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People say that in times of great struggle, it’s possible to triumph due to optimism and support of good friends. “Red Band Society,” one of Fox’s new offerings this fall, promotes this message whole-heartedly. The series centers on a group of young teenagers inhabiting a hospital wing due to a range of maladies preventing them from living normal lives. Charlie (Griffin Gluck), a comatose boy who was in a mysterious accident, narrates the show from his unconscious state lying on a hospital bed. Although this show tries to stick out from the norm by pioneering a setting rarely seen on TV—a pediatric ward—it doesn’t accomplish what it intends to due to its obvious intention to avoid any real drama.

The young cast consists entirely of strong actors, but the characters these ingenues play tend toward the formulaic. Kara Souders (Zoe Levin) is a bratty head cheerleader who is disrespectful to the point of evil, even going so far as to breathe cigarette smoke into Charlie’s mouth in order to see if he is truly in a coma. Her actions seem too cruel to be real, and although she slightly shows another side when she forges friendships with the other patients, she is extremely underdeveloped as a character. Although she smokes cigarettes, it comes as a complete shock to the viewer when it is casually mentioned that she will be at the bottom of a heart transplant list due to the multitude of drugs found in her system, including cocaine. Similarly inexplicable is why, after being told that her heart was too weak to function, she drinks beer without any acknowledgment from the show that she may be making a poor choice, almost as if the audience isn’t supposed to notice either. Leo (Charlie Rowe) and Jordi (Nolan Sotillo) are almost exactly the same character, down to the fact that soon they will have the same number of limbs (three, after Jordi’s leg is amputated) and a crush of the same girl, Emma (Ciara Bravo) who, in an odd casting decision, looks much, much younger than all of her peers and especially her romantic interests.

The strangest part of the show is that although it’s set in a hospital, it avoids delving into many of the characters’ illnesses. Emma, for example, is said to have an eating disorder, however, it is only really mentioned when Kara mocks her for it, offering her diet pills and cigarettes as replacements for food. Even the specific eating disorder that she has is unmentioned throughout the pilot. Thus far, the only really compelling tale is that of Charlie, the narrator of the show, who also occasionally somehow offers subtle advice to other patients though he is unconscious. The cause of his coma is unknown, but the fact that his dad secretly visits him despite being banned is an interesting twist that will hopefully lead to a unique and multi-faceted plotline.

Ultimately, “Red Band Society” seems to still have a lot of untapped potential. Currently, it seems to be more uplifting than emotionally wringing; obviously this may change very soon. I went into it expecting it to be an hour of revolving tears of grief and cheers of victory. Instead, I witnessed mundane teenage hijinks, such as Dash Hosney (Astro) telling an attractive nurse that he doesn’t want to “die…a virgin” in an attempt to get her to sleep with him, and an overuse of the word “YOLO.” Octavia Spencer does a great job with the sassy-but-caring nurse trope, although so far she is one-dimensional. The show’s writers seem to be very distanced both from what teenagers actually care about and the amount of freedom one has while living in a hospital: even with a suspension of disbelief, I had a hard time believing that a hospital’s valet would really be okay with lending a plastic surgeon’s fancy sports car to three sick 16-year-olds so that they could go buy alcohol with a fake ID.

Most jarring are the supposedly uplifting quotes, such as when Charlie, the comatose child, claims that “life doesn’t stop in a hospital, it actually starts.” Said by any of the other characters, this might have made a bit of sense, but the boy who hasn’t even been awake in the hospital? Obviously there is an element of magical thinking involved with his character; despite being in a coma he can supposedly hear everything around him and even purposefully fart in order to annoy Kara. Although the show obviously tries to remain light-hearted, the lack of appropriate seriousness given to the characters, who are all facing potentially fatal diseases, is borderline offensive. “Red Band Society” obviously attempts to break into the teenage-angst-with-a-dash-of-hopefulness genre usually associated with works such as “The Fault in Our Stars,” but if it refuses to address the true struggles the characters are dealing with and sticks to its lame jokes, then it will eventually face flack for its trivialization of life in a pediatric ward. It is my sincere hope, just for the sake of the actors involved, that this show turns itself around soon into something worth watching.