Visiting Column #56 -- Medical Dramas Go South, and Probably Don't Even Know It

Over the past few years, my wife's and my list of TV shows being DVRed has gone from a fairly modest percentage of them being reality shows, to even more being reality shows.  That is done at the expense of situation comedies and TV dramas, the latter being today's main topic.

I was, as you know, a medical-school student, so I am relatively conversant in medical jargon, certainly enough to understand the TV shows that have a medical setting, by which I specifically refer to the two that we watched fairly religiously.  That would be the old standard of contemporary medical dramas, Grey's Anatomy, and the more recent-vintage one, Chicago Med.  We had watched both of them since their inceptions years ago.  That's a lot of investment.

In their developmental years, both shows put out a set of characters that tried to create an appealing group, sometimes with quirks, but for the most part the producers realized that people watch medical dramas for the characters and not the medicine.  For years, that worked.

Both shows, however, have strayed toward the edge of being taken off the DVR list in the last couple years.  When I want to get a sermon, I turn to my pastor.  I do not enjoy being lectured by TV shows, especially when I may disagree with the message.  Grey's, in recent years, has decided that it needs to preach rather than spin good stories, and then preach some more.

Chicago Med befuddled me in an episode whose playing out was so contrary to its basic message that I wrote a piece about how they completely missed they way one plot should have developed.  Read my article here; it will help you get my drift.  You get the idea regardless.  For both shows, my best girl had to take me to task for yelling "Stop preaching!" to a mindless TV set.

I imagine that when you've produced a show like that for years, living in insulated Hollywood, you feel perhaps that you own that audience.  Perhaps it blinds you to reality, particularly the reality of why that audience is actually watching.  Most importantly, it can blind you to why we watch fiction in the first place.

Both shows were taken off our DVR list within ten minutes of the first episode of this season.  Moreover, it was for the exact same reason.

We watch fiction for the same reason we read fiction -- as an escape from the day's stresses and the reality of the world.  In the case of 2020, that reality is heavily COVID-centric.  We have businesses everywhere shut down and closed, governors and the House Speaker with their "Do as I say, not as I do" hypocrisy, masks abounding, toilet paper shortages, all that.  I don't have to explain; we're living it.

So I was particularly disappointed when both shows chose to put masks on their characters and go all coronavirus-stories on us.  I was disappointed, because it meant they'd have to keep it going all season, and I didn't particularly need to have the virus coughed in my face weekly by my choice of television shows.

Think about it.  I haven't seen much in the way of new sitcom episodes this season, but the few I have seen have completely ignored what is going on COVID-wise in the real world, and done so to their credit.  COVID-19 is not funny; nothing about it is.  Once you insert it into your plot line, you can't get it extracted, and we are not going to laugh.  The purpose of comedies is ... well, you get the idea.

But it wasn't just the masks on the two medical shows.  I am not lying to you when I say that it did not take ten minutes for both shows to find a way to work into their dialogue the idea that black people have a higher death rate from coronavirus than non-blacks.  Now, that's probably true and all, but without any context, so what?  Why, in God's name, did two separate shows on separate networks feel like we really, really needed to be told that in the first few minutes of their new seasons?  What, like we could do anything about it?

I had had it.  My best girl and I almost immediately shouted "Stop preaching!" at the TV, whereupon we looked at each other and switched to the recording-management screen and canceled them both.

As we are so early into the seasons of the fictional comedy and drama series, it is hard to tell whether or not more of them will insist on introducing the dreaded mask and our contemporary reality into their series.  But I beg this of them: Don't.  Resist the temptation, and let the stories tell their own tales, mask-free.

As a dramatic device, in TV dramas, it would now be beyond cliche.   In the context of a comedy, it would snuff out any humor in your entire season were you even to touch it once.  COVID-19 is the third rail of the 2020-21 television season.

I am right, am I not?

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Visiting Column #55 -- Three Things that SCOTUS Will Have to Decide

Good morning, fair readers.

As I write this, it is mid-November, and the 2020 election is in hot dispute.  What is being disputed is, well actually, a number of things, all related to whether there was an epidemic of ballot-stuffing, ballot destroying, a lot of 135-year-olds voting (they all seemed to like Joe Biden), and some very curious banning of Republican poll-watchers from cities with corrupt election histories like, you know, Philadelphia.

