Turow (1989) Playing Doctor

Playing Doctor is Joseph Turow's account of the history of "doctor shows" on American television. It describes the various genre conventions of these shows and how they came to be. He uses interviews and archival research to provide a behind-the-scenes look at how and why the medical establishment was portrayed as it was at various junctures.

A few trends and ideas Turow recounts:

• The doctor show genre has roots that predate television itself. Old film serials about Doctor Kildare portrayed doctors in saintly/godly fashion. Kildare serials and early doctor television shows portrayed doctors in paternalistic roles, giving necessary operations to patients operations in spite of their objections. Another genre convention established by these serials was the interplay between an older, wiser physician and a young up-and-coming doctor. This, of course, continues today as we see new interns broken in on ER, Grey's Anatomy, House, etc.
  
• Reality surgery shows aren't a new thing. The first real surgery footage was shown in a doctor show decades ago.
• As doctor shows developed, another important genre element that became prominent was that of the "Grand Hotel." A hospital setting is one in which new character can rotate onto the scene in each week's episode. It's a great plot device and one of the reasons these shows are perennially popular.
• In contrast to saintly TV doctors like Dr. Kildare (who was reinvented in a 1960s TV show) and Marcus Welby, the "bad boy" doctor also became a staple of television during the 1960s. Ben Casey, in a show of the same name, was an antisocial, tempestuous figure who was tolerated by hospital staff only because of his brilliance as a surgeon. This archetype lives on today in the TV show House. Casey and Kildare actually aired during the same years, making them favorite television foils.
  
• Doctor comedies eventually joined the ranks of doctor dramas, riffing on established genre elements.
• Portrayals of the medical profession have changed considerably over the years, as the influence of the profession behind-the-scenes has waxed and waned. Early on, the AMA contributed advisors to every medical TV show. Their seal actually appeared as a stamp of approval in the credits of the various dramas, assuring audiences that they were authentic. But having AMA approval also meant that the shows had to cater to the medical profession and portray it favorably. Eventually Hollywood wanted out of this arrangement and began producing unauthorized medical shows. The science used in the plots could be shoddy, but the shows no longer idolized the medical profession. Eventually, medical advisers returned to Hollywood shows in less coercive fashion, giving advice, but not orders. There was a return to realism, or perhaps an escalation of it, in the early 1990s with the birth of the show ER. But ER and other shows in its cohort, like Chicago Hope also did something new—they showed doctors as surprisingly fallible and mistake-prone.
• Epilogue: Though Turow doesn't get into it to a great extent in this book, elsewhere he has written on the importance of considering portrayal of medicine in fictional shows. As many people don't spend much time in hospitals until they're seriously injured, and may seldom even go to the doctor, they depend heavily on media portrayals of medicine in forming their expectations of the medical profession. Turow contends that people get far more of their information, or at least their implicit knowledge, from fictional shows than from the news, which has been the traditional focus of media researchers. This means that how doctors and patients are portrayed on TV can have an effect on real interactions in the healthcare system. Of late, he's also developed an interest in forensic shows, like CSI, because the forensic doctors are often portrayed as infallible in a Kildare fashion, even as their clinical counterparts on Grey's Anatomy and ER are seen as quite human and error-prone.