‘Royal Pains’ season 7, episode 3 review: A fine performance

This week on “Royal Pains,” Hank was studied by a method actor, Divya stood up for herself in her custody battle with Rafa, and Evan and Paige were willing to do just about anything to ensure that their baby dreams became a reality.

So did most of it work? That depends on your outlook. It was for the most part an entertaining hour of TV, but also a fairly inconsequential one. Sure, there were some little developments, with the biggest one being the super-moving moment at the end with Hank and Evan sitting in front of their mother’s great together. It’s been 25 years, and this moment allowed them both to have some needed perspective. Also, any time that the show explores its own mythology further is something that we can sign off on. It was strange that Evan had this story and also him accidentally releasing his sperm issues to the entire hospital within the span of an hour.

Now, the main issue for this episode is that we’re dealing with an eight-episode season, and yet at the same time we don’t know where we are going with all of this. Boris has been used sparingly, we’ve only seen Jeremiah in one episode, and Divya’s story right now is a little depressing for a show we consider to be for the most part fun.

In the end, we leave “Playing Doctor” torn. We wanted to really like it because the Hank story with Cole the actor was for the most part fun, but we come away from it wanting more. Part of that may be due to the aforementioned brevity, or because at this point we just want to see some of the characters making major strides forward. Maybe we’ll see some of that in subsequent weeks. This was pleasant and had some fun moments (namely Evan and Paige secretly spying on Hank and Cole), but we don’t know how much of it we’ll remember in a few weeks … save for that aforementioned Hank / Evan scene at the end. Grade: B-.