From its modest beginnings at the AFL-NFL Championship Game in Los Angeles in 1967, through to this year’s Super Bowl XLIV, Super Sunday has grown exponentially and, in the process, has become a bloated monster. Over the past quarter century or so, Super Sunday has illustrated the ability of a sporting event to offer a distorted and exaggerated version of social reality and social values in America, and it has done so on a grand, glorious and obscene scale.

It is difficult to say precisely when the Super Bowl reached larger-than-life proportions, but certainly by the end of the 1970s it was there. At Super Bowl XV in 1981, a New York Times headline claimed that 70,000 fans made “New Orleans Throb with Super Bowl Mania.” Gerald Eskenazi’s account described a “gridlock” of people in the French Quarter and an influx of “tens of millions” of dollars into the New Orleans economy.

The extravagances of the fans and everyone associated with the game had reached extraordinary proportions. Only the vocabulary created by Thorstein Veblen, the Norwegian-American economist who tracked the habits of the rich in the late 19th century, was capable of fully capturing the scene with such brilliant phrases as “conspicuous consumption,” “conspicuous leisure” and “conspicuous waste.”

The fact that all of this takes place around a football game would have delighted Veblen, who once observed that football is to education as bullfighting is to agriculture. Indeed, Veblen’s use of the phrases “predatory barbarism,” “pecuniary emulation” and “vicarious consumption” also seem particularly well suited to any description of our distinctive national holiday.

One of the most common measures of excess has been the price of commercial time. At the first Super Bowl, a 30-second commercial sold for $42,500 on CBS and $37,500 on NBC (both networks broadcast the game). By the early 80’s, the price for 30 seconds reached $400,000, and by the end of the decade it was a whopping $800,000. Thirty seconds of advertising reached the $1 million mark in 1995 and climbed to $2.1 million in 2000. In 2007, the price tag was $2.6 million, and estimates for this year range from $2.6 to $3 million.

Continue reading "Super Bowl History: “Our National Exaggeration” Through the Years"

December closed with a remarkable flurry of headline sports stories. It was not only one for the memory bank, but it may have been the most fitting way to end the decade known as the Naughty Aughties. What seemed like an awkward tag at the beginning of the new century has become a most appropriate signature phrase.

The first shock was the fall from grace of the poster boy for clean living and family values. Tiger Woods instantly went from the slickest brand in the American pantheon of commerce to the butt of jokes and ridicule.

IMG, the International Management Group, had persuaded nearly all major sport corporate sponsors that Woods was their man: the perfect golfer with the perfect image, the quintessential sportsman. Everybody loved Tiger, admired Tiger, wanted to be like Tiger.

We all got on board, even though we should have known better. America still wants its sports heroes cut from the Frank Merriwell at Yale mode, and Tiger Woods of Stanford looked like one of them.

Instead, Tiger is the perfect hollow man, lacking a center and lost without a compass — except for the one on his yacht that has become his shelter from the firestorm.

Typical in cases like this, the media that touted the Tiger Brand as the genuine article turned with fury and self-righteousness on its former model of perfection. Even more amusing is how quickly the corporate world cut its ties to the feline philanderer.

Accenture, one of the major corporations that identified its brand with his brand, quickly began removing all images of Woods from company advertisements. Tag Hauer, the Swiss luxury watchmaker, announced it would scale down its association with Woods. Procter and Gamble lowered their Tiger profile by withdrawing its Gillette ads featuring Woods. Then AT&T pulled the plug on its Woods connection.

Only Nike has remained completely faithful, with Phil Knight saying that this whole thing was but a minor blip. There have been no TV commercials featuring Woods on television since late November. Tiger Woods has vanished from public view and from the branded world in which we live. It is doubtful, however, that sex has disappeared from the PGA tour or other sporting venues.

Sex and sport are inextricably linked. Faux sex surrounds all our sporting events, where young women called “cheerleaders” and “dancers” decorate the landscape with wiggles, jiggles and giggles passing as a cross between glamorous role models and purveyors of sexual titillation. Then there’s the real sex, as women make themselves available to athletes, and star athletes take it as a perk of the position.

The Tennessee Hostess Scandal is an adjunct to the Tiger Woods affair. Sending young women from the University of Tennessee out to a high school football game on a recruiting trip is about as bad as it gets. The stories of attractive young women traveling hundreds of miles to see and be seen with naïve high school athletes who are targets on the football recruiting board point to issues of sexual access and the insane pressures surrounding intercollegiate athletics.

