The good-looking, deeply flawed doctors are in

IN “Bodies,” a taut six-part drama premiering tonight on BBC America, strapping young intern Rob Lake (Max Beesley, “Tom Jones”) takes up residency in the obstetrics-gynecology ward of a big British hospital and learns first-hand what many suspect -- that a hospital is a terrible place to be sick in.

Though it is a word usually best left in the big drawer of critical cliches, “gripping” is appropriate here: This is a series that won’t let you go, even when you would very much like to be somewhere else. Somewhere happy, where a laugh track is playing, and doctors are all lovely, capable people and no one dies.

Lots of people are dying on “Bodies,” not all of them because of the bad decisions and sloppy work of Dr. Roger Hurley (Patrick Baladi, “The Office”), to whom Rob is attached as a kind of apprentice, but Hurley is dispatching more than his share. Hurley looks good on paper, however, and is protected even by other doctors who know better. As the new boy in town, Lake has yet to lose empathy for his patients, or to fully embrace the system, and this is going to get him into trouble.

We’re told, just so we don’t get the wrong idea, that most of the time things go right in hospitals, but since this is a series about things going wrong, one is constantly apprehensive that they’re about to. There is a little bit of black humor and quite a bit of sex, between Rob and married nursing supervisor Donna Rix (Neve McIntosh, “Gormenghast”), but it is mostly not happy sex. It is, however, believable in a way that movie sex rarely is.

Notwithstanding a generally nervous camera style and the statistical unlikelihood that the doctors are all three times better looking than their patients, “Bodies” feels real -- nobody’s perfect here, not even perfectly bad, and everyone’s stressed. Creator Jed Mercurio has said he “wanted to create a medical drama that was an antidote to all the medical dramas that had gone before.” I’m not sure that “Marcus Welby, M.D.” is technically toxic, but “Bodies” has the narrative advantage of lasting only six weeks. It is not a disease-of-the-week show or a series of ennobling crises to be endured by glamorous doctors; but a single (if several-branched) story that will draw to a conclusion. Things will get worse, therefore, before they get better. But it will be worth staying the course, if you’re up to it.

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‘Bodies’

Where: BBC America

When: 10 tonight

Ratings: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for young children under the age of 17)

Max Beesley...Rob Lake

Patrick Baladi...Roger Hurley

Neve McIntosh...Donna Rix

Keith Allen...Tony Whitman

Susan Lynch...Maria Orton

Tamzin Malleson...Polly Grey

Preeya Kalidas...Maya Dutta

Karen Bryson...Hazel Melrose

Executive producers Mark Redhead and Gareth Neame. Director John Strickland. Creator, writer and producer Jed Mercurio.