Bill Lawrence Ought To Be Ashamed

I'm not normally given to making two blog posts within the space of four hours, but there you are, my blood's up. Seeing as though all I've done with it lately is rant about TV programmes I've watched, I may as well continue the theme and pretend like I'm Charlie Brooker and get paid for this stuff. Also, there's little point in my discussing details of my actual life, since anything of interest I'd probably tell people in a slightly less nerdy way.

So, I've just this minute watched episode seven of Scrubs's sixth season, which aired on NBC last Thursday and then on a lot of computers via various quasi-moral file-sharing facilities about three hours later. 'Nuff said, a nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse, need I say more et cetera et cetera. Anyways, bearing in mind that up this point, the show has been one of the smartest, best written and obscenely well-soundtracked TV sitcoms to date, I'm willing to forgive even quite a big duffer of an episode now and then. So what is it that makes me want to rant about it to an audience who mostly won't see the show until this autumn at the earliest, and therefore won't have a clue what the fuck I'm on about?

It's probably the obscenely childish portrayal of the touchy subject known as politics and also the linked notion that bringing it up would throw all notions of professionalism out of the window. Without going too in-depth into the plot (mostly because I don't need to, not because I actually think it's worth protecting anyone from accidental exposure to the plot of a half-hour sitcom they'll have forgotten by the time they get around to seeing anyway), the presence of a wounded soldier fresh from a tour in Iraq causes instant and suspiciously equal division between the staff at Sacred Heart hospital in the pro- and anti-war camps. What follows was no doubt billed by NBC as a fair and balanced portrayal not of the views involved, but rather the ancilliary effects of the conflict and what happens when friendship and politics mix. I'd describe it either as the sort of thing that could only be concieved in the most childish and simple-minded of intellects or a demonstration that life in America really is as bad as TV news-based panel shows and comedians would seem to suggest.

You see, as the two camps of staff continue to argue and dispute with one another, they end up neglecting their work, and, who'd've thought it, the injured soldier fellow nearly dies because of it. Eventually, tiring of all the bickering, Dr Kelso saves the day by setting himself up as a figure they can all love to hate and start getting along again. Oh, and JD demonstrates a complete ingorance of the whole situation, lovable scamp that he is, and goes off to read Iraq For Dummies while it all goes on.

So we're supposed to imagine that the assembled medical types (so, doctors, mind. Educated people who've done some learnin' in their time) are actually some form of robot or Jack Russel terrier, grabbing onto the touchy subject of the war with their sharp little teeth and refusing to let go until their jaws are forcibly unclamped and they can go back to running around yelping. There's nobody, in a hospital full of people, who has the wit to go "hold on, guys, we're not going to agree. What say we all abandon this endless bickering and, God, I don't know, stop that guy from dying and do our jobs?" Apparently, you see, in America, professionalism is just something to do while you're waiting for the next argument to come about. Or, to put it another way, there's a clause in the Hippocratic oath which excuses the doctor from performing his duty if the guy he's got to do it beside is a Republican jerk.

But oh! As long as we remember that we both hate our boss, then it's all cool and I don't know what we were fighting about in the first place, I really don't. Come on, let's sew this guy's chest back together, and I bet you fifty bucks that we never mention this incident again in the entire series. Meanwhile, poor ol' JD can't even point to Iraq on a globe, and has no idea what the fuck's happening until it's too late.

One might be forgiven for dismissing all of this as just really bad writing, but my meagre research performed on the subject indicate that the regulars on the show's message board count among their number several people who thought this an interesting, relevant and (sweet baby Jesus, don't let it be true) accurate portrayal. Which means, of course, that this kind of thing is more widespread than I'd dared believe, here in my liberal cocoon of intellect, education, relying on more than just the breakfast radio for my source of news and not letting people die because I was busy arguing with my colleagues. Silly old me for thinking that doctors in a TV sitcom might do the same.

Alternative to this view is the proposal that the writers actually know that what's on the show is a load of tripe-flavoured bollocks, but actually what they're doing is using their lovely medium to highlight an undeniably present issue by overblowing it so massively. All well and good, then, but they don't actually highlight anything. If they were to do so, there'd be a whiff of controversy about the thing, with possibly some sort of resolution. All I see is the use of a potentially hugely volatile (and, thanks to what's known informally as the Brass Eye Equation, potentially pant-pissingly hilarious) piece of current affairs as a throwaway bit of tat so disastrously wasted it's nearly as bad as that time I used the V & A's collection of Fabergé eggs to learn juggling with. God, that was a costly trip to the museum.

So, in conclusion, either this is a portrayal of a country so arse-backwards that it's not even funny anymore (which would make it dead serious and volatile, which would, via the Brass Eye Equation, make it funny again) or a disastrous waste of writer's resources the like of which they won't find again.

Right. I'm off to watch the whole of M*A*S*H. I'll no doubt be seeing you all around the point Alan Alda gets too preachy and BJ Hunnicut grows a 'tache. There's bile material in there for months.