No matter how you categorize her role or the show itself , Ambika Mod gave a spectacular performance.
Sure, the show primarily belongs to Ben Whishaw, whose increasingly frazzled performance walks that peculiar line between nightmarish comedy and spiky, scathing drama. He’ll have you laugh and cry and, depending on your phase of life, reconsider your birth plan. But Mod’s Shruti Acharya is the heart of the show, the conscience of the show, the one ascending doctor caught up in the chaotic world of the National Health Service whom viewers are desperate to protect. In Mod’s hands, Shruti never panders for pity or respect either from audiences or from Whishaw’s Adam, never makes Shruti come across as a victim or as a naive dilettante. She’s earnest and fragile and right on the edge of capable, to a heartbreaking degree.
The show’s sixth episode is an exceptional showcase for both Whishaw and Mod, as Adam experiences the posh and unhinged world of childbirth in private clinics and Shruti, unprepared for the task, faces a night of increasingly harrowing NHS chaos. The storylines carry equal weight because Whishaw and Mod do.is that, in the end, the show should have done better by Shruti and by Mod. Emmy voters have one chance to give Ambika Mod the respect she richly deserves.
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine,