Doctor, Doctor....Glad I'm Not Sick

Mrs. Groopman: You know what my favorite part of surgery is, Dr. Troy? It's not when the bandanges comes off. It's that the last thing I hear is your voice saying, "Everything is going to be alright."

Dr. Troy: Everything is going to be alright.

My new show to watch in this void of summer tv is Nip/tuck and not just because John Hensley is hot, as is a majority of the male cast. ( Oh yeah baby, nothin' wrong with a little eye candy for the woman folk) It's kind of an interesting little niche for the "hospital drama". To my mind hospital drama started with shows like MASH, which wasn't a true hospital drama, it was a quasi war/hospital dramedy. ( It would later inspire the show China Beach.) But the show did reveal to television developers and writers that the public could handle the particularly grim job that doctors in a war have to do. It also revealed that you could mix in humor and the audience would not be offended. ( Although the audiences SHOULD have been offended by the liberal use of canned laughter.)

From MASH there was the spin off "Trapper John MD" and the more popular "St Elsewhere" ( The show that gave Denzel Washington his start.) St. Elsewhere was a "hospital drama" which often had elements of soap opera. Instead of dealing with patients or medical issues, more often the show dealt with personal issues involving both doctors, nurses, other staff members, and patients. If it was hospital oriented it was more likely to an "administrative" drama ie dealing with running a small hospital that wasn't making much money rather than some serious medical ethical dilemma. Unlike in MASH where the main characters had both dramatic and comedic attributes ( the periphy characters were more purely comedic-like Clinger and Radar), in St. Elsewhere there were certain designated comedic characters, like Howie Mandell, and certain designated dramatic characters, like Denzel.

In the mid eighties there was a sitcom called ER. It focused on a small emergency room and the main character was played by Elliot Gould. The show consisted of only one set and very few actors. Amazingly there was never any blood on the set or on the costumes of any of the characters. Although there were medical emergencies on the show, the main focus was the personal relationships between the doctors, nurses, staff, and the occassional medical outsider. (One nurse had a boyfriend who was a cop who frequented the ER. Another nurse, nicknamed Thor, often spoke of her husband who never appeared in any form on the show.) Strangely this show was more in denial about the actual way an ER functions that much earlier shows like St. Elsewhere.

And then came the ER the rest of us know and love and Chicago Hope. Chicago Hope often had scenes that made me burst out laughing in the same way the sitcom used to. ( The sitcom ER once had a kid calmly sit through, with no blood spilt, a conscious lung puncture, which is one of the most painful procedures performed. The patient must be conscious while his or her lung is punctured and inflated. I have spoken to a few people who have lived through this ordeal. One of them told me it made her spinal tap feel like Disneyland.) I never watched Chicago Hope by my apartment mates did and so I kind of watched by default. They always wanted to know what I thought was so funny.

ER is more realistic. Unlike shows like MASH where the camera was set up to focus on the doctors, so the patient, and by default the the blood and the wound, here there was almost an emphasis on capturing at least some of the grueling, and let's be honest, disgusting physical aspects of working in a hospital. And of course the show had its share of relationships, but it also brought up a lot of the serious issues confronting doctors in terms of medical ethics. It also, for the first time I think, began to bring to its viewers how complex treating a patient really is. That it isn't just remember what you were taught and do it. But there are complex ethical issues and questions surrounding treatment. It also brought to light the emotional issues doctors have to face ( making mistakes resulting in permanent injury or death, clashing with other doctors over correct treatment of a patient, accepting that a patient has refused treatment etc).

Now we have shows like Nip/tuck and to some degree Crossing Jordan ( although Crossing Jordan may more correctly belong to the investigatory/legal drama). Nip takes the hospital drama to another level. Now the patients being treated are not in dire condition, unlike patients in ER or MASH, but rather, for a variety of reasons, seeking out "elective" surgery. The question to some degree that fascinates me here, and has fascinated me for some time, is does this show indicate that in contemporary American culture being unattractive has actually become a disease?

The writers on this particular show are much better at creating male characters and dialogue than female. The female characters tend to, well, let's say demonstrate the charisma and creativity of pre-fab housing. The male characters are also fairly stereotypic. Dr. Christian Troy-whose name says it all-part good guy, part porn star- is the "bad boy" doctor who really does the right thing in a very unconventional way in the end- ie he saves the haus frau wife of dr goody goody from committing adultery by greeting her in bed with 2 identical twins-and his partner,Dr. Goody Goody, I mean Sean McNamara is the guilt wracked, ethically obsessed "how do you draw the line?" ( why did he get into plastic surgery then?) doctor. Sean's son, played by John Hensley, is a tormented young man whose main torment is that he wants to be circumsized. And that's about as original as the show gets, but as I said at least the guys are nice to look at, and there is at least more originality there than in the female characters.

From the two episodes I've seen the endings have been too pat to have any kind of serious emotional impact. In one episode Sean and his wife go from seperation to serious fight directly into hot sex ( who didn't see THAT coming?) and this last one the older woman who "blackmails" Dr. Troy into having sex with her in exchanged for dropping a law suit ends up simply cuddling with the good doctor. The ethical implications of a doctor willing to sleep with a patient, and certainly the portrayal of Dr. Troy as nothing more than really a glorified gigolo, and the more serious implication that plastic surgery itself as an institution is a kind of professional prostitution of surgical talent is never seriously discussed. Nor is the more interesting implication of the reversal of the power role. Most often doctors are portrayed as the "powerful" or dominant partner in the doctor patient relationship, but here the patient is more powerful. Powerful enough to bully the doctor into an unwanted sexual relationship. It's particularly interesting that this kind of portrayal would happen while direct to consumer advertisement of prescription medicine is at its height.

Basically the concept behind Nip/tuck and the issues that could be talked about in such a show are intriguing, but the actual shows fails to deliver.