Nurses, a Canadian import now airing on NBC, introduces an interesting hook in its premiere episode, “Incoming”. It’s a medical drama not about elite surgeons or medical directors but the nurses in a major Toronto hospital; it’s kind of like the Star Trek: Lower Decks of the genre, though obviously not as funny and not set in space.

But it’s definitely a bit funny, as all the nurses seem useless and are under the auspices of a very Irish head nurse named Sinead (Cathy White) who seems built from the ground-up to be a funny character in a TV show rather than anything resembling a real person.

A show like this lives and dies on the strength of its characters, and we seem to have an interesting group here. The ostensible lead is Grace (Tiera Skovbye), who you can tell is important because she provides needless narration and has a vaguely mysterious past, though the most interesting thing about her in the first episode is what we learn right at the end, which is that she’s having an affair with a married man. Her case of the week is pretty interesting, too, treating the perpetrator of a hate crime, even though she’d rather not.

Keon Colby (Jordan Johnson-Hinds) also gets a fair amount of attention here as a former college football player who makes a serious blunder – he fails to find a baby’s heartbeat during an ultrasound scan – which quickly earns him a reputation throughout the entire hospital. The episode’s comic relief largely comes from Wolf (Donald MacLean Jr.), who spends almost all of it frantically searching for the owner of two severed fingers in an almost slapstick plot with a nice payoff.

The other new nurses include Nazneed Khan (Sandy Sidhu) and Ashley Collins (Natasha Calis), who’re present but have less to do for now. It’s a promising way of approaching a well-worn genre from a slightly new angle, and with TV production being what it is currently, Nurses seems like a smart pickup for NBC.

This recap of Nurses season 1, episode 1, “Incoming”, contains spoilers. We recapped every episode — check out the episodes tag.