Dana Delanys Body of Proof is Amazing

Emmy award winner Dana Delany has done it again. Her new drama series Body of Proof is a big hit for ABC this season. 

Dana Delany is Medical Examiner Megan Hunt, once a top notch neurosurgeon, who now works in Philadelphia’s Medical Examiner’s Office after a car accident that quickly ended her career as a neurosurgeon.  As a Medical Examiner Megan applies her vast medical knowledge, keen instincts and variously charming and scalpel-like personality to the task of solving the medical mysteries of the dead and bringing the people responsible for their deaths to justice. But that’s only half the show.

I love mysteries, be they criminal, medical or what have you, Body of Proof offers both. On its surface Body of Proof is a close-ended procedural. Each week will deliver on the promise of a smart mystery geniously solved. But at its core, each episode lets you visit Megan and the rest of co-workers. Why do I like Megan so much? She is funny and charming but also impatient and driven. She can be abrasive one moment and achingly vulnerable the next. We may not be as smart as she is, but we’re not as broken as she is either. We will root for her as she takes on not only cops and killers each week but also the down fall of her marriage and her estrangement from her young daughter Lacey. And we will experience right along with Megan her faltering early steps in what we hope will bea series-long quest to find love, happiness and self-knowledge, a quest for which she often seems completely unequipped, but a journey on which she has an unlikely group of helpers. The dead.

Death is a fact of life. The irony is, death has brought new meaning to Megan Hunt’s life. As she investigates what happened to her patients, their lives and the lessons they hold become a kind of bequest to Megan, to learn from and to apply to her own life, if she has the courage to do so. It’s one thing to want to change, it’s quite another to make it happen. I will enjoy watching her try and hope you will too.