Such insanity was on display in Florida recently as Urban Meyer, head football coach and minor deity, announced his retirement from coaching, citing his health. An outpouring of grief and angst flowed throughout Gatorland. Then Meyer reversed his decision. He will now take a leave of absence until he gets control of his world. This is comparable to most of us giving up breathing until we could live without having to do it constantly.

Continue reading "A December to Remember: The Wide World of Sports Turns Wackiest Before the Dawn"

When is the right time to leave? Some wait too long, others leave too soon. Some go out on top, some tarnish their legacy before letting go.

For those who have followed Florida State University football over the past three decades, the last few years have been painful. Bobby Bowden, one of the great football coaches and entertaining personalities of the coaching world, joined the long list of those who stayed too long. In the last five years, it became increasingly apparent that Bowden had relinquished day-to-day control of the football program. He seemed to have lost almost all interest in that aspect of coaching — and perhaps most of the other obligations of a college football coach.

The result has been a decline in FSU’s football fortunes and a growing number of fans and boosters calling for Bowden’s retirement. As the voices became louder and more insistent, Bowden became defensive, until he most recently resembled a wounded animal. His defense of his son Jeff as inept offensive coordinator took a toll on both Bowden and his reputation. Certainly it should never have come to this. And of course, it didn’t need to come to this.

Retirement is often a difficult choice. For the professional athlete it is particularly difficult, as it signals the end of what is likely to be the most significant part of their lives. Willie Mays stayed on too long, Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas went out as near empty shells, and there are any number of athletes who make one too many comebacks. It is the rare case, such as that of Sandy Koufax, when the athlete leaves on top.

There was a young man who worked in the history department here years ago as an adjunct faculty member. He had an master’s in history and was also a professional boxer. He was a marginal fighter, but he was able to keep fighting as long as he wanted, because at that point in boxing history promoters were looking for white guys to put in the ring.

Continue reading "When is the Right Time to Leave? A Question for Coaches, Academics and Everyone Else"

“Mad Men,” my favorite TV show of the moment, offers a poignant look at the trials of women in the workplace in the early 1960s. The series is set at a growing ad agency on Madison Avenue (that’s copywriter Peggy Olson, played by Elisabeth Moss, above), and it’s full of cringe-worthy moments. Seven of the show’s nine writers are women, which Amy Chozick notes is a rarity in Hollywood television.

Joan Wickersham, who worked as a copywriter in a Boston ad agency in the 1980s, writes in the Boston Globe that “long after the 1960s, the workplace was still stuck in the same cultural blind spot satirized in ‘Mad Men.’” She shares this story of a client presenting prototypes of two computer games, one targeted to boys and one to girls. The boy’s game involved building a railway empire; the girl’s game involved deciding where to put furniture in a house.

I suggested to the client that maybe the girls’ game needed a little more substance. The boys’ game was ambitious, intellectually challenging – couldn’t something similar be devised for the girls? Or maybe they didn’t need their own game. Maybe they’d be just as excited as the boys about building a railway empire. Maybe . . .

One of the men I worked with gave me a look. A look that said: “You’re being a pest, and a troublemaker. Shut up.’’

And I did.

Fast forward another 25 years, and consider Wal-Mart’s gendered back-to-school commercials, as described by Claire Mysko:

Boy version with Mom voiceover: “I can’t go to class with him. I can’t do his history report for him, or show the teachers how curious he is. That’s his job. My job is to give him everything he needs to succeed while staying within a budget…I love my job.” Cut to boy with his new affordable laptop. He’s getting applause from his teacher and the students in the class as he delivers a report.

Girl version with Mom voiceover:“I can’t go to school with her. I can’t introduce her to new friends.” Cut to girl nervously asking “Can I sit here?” to a group of girls sitting together at lunch. “Sure, I like your top!” one of them answers. “Or tell everyone how amazing she is. But I can give her what she needs to feel good about herself without breaking my budget. All she has to do is be herself.” Cut to smiling girls walking arm-in-arm down the hallway.

It appears that much work still needs to be done.

When I was a young boy, I remember using the term “Chinese water torture” for any activity that seemed long, torturous and pointless. I have been reminded of this repeatedly over the last few years as slowly, almost one-by-one, the names of baseball players who tested positive for some sort of performance enhancing drugs have become public.

