The right decor in a medical environment is Critical.
You want white as a colour, modern as a theme, shiny as a central narrative and technological as an absolute necessity.
Things that go ''beep'' and have a digital status are also right up there with medical interior designers.
Critical, which begins Saturday on Sky's UKTV has these things in droves, despite the home of the show being within a National Health Service unit known as the very non-specific City General Hospital.
I can't give commentary on UK hospitals.
But I can compare this fictional environment unfavourably with local hospitals, although, I must say, I and others close to me owe our lives to dowdy, grey buildings with poor feng shui.
Anyway, a state-of-the-art building with an enormous glassy atrium and glass lifts and wonderful equipment is where Critical takes place.
Just what Critical is all about is probably best left to actor Lennie James, who discussed the issue personally with Remotely Interesting just last week.
Talking to James is a very international experience.
Someone from the BBC, with an Australian accent, hooks up a phone line with our man, who is in Los Angeles.
James (The Walking Dead) plays Glen Boyle, who comes on the scene late in a bloody and medically action-packed episode not much like Shortland Street, a show with which James is familiar, as he has chums who have been in it.
Boyle becomes the head of a state-of-the-art trauma unit at City General.
He's also a lieutenant-colonel in the British army, who has come straight from Afghanistan back to England to take charge, and, if a visit to a consultant psychiatrist is anything to go by, is troubled.
That goes without saying.
''He is an army man, really,'' James says, ''and he comes straight from one of the best trauma units in the world.
''He's come from the best and if he says do something the person says 'Yes sir'.
''Now he's in a National Health Service environment, where someone may say 'Why?'.
''He's also a man dealing with personal trauma. He's not necessarily good at dealing with that, or in the right place to do so.''
Critical is a real-time drama that follows one patient as their life lies in the hands of the trauma unit.
It is bloody and fleshy and full of scalpels and scissors that cut deep into bodies.
James says concentrating on the patients rather than the trauma team is what sets Critical apart from other medical dramas.
''You don't really go home with the characters that form the trauma team.''
There are, however, romantic entanglements and troubled politics to deal with in this new twist on an enduring television standard.
• Charles Loughrey