I'm expecting that in the coming weeks, a lot of court cases will be heard, and ultimately, they will float up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will have to make a few different findings and hand down a few different rulings.

While I don't know what those rulings will be, or even what cases they will hear, this particular column is meant to point out that the rulings will not be nearly as straightforward as those in Bush v. Gore, 2000, and they will have quite a bit more long-range impact.

There are three things that will have outcomes as far as this situation is concerned, and SCOTUS will have failed miserably if they don't execute on all three, to wit:

1. What happened?  This is a finding, in the sense that the Court will have to determine the facts of the cases.  I say "cases", because in different states, the Democrats did somewhat different things.  We don't know for sure (that's the Court's job to decide), but regardless, there have to be rulings of what the evidence showed happened in each of the contested states.  SCOTUS will find that X, Y and Z happened in Michigan, and X and Y happened in Pennsylvania, and maybe V and W in Arizona and, oh yeah, W, X and Y in Wisconsin and Georgia.  You get the idea.

So the first outcome is that the Court will make one ruling per state as to what it has found to have happened with the election.  Neither you nor I can tell you what that is going to be, because there are multiple legal teams pursuing this, some with no ties to the Trump campaign and others connected to it.  Some of them are being very close-hold with their evidence, lest the leftist media put forth their opposition to the public ahead of time.

Obviously, if the Court rules that nothing happened, or if maybe only one state played fast and loose with election laws, it's over and Biden will be sworn in on January 20th.  You don't need to read my column for that, so let's deal with the assumption that the Court finds multi-state problems took place.  Then we get to ...

2. What is the remedy?  So let's say that the Court finds that the elections in three states were corrupt, and the electoral count of those states is enough to swing the election to President Trump. Here's where SCOTUS becomes a real wild card, because I didn't attend enough law school (i.e., none) to know the answer to the $64,000 question -- what is the fix for this one, the 2020 election?

Obviously, there are multiple avenues of repair -- a replacement election, or the discarding of all successfully-contested ballots, or simply voiding the general election in that state and defaulting to the Constitutionally-mandated solution where the legislature of the state votes on the electors it will send to the Electoral College in December.  I honestly don't know, and those remedies could theoretically be different for what the Court orders each state to do, depending on all that X, Y and Z stuff I wrote above.

But the point is, that if the Court finds that the election was in any way corrupted, it has to order a specific solution; it can't pass the buck.  I do not know what that would be any more than I know what their finding would be, but I can tell you this -- the Court must, in that case, specifically mandate the immediate solution to tell the states how to determine what electors go to the College in December.  It cannot leave that to others.

I'll add this.  The left (meaning the Democrats and the media) will riot in the streets if that remedy does not go their way.  The Court -- and I'm serious -- must not care.  During her confirmation hearings, Justice Barrett pointed out that the Court should not be taking outcomes into account in making a Constitutionally-acceptable ruling, and this would be a good example.  They must rule properly, and provide a Constitutional remedy, and the remedy must be explicit so as to order how the electors for each state will be chosen.  And if the left (or the right) doesn't like the outcome, well, that's simply not relevant.

3. What is the future?  So whatever the Court finds, as long as something is found to be wrong, the nation can no longer trust its own electoral process.  And here is where the Court has to act decisively.  If there was corruption, in the eyes of the Court, then it owes it to the citizens (i.e., legal voters) of each affected state to do what it can to prevent that sort of thing from happening ever again.

Let's say that the Court finds that the prevention of Republican poll-watchers from overseeing the ballot counting in Philadelphia was felonious, and logically leads to the elimination of trust in the outcome.  It is incumbent on the Court to order penalties for those responsible, and it is equally incumbent on the Court to order the city and, assumedly, the commonwealth, to take affirmative, auditable steps so that such corruption can never recur.

Face it, my friends, right now we do not believe that the 2024 election will be on the up and up, and we certainly don't feel the 2020 election was.  The Supreme Court can not allow future elections to be subject to the same tortured doubts that we have about this one.

So if there was wrongdoing in 2020, then people need to be sent to prison, and systems need to be fixed.  Now.  Not two years from now, and certainly not four years from now.