Anonymous and confidential drug testing, conducted for Major League baseball and the MLB Players Association in 2003 to determine the extent of the drug problem, has turned out to be not so confidential.

Obviously, some of the anonymity has been taken out of the process by various leaks from a sealed document of a grand jury. Some law abiding journalists have managed somehow to get this information and have it confirmed and published before anyone else beats them to it. Confidentiality be damned. Trust has become an unknown commodity in our tell-all world.

This week, the names of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz leaked out a mere six years after the tests. In Manny’s case, there can be little surprise given the fact that he has just finished serving a 50-game suspension for failing a more recent test. In David Ortiz’s case, again the shock can’t be too big when one considers the circumstantial evidence drawn from changes in his career trajectory in the early part of this decade.

Despite all this, six-year-old news is being treated with the kind of sensation that a recent drug bust at your parish church might garner. Baseball writers have a special gift for defaming the game with old and tired news. They seem to have appointed themselves the special guardians of the purity of baseball across time, although given their limited vision, they are able to deal with only one set of drugs at a time.

They also can deal with only one sport at a time, or perhaps football has been too riddled with steroids from the start for anyone to care. And they insist on referring to the past 10-15 years as the Steroid Era. Perhaps it was.

However, if the “Steroid Era” becomes a specific designation for record keeping purposes, then shouldn’t there also be an “Amphetamine Era,” when players used greenies to make it through those difficult road trips, those day games after night games, and those first games after coming off coast-to-coast travel without a day off?

Continue reading "The Slow, Torturous Release"

Alan Sepinwall of The Star-Ledger writes about his recent tour of the “Dollhouse” set — guided by the creator Joss Whedon himself — in anticipation of the start of Season 2 in late September.

The articles gives us a lot to look forward to — as well as a reminder to catch the last unaired episode of Season 1 — which is critical to understanding Whedon’s expansion of the show’s mythology in the upcoming season.

But what’s most interesting is the way Whedon articulates the politics of art in the Age of Image:

Whedon talked about how he and Fox both felt the show would be more accessible if they focused on standalone episodes built around Echo’s missions. But both he and the network realized after a while that those simply weren’t working, and that the audience was more invested in the ongoing stories of the characters in the Dollhouse.

“(Fox) saw that when we liked it (ongoing storylines), everybody liked it, so they liked it. So they stopped going, ‘Let’s try this, let’s try that.’ They said, ‘You do your thing, it’s not for everyone, but the people who love it, love it hard.’”

If Fox can come to see the value of a serial story, we might be getting somewhere.

So, if you haven’t heard, Obama’s drinking Bud Light at tonight’s “Beer Summit,” which brings together Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge Sergeant James Crowley in an attempt to seize a “teachable moment” on race relations.

Unfortunately, if this moment is teaching us anything about race in America, it’s that we don’t know how to talk about it and don’t really want to talk about it (Stephen Colbert made this point with his usual brilliant satire). Oh, and that the right-wing reactionaries in America still love to exploit all that unease (Joan Walsh has the best take on Glenn Beck and company).

The real “teachable moment” here is the opportunity to show what a screwed-up relationship Americans — especially American men — have with beer. And how easy it is to fix that relationship — by staying local and trusting craftsmanship over marketing.  I’ve said this before.

And Obama is just the one to do it. He has already showed his preference for microbrews — at parties and at the White House. And he clearly has a sophisticated palate — considering his favorite restaurants, chefs and foodie friends as well as the people he has chosen to take the lead on food policy (especially USDA Under Secretary Kathleen Merrigan).

And he chooses Bud Light? Pandering would be an understatement. Some image maker appears to be telling him he needs to up his NASCAR-Dad credentials. How sad. I really didn’t plan to have to say that about Obama — at least so soon.

For your information, Bud Light receives a D- from Beeradvocate.com and is in the “0″ percentile (that would be out of a 100) on the ratebeer.com scale. Of course, Red Stripe (Gates’ choice) doesn’t fare much better.  Blue Moon gets mediocre ratings (putting aside that it’s a MillerCoors product) — but oh, there are so many better American craft-brewed Belgian white ales out there!

Oops, I lapsed into beer snobbery there. But it’s really not about drinking hoity-toity beer. It’s about honoring authenticity and complexity over a manufactured narrative that can be overwhelming, especially for those of us who have had to sit through the endless line of juvenile beer ads while watching a sporting event on TV.

