'Hospital Playlist' Premiere: 5 doctors who are best friends are compelled to start a band to deal with stress
'Hospital Playlist' introduces us to five best friends -- Lee Ik-jun (Cho Jung-seok), Ahn Jeong-won (Yoo Yeon-seok), Chae Song-hwa (Jeon Mi-do), Yang Seok-hyeong (Kim Dae-myung) and Kim Jun-wan (Jung Kyung-ho) -- who are doctors working hard every day to serve and save patients. Each of them has a defining trait that leads them to make certain decisions in life. The partner they choose, the lover they end up with or when they decide to break up with their romantic interests.
Ik-jun is a father to a young child who seems to be taken enough to take over a surgery for a senior surgeon when required despite not being employed in the same hospital. Jeong-won is a pediatrician who understands children really well. The other friends learn that Jeong-won is the son of their hospital's chairman she passes away in episode 1. In fact, the other friends learn the truth about him at the funeral. Then we have Song-hwa, the only woman in this group of friends who is straight forward with her friends but warm and understanding towards her patients. Seok-hyeong has returned recently after serving on a research team and for the time being, he doesn't want to work. He wants to spend more time with his mother and away from work. Finally, we have Jun-wan who is tough with his Juniors at work, is sharp about diagnosing patients and works hard.
These five friends are under constant pressure as they deal with life and death and with Jeong-won signing up a deal with the new chairman of the hospital to let his friends work with him for the VIP ward so that he can help now patients and also good friends. All his friends are excited because they are expected to get a huge pay hike. One of them, however (Seok-Hyeon), disagrees and says that he won't join his friends unless the five of them can have a band of their own together. Why? He doesn't answer but the way he treated one of the patients who was actually electrocuted at his house while trying to fix a bulb indicates that he may not be too comfortable with treating patients.
While we will have to wait and see how true that assumption is, the episode does show how the five friends come together to form the band. The vocalist might be off-key, but as Jeong-won said, they don't plan on taking their act to the Grammy's or Wembley Stadium (Yes! That is a reference to the Bangtan Boys BTS) so the plan is good for now.
Just as we met each of them in the present, years after they had become friends, we also see them as they were in the past while in pre-med school. Jeong-won and Seok-hyeong have been friends from when they were in middle school in the city while Ik-jun and Jun-wan are childhood friends who went to school together in Changwon. The four meet when they try to hide from their seniors at the introductory party at their university. Song-hwa joins them in the end, at the same hiding spot and that was when the five of them became friends. We will see more of this friendship evolve in the upcoming episodes.
'Hospital Playlist' episodes air on Thursdays on tvN and can also be streamed on Netflix.