losing her fine motor skills via the handwriting in her little black book, and they order a gene test (on the ship?!?! how?!?!). Tristan must break the news to his mom that she has Huntington’s disease and has ten good years left. She reveals that her grandpa died of Huntington’s. She tells Tristan she wants to make amends for being a bad mother …
Emotional Emergency of the Ep
… Then immediately stiffs Tristan, standing him up for a lunch date and disembarking early. He realizes she’s why he keeps chasing unavailable women in positions of power and gives Doctor Odyssey his “inherent blessing†to keep sleeping with Avery. Emergency averted!
Episode two: “Singles Weekâ€
Lady Fight in Giant Hot Tub
Like one hour into Singles Week, a hot-tub brawl between three lovers of an unseen man named Jeffrey sends all three women to the sick bay. Doc and the crew patch them up while they hurl insults: “nasty, dirty-lookin’, triflin’ girls,†“pirate-lookin’ bitch†(because one of them got her eye scratched and needed a patch), and “womb like a haunted house, just dusty.†They can all agree on one thing, though, and that’s Jeffrey’s “D,†which makes NP Avery go, “I’ve never had D like that.â€
Skinny Juice Make Hot Girl Heart Go Stop
Passenger Kelly passes out on top of Nurse Tristan while hooking up with him, so the gang rushes her to the sick bay and shoves a camera on a tube down her throat while she’s awake, which causes her to crash, making them do defib on her. It was worth it for the shot, though, because it shows them she doesn’t have a hole in her heart. Later on, while Avery hooks up with the man whore (more on this in a moment), he mentions taking diuretics when he’s trying to get into the “shred zone,†which helps Avery solve the mystery. Kelly has been drinking a “health powder,†a.k.a. thiazide, a.k.a. “water pills,†a diuretic for weight loss that has the unfortunate side effect of interrupting electrical signals to the heart. “I spent so much money on this trip, I have to look pretty in a swimsuit!†says Kelly. They put her on potassium and electrolytes and the day is saved.
Man-Whore Syphilis
This cad who doesn’t use condoms (latex is bad for the turtles) has a nasty rash that Doc Odd misdiagnoses at the pool as possibly just eczema. Turns out it’s syphilis and he has spread it to like a dozen people on the ship so far, guys and girls alike, leading to a fabulous montage of Doc Odd calling them into the sick bay to get penicillin shots in their bums like it’s the hottest nightclub at sea.
Captain Heartbreak on Oyster Date With Shania Twain
As a recent widow who’s new to the whole being-single thing, Shania Twain is worried she’s the oldest person on the ship. That is, until she shares a slow dance with Cap’n Don Johnson, who lost his beloved wife last year. He takes her back to his gorgeous cap’n quarters (which has a fireplace! At sea!) and wines and dines her with some oysters. She leans in and says, “You’re flush, I think the oysters are doing their job, Captain,†but actually he’s passing out. The gang slices him open and does a catheter to the heart, but his angiogram comes back normal, like a “heart attack without the heart-attack part.†Ah, so all the problems at Singles Week are STDs or matters of the heart. Once the cap’n’s shipshape, Doc Odd tells him he has “stress cardiomyopathy, better known as broken-heart syndrome.†It’s triggered by emotional stress brought on by the loss of a loved one. The cure? Takin’ it easy. “You know what the worst thing for our heath is?†Doc Odd asks. “Being alive.†But you gotta muddle through anyway. Beautiful words of wisdom from the doctor.
Life Raft: Lisa
While the captain’s under on the night of his medically urgent heartbreak, the ship’s radar picks up a floating figure at sea that could be a life raft. But it’s actually a human, so the Doctor and Nurse Tristan hop a speedboat (I hope they do this every episode) to rescue Lisa, who has gastroenteritis from saltwater exposure, heatstroke, dehydration, confusion, and, yes, needs the defib. She took work on a fishing boat off the coast of Mexico, but there was an accident. When she was stranded at sea, she was all “It’s okay if I die because at least I found true love in my life.†Turns out her true love, her fiancé, also gets found on a different life raft as he went out to sea to try to save her. They bring him in and it’s a beautiful reunion, proving that True Fishermen’s Love is more valid, beautiful, and legitimate than all these silly dirty singles aboard the ship. I felt very attacked by this episode.