The nine justices on the Supreme Court are going to have a very tough task in front of them, but they cannot finesse it, or do it halfway, or kick the can down the road.

They need to decide very specifically what happened. 

They need to order how to fix anything that went wrong so we have legitimate electors in December.

They need to punish the guilty and ensure that future elections can be trusted.

All three. This is their moment.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Visiting Column #54 -- Election Day Ramblings

This column was started in 2014, and for over four years I wrote a column every workday, until I reached 1,000 articles.  That means, though, that there has only been one other Election Day column on a presidential election day, so I went back to see what I had actually written, what pithy advice I had given, what remarkable insights I had shared with the world. 

You what I wrote?  Why I like cats and don't like dogs as much.  I'm serious; it is right here.  Election Day 2016.

So today, I feel that perhaps I might want to share some thoughts that might have a bit more relevance to the presidential (and Congressional) elections taking place today, that perhaps may end in the declaration of a winner.

I voted already.  My home state has early voting, but I chose to send for an absentee ballot, fill it out and hand-deliver it to my county's government center at the Board of Elections, and verify that it was counted.  I voted for Donald Trump for reelection as president.

But of course I did.   I am a conservative, unapologetic indeed.  I believe that the long view of our nation is one where people of all backgrounds have unlimited opportunity to succeed.  I believe that view has a support net for the truly needy, but that motivates everyone to get off that net if physically possible.

I believe in a long view of the nation where government keeps us safe, both domestically and internationally.  I believe in law and order, properly and compassionately administered.  And I believe in the idea that we reward talent, intelligence, diligence and accomplishment as a society and an economy.

Finally, I believe that the governance of that view is the Constitution.  Most particularly, it is the "powers not delegated" phrasing that effectively states that if a role is not assigned to the Federal government in the text of the Constitution (such as the national defense, the post, interstate commerce and coinage), it is the province of the states (such as, you know, education and morality).  I detest Federal overreach into areas the government has no business being in.

Donald Trump can be a frustrating man to support.  But the bottom line is simple.  The vision of the country that I just expressed is his vision.  Therefore I can be assured that his energy directed toward policy will be in the promotion of legislation and executive orders that closely align with that vision.

The opposition Democrats do not agree with any of that.  Their vision is of an all-powerful centralized government run by the elites, with policies that govern the election system so as to ensure their power.  It is, indeed, all about power for them.  It requires a socialist system to prevent non-elites with the aforementioned talent, intelligence and work ethic to succeed and challenge them.

There is no excuse for the way this year's riots have been managed in cities and states all run by Democrats.  The police are ordered to stand back and let the looters loot and the rioters vandalize and  burn, even when the minority owners of some of those businesses, already ravaged by the Wuhan virus impact, protest that it is hurting them.

There is no excuse for the Democrats' impeachment of President Trump for literally asking about the potential influence peddling by the Biden family and for the Ukrainians to please look into it. I can't possibly support that incredible "judicial" overreach by the House.

There is no excuse for Obamacare, particularly the way it was rammed down the throat of our nation with the pomposity of the elites, with the notorious declaration by Nancy Pelosi that we'd "have to pass it to see what's in it."  People who say things that condescending ought not to be allowed within a country mile of power.  Because "what's in it" forced 63-year-old couples to pay for coverage for maternity and pediatric dentistry but stripped our own dental coverage from the plans the law outlawed.

There is no excuse for Joe Biden.  The man clearly was engaged in selling access through his son and brother, and an apolitical judiciary would have no problem declaring those actions to be treasonous in that they involved our adversaries.  And there is no excuse for the actions of the news media and Big Tech in stomping on the evidence of that access-selling and trying to prevent you from knowing about it. 

I honestly don't care much how President Trump expresses himself.   One could argue that if he weren't who he is, then he couldn't get done what he does, and there is some truth in that.  It is all about what he does; and what he does is to get things done -- with achieving energy independence, with ISIS, with Israel, with the USMCA, with the removal of onerous regulations, with the cutting of corporate and individual tax rates -- the way a businessman with an eye on efficiency would.

Yes, I voted for President Trump and it wasn't even close.

 Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton