Doctor Doctor
We were all teenagers once. I am saying that feeling fairly safe in the knowledge that no under 13s are reading this. If you are there well thanks for being here and I assure you soon you will have the joy of the teenage years.
One of the joys of having a teenager or two in your house is that you can indulge in some cross pollination of culture. You might try to introduce the teenagers to some of the works of your teenage or formative years. Perhaps Apocalypse Now, Bowie, Cormac McCarthy, Peter Temple, Led Zeppelin, Nick Drake, XTC, The Sopranos and The West Wing, Lantana or The Castle.
Of course this introduction is not always successful and this is an exchange of ideas so you have to get some stuff back and of course you might not like it a lot of it. In return the teenagers might not give the genius of Bowie the praise that you believe it clearly warrants. If the teenager is your daughter you might find it even harder to find common ground.
This brings me to Grey’s Anatomy. When she is at home my daughter loves Grey’s Anatomy and binge watches it in the evenings. A cultural phenomenon, Grey’s Anatomy is seventeen seasons old and still going strong, rates consistently well, wins all the obvious industry awards and is course the latest iteration of one of the staples of TV, the drama set in a hospital. Grey's Anatomy follows the lives of the doctors at the fictional Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital in Seattle. These shows have been around for as long as TV, every country that has a local TV production industry pumps them out. When I was a teenager Australian made Young Doctors and a bit later A Country Practice ruled the airwaves.
Last night I even sat down and watched two episodes of series seven back to back and quite enjoyed it. There I have said it.
Naturally these shows have been parodied [the excellent Scrubs for example] because well they just get a bit too much with all that emoting and nurses uniforms. But Grey’s Anatomy generally nails it and I have come to develop a grudging appreciation of the show. For my money it is not as good as ER, the 90s hospital drama that launched George Clooney’s career [and a few others for that matter] but pretty good nevertheless.
Obviously the production values and acting uniformly strong, the cast are all good looking, the characters and plots broadly agreeable and all the emotional strings are plucked in about the correct ratios. Tense surgery scenes, tragedies, personal dramas and romantic breakups, a little bit of factual substance, the odd shock or two and of course some patients live and some die. The real stars are the scriptwriters who develop situations that are familiar to any drama watcher but still entertaining and plausible on this heavily travelled path. There is clever use of music too. I wouldn’t say I am a total convert but it is a hundred times better than manufactured reality TV like Big Brother and Beauty and the Geeks.
It does make me wonder though. These human dramas seem to work best when the cast is doing a job that is very strongly linked to community service. Hence in order of popularity we have hospitals, then police stations and legal offices. Ricky Gervais’s masterpiece The Office could only ever have been a comedy and a very particular one. Even though all the humans in his fictional paper merchant company have the same emotions and personal life events as doctors, somehow it just would not work. The drama of the operating room will always beat a sales office on an industrial state. Maybe too it is because these settings are also foreign to most of us hence why the settings of schools or universities don’t seem as popular.
By the way my daughter isn’t that interested that I like her TV show too. I guess that like when I was a teenager if your parents really liked something you loved then maybe something was wrong. I can still remember a strange delight as I looked at the puzzled and slightly worried faces of my mum and dad as they watched part of an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus before leaving the room. Fun in itself.
The big question is why do we baby boomers insist on ramming our pop culture favorites down the throats of the next generations? That, I am still trying to work out.
Six Classic Songs about Doctors
Rock and Roll Doctor - Little Feat
Doctor Doctor Bad Case of Loving You - Robert Palmer
Doctor Doctor - Thompson Twins
Doctor Jones - Aqua
Doctor Robert – The Beatles
Doctor Wu - Steely Dan