That narrative, centered around young, goofy men ogling young, goofy women while a “drinkable” beverage loosens them all up, divorces the experience of drinking beer from its production (which is an art form when done right) and the communal enjoyment of its taste (which a site like ratebeer.com or a booth a your local gastropub — we love you, Hopleaf! — revels in).

And it’s not as if Obama didn’t know there were plenty of beers out there that could have allowed him to step outside that narrative without losing credability. Jack Nicas of the Boston Globe reports on how Boston brewers made their case to be the beer of choice at the meeting — emphasizing how all three participants had Boston connections. Matt Simpson, a “beer sommelier” who writes the “Ask Beer” column for Beer Magazine (which, to digress and paraphrase that ol’ saying, tries have to have its traditional beer narrative and drink its craft beers too), made the rounds with his own recommendations in interviews with NPR and ABC.

That ABC News article also interviews Anthony Bowker from Goose Island, who makes the case for a beer from his (and Obama’s) local Chicago brewery — possibly, he notes, 312 Urban Wheat Ale (a summer fave of mine as well).

Personally, I’d take the Chicago angle as well, but I’d recommend that Obama show his support for an up-and-coming small business … who happens to make the best damn lagers on the planet. That would Metropolitan Brewing, which is quickly making a name for itself on the north side of Chicago. Their Flying Wheel Bright Lager is a perfect choice for a summer day.

A very “teachable beer,” one might say.

If you watched The Open from Turnberry this past weekend there were two surprises: Tiger Woods didn’t make the cut, and Tom Watson nearly won the tournament. It became obvious that Tiger wasn’t playing his A-game when, in the middle of his second round, he played himself out the tournament.

Woods was one under par after seven holes and then went bogey, bogey, double bogey, par, bogey, double bogey. He was hitting shots that any weekend duffer could relate to as he topped the ball, mishit the ball several times, and explored all of the varieties of the rough. It was quite amazing.

It was not nearly half as amazing as what Tom Watson was doing. But before we get to that, we turn to the less edifying side of sport, where we are about to be treated to the opening of yet another architectural obscenity in the form of an overpriced overdone monument to misplaced societal priorities, avarice and decadence.

How appropriate is it that this latest entry in the decadence sweepstakes is to be found in Texas, and better still, in Dallas, the home of J. R. Ewing? You may recall J.R. as the leading practitioner of Texas overspending and overconsumption who taught us how the life of Texas cowboys had changed since oil money became a reality.

In the late 20th century, J.R. came to life in the form of one Jerry Jones, a bona fide oil and gas man, who purchased the Dallas Cowboys so that he could exercise his ego on national television. In recent years he has been doing his best to subvert the revenue sharing policies of the NFL and to undo the football success of the Dallas Cowboys. He has succeeded on both fronts.

Now Jerry is writing a new chapter in the history of the NFL, the history of Texas, and indeed  the history of Jerry Jones. Come September, the Dallas Cowboys will have another new home not in Dallas. Cowboys Stadium is the new billion dollar bauble ($1.15 billion) of Mr. Jones’ possessions.

Jerry says he could have built it for less, but at $850 million the stadium would lack the “wow factor” — and what’s a few hundred million dollars when the “wow factor” is out there for the getting?

No doubt Jerry was referring to the Italian marble floors, the pricey art collection, the dual gigantic video screens (72′ x 160′) that will carry the internal telecast, or the retractable glass end zone doors that will slide gently away.

Continue reading "Grace and Excess: From the Sublime Run of Tom Watson to the Ridiculous Spectacle Built by Jerry Jones"

Judge Sonia Sotomayor

, President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, attracted my attention in the spring of 1995 when she made the decision that ended the suicidal baseball strike that prevented a World Series in 1994 and threatened to destroy the 1995 baseball season.

Not only is Judge Sotomayor an excellent choice for the Supreme Court, but she also belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame as the Judge Who Saved Baseball

eli

. What follows is a radio commentary I wrote for WUCF-FM in Orlando on April 5, 1995.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

After nearly eight months, some 232 days after it began, the strike by major league baseball players ended not at the bargaining table, but as the result of a judicial ruling by the youngest judge in the Southern District of New York.

