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Doctors on TVWhat America learns about health care from watching Mercy, Three Rivers, HawthoRNe, and Grey's Anatomy.

By Troy PattersonPosted Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009, at 12:05 PM ET

In an America where police procedurals warp jurors' expectations of forensic science and Dragnet's Jack Webb taught kids their Miranda rights before civics teachers had the chance, it must be the case that TV shapes popular ideas about the health care system. What does this mean for the current debate and ongoing spat about health care reform? I can just barely contemplate it, preoccupied as I am by working on a treatment for a reality-competition/game-show hybrid provisionally titled, with apologies to Betsy McCoughey and Sarah Palin, Death Panel. (It is loosely modeled on The Dating Game.) In any event, this much is clear: The viewing public loves a good brain death.

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Preferably, the pulling of a plug is followed by the fleet delivery of donated organs to a good-looking or otherwise compelling person. An end, a beginning, an Igloo cooler—these are a good start for a show, and for evidence, we need look no further than last week's Grey's Anatomy. At the close of last season, the lives of both George and Izzie hung in the balance. Would she die? One hoped so, as she is terribly annoying, but it was George whose brain activity ceased. No one knew whether he had opted to donate his organs, but after an agonizing emotional struggle persisting through one or two commercial breaks, the team at Seattle Grace did the right thing. Miranda immediately demanded to know where George's kidneys were going. They would save the life of an 8-year-old, of course, and we all felt a twinkle of hope for the world.

There were no organ transplants on House last Monday, nor was there any nod to bureaucracy, as is usual. True, a medical drama addressing the topic of insurance company approval would be commercially unviable and artistically undesireable; it would be something along the lines of a homicidally torpid production of a Beckettian anti-drama. Still, this week's House seemed particularly ridiculous to an occasional viewer of the show. A patient needed a mercury test, spinal stimulation, an MRI, chemotherapy—no sweat. Perhaps all red-tape complications were sublimated into the tortuous romance between Foreman and Thirteen.

We might find a marginally less unrealistic depiction of such matters on TNT's HawthoRNe, where Jada Pinkett-Smith portrays the head nurse at a Richmond, Va., hospital and does half her acting by peevishly sucking in her cheeks. We might, but we don't. However, inasmuch as HawthoRNe addresses issues, it speaks to real-world frustrations, even while inspiring fake-world frustrations with its persistent silliness. On last night's rerun, the emergency room was overwhelmed after the government slashed another hospital's funding. "Standard nurse-to-patient ratio is one-to-four," a whistle-blower said to a journalist preparing a hush-hush exposé. "Now it's one-to-six here." The second half of that quote is a paraphrase. I couldn't take notes properly at that moment, distracted by this allegedly sneaky reporter following his source around the hospital while carrying a notebook. Elsewhere, seeking information about a homeless mother, Pinkett-Smith's character bribed an administrator with the promise of treating her to a mani-pedi.

Last week's premiere of Mercy (NBC, Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET) introduced us to a trio of nurses at the core of what will be the best new drama of the fall unless FlashForward starts making sense. There was doe-eyed Chloe (Michelle Trachtenberg), who is the naif misguidedly garbed in Hello Kitty scrubs; saucy Sonia (Jaime Lee Kirchner), who is superfluously hot; and complex Veronica (Taylor Schilling), who was shaped from the tough-but-inwardly-fragile template of TV saviors. Veronica has recently returned to a Newark, N.J., hospital from Iraq, so when she scorns doctors as arrogant fools—that sine qua non of nurse shows—she gets to bark righteously about how she and her mates did things "on the front lines."

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

COMMENTS

There's quite a few conventions that I wish doctor shows would just do away with--

1) brilliant doctor/team of brilliant doctors will get you a diagnosis in about 60 minutes.

2) brilliant doctor only needs ONE LAST esoteric bit of patient history to arrive at a diagnosis. ("What? Why didn't you tell us that he ate that undercooked bear jerky last month? It was leptospirosis all the time--now we don't have to amputate his legs!")

3) brilliant doctor/team of brilliant doctors only are thinking about one patient at a time, and they don't think about another one until they have it all figured out (in about 60 minutes.)

4) someone can be "coded" for an extended period of time, then get shocked ONE last time and wake up spontaneously without any ill effects.

5) people in "comas" can wake up 10+ years later without any neurological deficits (oh yeah, and they never get bedsores, UTIs, line infections, etc.) (And they usually are either intubated for 10 years straight or are just lying there asleep and look otherwise normal. Nobody on TV ever gets a trach.)

6) all doctors are able to deliver babies, do brain biopsies, crack open a chest, and start an IV regardless of how they were actually trained.

7) doctors only fall into 2 personality types--arrogant bastards, or sensitive guys/gals who "care too much"

Actually, my biggest one (and the reason I quit watching "ER") is when the writers lift scenarios directly from board review texts. I was watching "ER" one night after studying for boards and they had the 45-year-old guy with crushing substernal chest pain AGAIN and I decided then and there that I couldn't take it anymore.

And don't get me started on "House" (see above)--my family has forbidden me from watching it because I usually end up throwing something at the TV.

-- Grungie
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