Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Broadcast network series are slowly getting back into production this month following pandemic shutdowns. Other programs won’t start filming new episodes until September. In a normal year, many broadcast dramas and comedies are back in production by late July.

So it’s safe to assume many of your favorite TV shows will be delayed in returning to prime time. In their place viewers will see acquired series, including NBC’s Canadian import “Transplant,” which debuts in the 10 p.m. Tuesday time slot this week on WPXI-TV. Consider it a seat warmer for another NBC medical show, “New Amsterdam,” which is expected to return to that time period later this year.

Like “New Amsterdam,” “Transplant” is a high-gloss, middle-of-the-road broadcast drama. It’s “ER” with an immigration story overlay, but it doesn’t redefine the medical drama the way “ER” did in 1994.

The pilot episode is particularly frustrating as it attempts to manipulate viewers and characters in the show into thinking Bashir Hamed (Hamza Haq, “Quantico”) may be up to nefarious deeds by portraying him as secretive and shifty even as he works medical miracles on victims of a truck crash into the restaurant where he works as a cook.

Savvy viewers will pretty quickly deduce Bashir was a doctor back in his home country, Syria, and if he’d just tell the doctors and police he encounters this important bit of information, his problems would likely disappear. Instead, he clings to this unnecessary secret halfway through the premiere episode.

By the end of the hour he gets a chance to work for Dr. Jed Bishop (John Hannah, “Spartacus”) at Toronto’s York Memorial Hospital ER.

“Transplant,” a hit in Canada, repeats the if-he’d-just-say-something-the-misunderstanding-would-be-cleared-up trope in its second episode but mercifully dispatches with it in the show’s first five minutes.

TV writer Rob Owen: rowen@triblive.com. Follow @RobOwenTV on Twitter or Facebook.

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