At age 40, Judge Sonia Sotomayor is the first Puerto Rican appointed to the bench in this predominantly Puerto Rican district. A Yale Law Graduate, who grew up in South Bronx just a few blocks from Yankee Stadium, she was appointed to the bench by former Yale first-baseman George Bush on the recommendation of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard Nixon’s designated hitter.

In her ruling, Judge Sotomayor clearly upheld the decision of the NLRB which found the owners in violation of labor law by imposing new conditions of employment on the players after unilaterally declaring an impasse in negotiations. She ordered the owners to restore the previous rules including salary arbitration, competitive bidding for free agents, and the anti-collusion provisions of the free agent rules.

The judge said that collective bargaining process was being threatened, and that she was re-enforcing the NLRB’s protection of the “spirit and the letter of federal labor law….” She also told owners they must return to her courtroom before they can declare an impasse in negotiations in the future.

The legal experts seem to agree that it was a very strong decision, and the owner’s lawyers thought it so strong that a lockout could put the owners in a position where they would be liable for players’ salaries, to the tune of $5 million a day.

The owners had clearly lost as they were told they were in violation of federal law and must rescind their actions. This does not mean that the players won. All it means is that we are back to square one. The players are back at work, there is no contract agreement, the parties remain far apart on the issues, and little or nothing has been resolved as a result of the eight month strike.

What has happened is that the players and owners have managed to anger the public and one another, and perhaps have done permanent damage to the major league baseball goose, which has been laying golden eggs for the past several years. What the coming season will bring remains a major question.

What it will not bring, or is not likely to bring, is a lockout or strike before the end of the World Series. The trauma of the past few months should have had a sobering enough impact on players, owners, and negotiators to keep anyone from reopening the wound.

Whether there will be a settlement is equally doubtful, although the pressures to settle have been intensified. The owners know that before they can declare an impasse again they must reappear before Judge Sotomayor, before whom they remain hitless. The players know that if they would walk again the public would never forgive them, and it is likely that many players would not walk a second time.

Continue reading "Judge Sotomayor's Grand Slam"

From the files of What Were They Thinking comes news that “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” may appear again on movie screens, but without Joss Whedon at the helm and without the television series’ favorite characters. Borys Kit at The Hollywood Reporter writes:

“Buffy” creator Joss Whedon isn’t involved and it’s not set up at a studio, but Roy Lee and Doug Davison of Vertigo Entertainment are working with original movie director Fran Rubel Kuzui and her husband, Kaz Kuzui, on what is being labeled a remake or relaunch, but not a sequel or prequel.

While Whedon is the person most associated with “Buffy,” Kuzui and her Kuzui Enterprises have held onto the rights since the beginning, when she discovered the “Buffy” script from then-unknown Whedon. She developed the script while her husband put together the financing to make the 1992 movie, which was released by Fox. [...]

The new “Buffy” film, however, would have no connection to the TV series, nor would it use popular supporting characters like Angel, Willow, Xander or Spike. Vertigo and Kuzui are looking to restart the story line without trampling on the beloved existing universe created by Whedon, putting the parties in a similar situation faced by Paramount, J.J. Abrams and his crew when relaunching “Star Trek.”

Linda Holmes explains at NPR’s Monkey See blog why this Very Bad Idea actually has little in common with the newest “Star Trek”:

It’s one thing to use a high-powered guy like J.J. Abrams to reboot Star Trek

daybreakers dvd

more than 40 years after the original show debuted on television, almost 18 years after Gene Roddenberry’s death in 1991.

It’s entirely another to try to do a Whedon-less Buffy movie only 17 years after the original Buffy movie and only six years after the end of the beloved TV series, while Whedon is still not only alive, and not only still making wildly popular projects like 2008’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, but still quite possibly the most cultishly revered showrunner in television.

In response to the news, Whedon said, “I hope it’s cool.”

Meanwhile, in other Whedon-related developments, “Dollhouse” will premiere in Australia on June 9 on cable channel Fox8. The promotional trailer, shown here, highlights the underlying conspiracy and intrigue — a big step up from Fox advertising in the States that focused on the selling of Eliza Dushku.

David Simon, creator of “The Wire,” has been making the rounds lately — and I couldn’t be more pleased.

While I am eagerly awaiting his new TV series set in post-Katrina New Orleans (appearing on HBO in 2010 – already re-upped for a full season!), he wasn’t doing the usual promo cameos. It’s a little early for that, anyway.

