humanist + humorist

My “watched” list in this genre has been piling up. Have a themed batch of reactions to everything I’ve checked out since…the last time I did this, probably.

ER:

Had to full-on quit watching this one. There was a character I just got madder and madder at…which would be one thing if he was supposed to be the bad guy in his subplot, but I don’t think the show even understands that he was the bad guy.

Surprisingly, it’s not the doctor who bullied one of his residents into going off her ADHD meds! No, this was the doctor who was horribly entitled and self-important in a custody subplot: convinced he was the only one with the right to be a dad to a kid he barely saw, treating the guy who was actually raising the kid like an intruder who should be phased out of his life (the custody battle was kicked off when the mom died, neither of these men was the biological father), and committing full-on perjury to present himself as more of a fit parent than he actually was.

And the court bought it! And the writers seem to think this is a heartwarming heroic victory! He’s a terrible person and the kid deserves better.

Most of the show is not even about this subplot, but by the end, any scene with this doctor just reminded me how maddening it was. So I did myself a favor and tapped out.

St. Elsewhere:

Gave this a try, dropped it a couple episodes into season 1.

I don’t know if it was actually worse at the ’90s levels of racism/sexism/ableism/etc than ER, or if I just burned through all my tolerance for that by watching ER. Either way, it was too much to enjoy.

Brilliant Minds:

This one’s new (just wrapped the first season), and based on the work of neurologist Oliver Sacks, who wrote up a bunch of case studies of Weird Brain Things. (The MC is even named Oliver, in case you missed the connection.) Which you would think would be right up my alley! I love Oliver Sacks’ books!

…Again, I don’t know if it’s actually worse about the medicine than other medical shows, or if I just notice it more in this one, because I recognize all the cases and know how they really went.

But what I keep noticing is, the main neurologist and his team keep “figuring out” things that should’ve been obvious. Some examples:

• A teenager comes in with what they think is seizures — turns out it’s a heart condition — but the point is, it gets triggered when she laughs too hard, and neither she nor her parents have noticed the obvious recurring trigger until Dr. Oliver deduces it
• One of the residents keeps mirroring the reactions of people around him — if, say, a patient keels over, he also keels over — and it’s not just that Dr. Oliver knows the technical term for what this is or why it happens! No, his basic deduction of “you are mirroring the reactions of people around you” is treated as a big reveal that the resident didn’t already know
• The team diagnoses Congenital Insensitivity to Pain in a kid who has to be at least eight. The writers try to give us a heart-tugging subplot about a single parent who’s too overwhelmed to catch everything, but this isn’t something you can just miss for eight years

Also, Dr. Oliver himself is supposed to be faceblind…but the writers don’t seem to consider that it would affect his life all the time, day-to-day, not just during the scenes where it comes up in the script.

(One moment that sticks out: he sees his also-a-doctor best friend arguing with a guy in her office, goes in, and immediately jumps in. I can accept Dr. Oliver thinking “if there’s one woman in Dr. Best Friend’s office, it’s safe to assume this is Dr. Best Friend” — but she could be talking to any number of co-workers, patients, or other social acquaintances. How does Dr. Oliver not need a moment to orient himself, to double-check who this is, before he knows which argument he’s jumping into?)

(…sure, maybe it’s supposed to be a character point that he jumps into arguments without being 100% sure who he’s talking to. But if that’s a deliberate writing choice, we should see it coming back to bite him at some point.)

Also also: there’s some seriously unethical practice from Dr. Best Friend, and I think the show wants us to see her as more sympathetic than she is.

Made it through all of season 1, but I’m not feeling motivated to go back for season 2.

Doc:

Another new one — Season 1 is still ongoing — and by coincidence, the last episode I watched had a patient with CIP, who was much more convincingly-written than the Brilliant Minds one! Promising.

The gimmick in this one is, our main doctor gets a brain injury in the pilot episode, and has amnesia for her last 8 years of medical knowledge, practical experience, and interpersonal drama. So the “personal soap opera” aspect of the show is inherently an ongoing Weird Brain Thing.

I’m liking it so far! Fingers crossed it holds up.

St. Denis Medical:

Also new, and this one’s a comedy! From a lot of the same people who made Superstore, so you know they’ve got the chops to do it well.

It’s not going deep into interestingly weird medical cases, or building tension about whether patients are going to survive. So if that’s the main thing a viewer is looking for in a doctor show, they probably won’t be into this one. But the comedy gets a lot of mileage out of “how all the usual tropes and struggles of a workplace sitcom interact with the particular needs and problems of a hospital.” And I feel like watching so many Serious Doctor Shows makes me appreciate the texture of this more.

It’s snappy, it’s clever, it can do heartwarming when it wants to — and it’s the kind of show that actually likes all its characters, you know? They all have flaws, sometimes they’re doofuses, some of them can be mean to each other, but the writing isn’t mean to them. Some of them can get cringey, but not so much that it hits the embarrassment squick. It’s fun.

Already hoping for six seasons and a movie.