Emotional Emergency of the Ep
Avery hates Singles Week because relationships are not her thing. She has put her life into her job and helping others, which leads to an emotional breakdown where she cries under the stars about how she deprioritized everything else in her life to be a cruise NP. “And at the end of the day, I’m alone, adrift, with nothing to show for it. I’m never gonna be a doctor. This is all there is for me. Pumping people’s stomachs when they eat too much shrimp and flings with loser douchebags on singles cruises.†Shout-out to the shrimp OD mention. Nurse Tristan makes her feel better by kissing her.
Episode one: “Pilotâ€
Too Much Shrimp
Rachel Dratch and her husband, Frasier’s boss at the radio station on the original Frasier, end up in the sick bay after the sailing-away dinner. He’s presenting with an allergic reaction to antibiotics, only he isn’t on any. It’s Doctor Odyssey’s first night onboard and he is stumped. Nurse Practitioner Avery Morgan (Phillipa Soo), however, has worked aboard the Odyssey for years and sees this all the time: Dratch’s man’s got iodine poisoning from eating too much of the unlimited shrimp at the seafood buffet. This happens so often on the boat they’ve got a name for it: seal disease. These people are why Red Lobster went bankrupt, but then again, if I had a nickel for every time I ingested a medically problematic amount of shrimp, you know?
Broke Dick
It’s obviously a Murph joint when you’re only 16 minutes into an episode and a guy says he “snapped my pee-pee in half.†The medical team is called into a stateroom where a guy’s dick has been bent in two while he was, well, rockin’ the boat. It’s a penile fracture, something that normally happens when the girl’s on top and comes down too hard; Doctor Odyssey knows this from firsthand undergraduate experience. The team patches it up and tells the couple they have to lie low for four to six weeks, but Phillipa Soo, NP, tells the couple she knows a tantric-sex specialist in the next port who can teach them alternative ways to consummate their marriage.
Waterslide Throat Kick
Seemingly immediately after OD-ing on all-you-can-eat shrimp, Mr. and Mrs. Dratch find themselves in another emergency. The couple went down the waterslide one after another, and when Rachel slid off she throat-kicked her husband to the point that he was knocked out and unable to breathe. Doc Odd does a penknife incision to the man’s neck (hate this) and brings him down to the sick bay to insert a tracheal tube and physically wrench his sternoclavicular joint back into place, which the nurses find very risky. Doc Odd goes against protocol, though, and saves this schmo’s life a second time in one night. When the Dratches disembark at the end of the episode, they say that despite it all they still had the best week of their lives.
Man Overboard!
By emergency No. 4, you start to learn a bit about how this show’s structure will work going forward. Medical situations escalate in severity and grow more serious in tone over the course of an episode. We’ll see how the situations occur, either in flashbacks (waterslide, broke dick, shrimp freak) or as they happen in the moment, as is the case with the young man who, after taking molly with his girlfriend at the on-ship nightclub, sneaks out with her to the upper deck, where he stands on the railing, does the “I’m king of the world!†thing, and immediately topples overboard. Cap’n Don Johnson is alerted at the brig (terminology check?) and orders the ship to drop buoys, informing us that only 15 percent of overboard cases survive. The medical team peels out in a speedboat to find him, and Doc Odyssey does what Male Nurse Tristan (Sean Teale) calls an “epic†dive to save him from hypothermia. All in a sailing’s work for Doctor Odyssey.
Emotional Emergency of the Week
Tristan confides in his new supervisor, with whom he has to work every single day, that he’s had a crush on his co-nurse for years. Dr. Odyssey immediately turns around and makes out with her. In Tristan’s face! While “Despacito†plays!
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated Avery Morgan’s title. She is a nurse practitioner.