No, Simon is testifying in front of Congress — and chatting up the likes of Bill Maher — about the future of journalism and the destructive effects of the drug war, both topics he has experienced and explored in depth in his career as a reporter and in shows like “The Wire.”

Simon’s appearance on Bill Maher shows how comfortable he is walking the line between the entertainment and political worlds. Maher’s show is a strange hybrid of those worlds, but it rarely reaches the level of clarity and insight that Simon provided:

His testimony before the Senate was more direct and elaborate, and its focus was exclusively on the state of journalism. John Nichols, who has written about the demise of newspapers himself, has a great critical review of the hearing over at The Nation — and while he laments that no solution to the journalistic void is clear, Simon seems to be the most lucid deconstructor of why we are the in current mess. I look forward to listening to Simon in whatever medium he chooses.

There are many reasons to love Rachel Maddow, not the least of which is she makes cocktails during her MSNBC show (as she has done at previous jobs).

Last night, after discussing the filly named Rachel — the best 3-year-old you won’t see racing in today’s Kentucky Derby — master mixologist Dale DeGroff made a frosty mint julep:

3/4 oz. simple syrup or one teaspoon sugar
4 mint leaves and a sprig of mint
(Use tender, young sprigs.)
2 1/2 ounces Maker’s Mark Bourbon

Preparation:

Prepare some very cold, very dry powdered ice with large cubes of Kold Draft ice and a canvas ice bag. Bruise the mint leaves in the bottom of a julep cup with sugar or sugar syrup and then remove the muddled leaves. Add ice to the three quarter mark and half of the bourbon. Stir to chill the julep cup. Top off with more powdered ice and the remaining bourbon and continue to stir until the outside of the cup begins to freeze. Garnish with the mint sprig and set aside to rest while the julep cup freezes over on the outside. Pick up carefully and imbibe.

Of course, we learned last year that this isn’t exactly keeping with tradition, but never mind. With the Belmont Stakes right around the corner, you might also want to check out the Belmont Breeze (scroll down).

In other culture/sport pairings

, Peter Hartlaub offers his picks for the ultimate pop culture horse race. Would you place bets on The Black Stallion or Pie-O-My?

Related stories from PopPolitics: Sports and the Profit Motive: The Coming Demise of Horse Racing; Keeping Tradition Alive: The Derby, writes Richard Crepeau, is one of those signature American events that offers a snapshot of sports culture while simultaneously reflecting the many divisions of American society.

In an article published in PopPolitics magazine, Sarah Yahm ponders why the reincarnated “Battlestar Galactica,” a show that consistently raised complex and challenging questions over its four seasons, decided to fall back on pat answers in its devastatingly reactionary series finale:

Frederick Jameson, the Marxist literary critic, argues that pop culture consistently provides us with interesting rich alternatives to the status quo and then in the end rejects them. We can escape into alternate (even at times radical) possibilities without actually having to challenge our own cultural system. Because of pop culture, we can go to Oz while simultaneously renewing our commitment to not leave Kansas.

I know I wasn’t alone in hoping that “Battlestar Galactica” was going to break that pattern. Throughout the past four seasons, “Battlestar” has consistently raised rigorous questions about the nature of humanity, the role of government, the importance of community, the definition of family, and the correct relationship between humans and technology.

I had faith the writers were going to resolve these questions in the only way possible — by not resolving them at all and instead forcing us to continue to grapple with them alone. They weren’t going to raise questions and then give us pat answers, I insisted. Frederick Jameson was one smart cookie but he was wrong about “Battlestar.”

But sadly, Jameson was right once again, because Ron Moore gave us some really pat answers. He retreated to an old but faithful amalgam –- the purity of nature, monotheism, the sanctity of traditional hetero families, and, yikes, colonial expansion

Continue reading “Is Lee Adama the New (And Not So Improved) Thomas Jefferson?  Thoughts on the Battlestar Galactica Finale.”

The 15-year run of “ER” ended last week, sparking a number of reflections and retrospectives.

Since I cover health, I especially appreciated this analysis of the NBC series’ influence on the representation of health care in television programming.

It was back in 1996 when The New England Journal of Medicine first took “ER” and other medical shows to task for performing CPR much more frequently — and with much greater success — than doctors do off-screen.

