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