Letters to the Editor
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Wonderful Article
Thank you for a wonderful, well written article. Nurses are rarely acknowledged for all the good they do, and that is a shame. Keep up the good work you are doing in Ordinary Hospital, your patients are lucky to have someone who cares so deeply for them.
I'm a teacher, and rarely are we presented as we really are on TV, either. On the fictional shows, teachers all wear low cut blouses and unrealistically high heeled shoes, on the news we all seduce our students. ;) Sadly, a lot of people aren't ever going to know or care what folks in our professions do on a day to day basis, but it's okay, because WE know we're doing good work, and the people we work closest with - your patients and my students - know that what we do makes a difference.
As for the negative letters, I'd ignore 'em. I think if we baked some of these angry folk a big ole plate of chocolate chip cookies, they'd gripe and moan because they weren't oatmeal raisin, or vice versa. Some folks just like to be miserable, and they can't help but try to bring the rest of us down with them.
You do good work, Ms. Tisdale. You get a gold star from this teacher.
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Some reality at last
I can't watch most of these shows either, as they're so far removed from any sort of reality I recognise.
I suppose it depends on what presses your buttons but, for me, this type of show is not 'escapism'. It, and others like it, purport to reflect some sort of reality when in fact they're about as real as Star Trek.
And it's not a question of viewers not being able to tell fact from fiction: these shows are asking for our involvement, asking us to believe that all this could be for real. So if you KNOW that it's just not like that in real life, how can you watch it? I know I can't.
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What Makes Good Drama?
People who capture our attention (beautiful people often do), conflict (a placid, easy-to-work-with doctor does not provide this), variety (if the doctors only treated one area of specialty, the show would seem mundane), pacing (if the diagnoses took as long as through a process as tedious as real life people would stop watching).
Now to agree with Tisdale for a minute, I loved St. Elsewhere and can't stand House and enjoy Scrubs. But it's pretty easy to understand why the differences between real life and most television shows exists. And as I recall, St. Elsewhere was only a minor hit; it never scored massive ratings. No surprise then that few shows have emulated it.
My dad's a surgeon. I don't think he's ever watched a doctor show in his life. But then, I doubt many detectives watch Law and Order. (It's realisitic? Please, it's the most formulaic show on television: any regular viewer can tell you exactly what steps it will go through from pre-credit sequence to "ironic thought" closing comment.) Too much has to be changed for a variety of reasons to make a show set any profession interesting to the people who actually practice it.
Except, for some reason, journalism. Journalists invariably seem to love any drama set in their field. I never figured out why.
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Perspective
"House" is unwatchable unless you assume it's a comedy. As a comedy, it's a riot.
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I teach in a high school. It's not like "Boston Public".
Most teachers are very dedicated and none to my knowledge are carrying on affairs
with students.
I have a friend who is a police officer. Not at all like "Law & Order".
So what exactly is the author's point? Most professionals work very hard and TV is not like real life.
OK.
Where's my check from Salon? I already knew that.
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thanks for the deep insight.
Reality is more complicated than fiction and real people are uglier than TV stars. The horror.
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It's a TV show
First, I greatly admire and appreciate you for your dedication and the difficult and largely thankless work you do.
That said, House is a television show centered around medical mysteries. A television show, not a documentary. It doesn't have to be terribly true to life. It's entertainment. When you watch other dramas, such as the legal or police shows, do you expect to learn the true nature of those professions or just to follow a good story?
There are more realistic views of hospitals, off and on, over on the various Discovery/TLC channels. There have been good documentary series based on Johns Hopkins and other facilities. That's where I expect to learn a bit about your world.
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Missing the point?
My mother is a nurse and my dad was a hospital pharmacist. I have always admired them both for their professionalism and their dedication. My dad died when I was very young. My mother has done every kind of nursing you can imagine - including city health nurse and (before she retired) nursing hime care. She has saved lives in unglamorous ways I don't know how many times, and she used to come home from a hard day at work in ways that made your heart ache. A baby was sleeping in carton box near dog droppings - an elderly patient died ...
So I think hospital staffs are the unsung heroes of the world, and I grew up hearing about both kinds of doctors - the kind and dedicated ones as well as the arrogant assholes.
I never liked a medical show until House, and here's why. It is in fact not fundamentally about the medicine at all. The setting is a pretext for some excellent writing (best on TV since they cancelled The West Wing and Studio 60). Dr. House is Sherlock Holmes (brilliant detective, ant-social addict), and the scripts are about clashing notions of morality, the limits of science, a dysfunctional character in a variously dysfunctional world - oh, yeah, and the part where they're all gorgeous is okay with me. It is definitely a soap opera (House watches them all the time - HINT), and you have to suspend disbelief if you're going to appreciate it.
I totally understand why real doctors and nurses and hospital staff might not like the show, but it is not a slice of life, reality-based show about hospitals. It's a detective show with morality plays interspersed that just happens to have a hospital for a setting.