Within a year, the show’s writers, which then included an emergency room physician and a pediatrician who was the show’s co-producer, crafted a scene in which Dr. John Carter (Noah Wyle) broke an elderly man’s rib while performing CPR.

How off were the numbers? A 2006 New Yorker article noted that in reality one in 100 patients undergo CPR or some other resuscitation procedure. Just 15 percent, at most, are successful. On television shows, the success rate is closer to two-thirds.

“ER” has also been the medium for messages about HIV transmission, breast cancer, adoption, domestic violence, elder abuse and drug use. One of the final episode story lines revolved around a teenager who drank too much vodka at a friends’ home, providing Dr. Tony Gates (John Stamos) the opportunity to lecture that only 6 ounces of alcohol can be dangerous.

Adding another layer of real-life complication, the drinking was sanctioned by the friends’ parents. That now translates to “call the police.”

Writing in the Times, Pam Belluck describes the show’s powerful legacy as “a give-and-take between the world of entertainment and the world of medicine that has become stronger and more deeply intertwined with each year that ‘ER’ has been on the air, carrying over to other medical shows.”

One of the first hospital dramas to take its medicine seriously — as the engine rather than the backdrop for its scripts — “ER” caught the attention of the medical establishment as a source of health information for millions of Americans. A 2002 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that viewers’ knowledge of emergency contraception and the human papilloma virus increased after watching episodes that mentioned those subjects; a third of them said the show helped them make health care choices. One in five doctors in a 2001 survey said patients asked about diseases or treatments they saw on shows like “ER.”

Today, a small industry has grown up to influence writers and producers. A program called Hollywood, Health and Society gets money from health organizations and federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to arrange meetings where doctors urge medical-show writers to highlight certain diseases or issues.

“We coach our experts in telling writers real stories of real people,” said Sandra de Castro Buffington, director of the program, part of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication.

Interestingly, the Gates Foundation, best known for funding global health projects, has also helped shape story lines on “ER,” among other shows. Issues include HIV prevention, surgical safety and the spread of infectious diseases.

What I also find interesting about the “ER” postmortem is the shift in attitudes toward doctors. During the days of “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” physicians were revered for their medical skill and bedside manner. The American Medical Association even gave its approval to some shows, but the approval had less to do with medical accuracy and more with how the doctors were portrayed.

[A side note: For a terrific discussion about how "Marcus Welby, M.D." reflected its time period, read this article by Joseph Turow at the Museum of Broadcast Communications. Turow recounts how it addressed medical topics, such as sexually transmitted infections, that up until then TV censors didn't allow. The show was memorable in other ways: Gay rights activists, in one of their first organized protests against a TV show, criticized an episode about about the rape of a teenager by a male teacher. And women's rights activists complained that "Marcus Welby's control over the lives of his patients (many of whom were women) represented the worst aspects of male physician' paternalistic attitudes."]

“These were sort of adoring doctor dramas,” John D. Lantos, a bioethicist at the University of Chicago, told the Times. “My sense is that the medicine was irrelevant and unsophisticated — someone’s lying in a room that looks like your living room and there’s an IV running, the universal symbol that something medical is going on.”

That certainly wouldn’t fly today, when story lines can be fact-checked instantly and the accuracy of medical jargon and physical details is as important as character development.

Speaking of character development, “ER” was one of the few shows that featured strong, complex female characters almost every season. Most everyone I know stopped watching “ER” years ago, but I faithfully TiVo’d each week. I’ll miss the familiar characters, as well as the newer ones, including Dr. Cate Banfield (Angela Bassett, who deserved more air time), and the ones we’ll never get to know, like Dr. Julia Wise (Alexis Bledel); I know, I know — I can’t believe either actress didn’t join sooner.

In recent years my favorite was Dr. Neela Rasgotra (Parminder Nagra). Least favorite: Nurse Samantha Taggart (Linda Cardellini — who had much better scenes as highschooler Lindsay Weir).

But mostly I’ll miss a show that indulged my health curiosity (and anxieties) and made the often arcane and intimidating world of medicine accessible, chiefly by showing that in the end, the characters that compose that world are as human as we are.

Plus: If you’re suffering from “ER” withdrawal, you may want to check out “Doctor’s Diaries.” The NOVA program, which broadcasts on PBS, has been following seven former Harvard medical school students for more than two decades. Pauline Chen has more. (Or you can try to convince me to watch “Grey’s Anatomy.”)