Grade: 78/100
“Red Band Society” is “The Breakfast Club” in a hospital. You may like this newfound revelation, and you may not, but it’ll be true either way.
The main ingredients are all there — the athletes (there are two of them this time around), the princess, the basket case, the criminal and the brain. While John Hughes’ iconic coming-of-age masterpiece revolved around those five characters, and those alone, “Red Band Society” features a variety of players to complement its ensemble cast.
The cast of attempts, admirably if not equally, to follow in the footsteps of the proverbial “Brat Pack” — there’s the pair of Jordi and Leo to Emilio Estevez’s oppressed star wrestler; resident bad girl Kara to Molly Ringwald’s snooty princess; the eternally scheming Dash attempting to imitate Judd Nelson’s criminal; Emma, the girl recovering from an eating disorder, to Ally Sheedy’s aggressively introverted basket case; and the adorably precocious narrator, the comatose Charlie to Anthony Michael Hall’s pressure-bound nerd. While “The Breakfast Club” is an hour and a half motion picture, expect “Red Band Society” to be more of a slow burn.
Despite the obvious similarities, “Red Band Society” has its own idiosyncrasies. Rather than Paul Gleason’s sneering principal, “Red Band” has its resident authority figure (though you’d think there’d be more of them in a hospital for kids), the incomparable Octavia Spencer plays Charlie’s pediatric nurse. She’s intimidating at first but as expected, she turns out to have a heart of gold.
All in all, “Red Band Society” is worth your time, and it isn’t likely to get cancelled anytime soon — when “Glee” concludes in the spring, it seems a perfect fit for this show to take its place in the primest of primetime slots, given the combination of comedy and tragedy that’s pretty hot right now. It’s true that the premise is perhaps a tad absurd. A hospital wing full of sick kids, many of them terminal, is enough to make the most grown men cry. But “Red Band Society” manages to make itself endearing, a method that seems almost necessary for subject matter so innately dark.
If there’s anything to be said to detract from the show’s otherwise as-good-as-advertised pilot episode, it’s the sugarcoated world in which the characters reside. Despite their primarily terminal illnesses, the kids appear overflowing with energy. Adults never appear at inopportune times to ruin the fun, and the kids’ lives are altogether a basket of sunshine. The narrator, Charlie, is entirely comatose and yet he can hear everything around him, as the show auspiciously bridges the gap between real and magical with little more than a quip from a little kid to assuage you.
At a glance, the pilot wows in several ways. It’s cleverly balanced for such a large cast,  doesn’t take itself too seriously and is downright adorable. Viewers await the day that Hughes makes his cameo appearance.