We’ve seen it so many times. A young, handsome man rushed into the emergency room with a gunshot wound. A flurry of white coats racing the clock: CPR, the heart zapper, the order for a scalpel. Stat! Then finally, the flatline.
This is Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider’s biggest pet peeve. Where are the TV scripts about the elderly grandmothers dying of heart failure at home? What about an episode on the daughter still grieving her father’s fatal lung cancer, ten years later?
“Acute, violent death is portrayed many, many, many times more than a natural death,” says Ungerleider, an internal medicine doctor and founder of End Well, a nonprofit focused on shifting the American conversation around death.
Don’t even get her started on all the miraculous CPR recoveries where people’s eyes flutter open and they pop out of the hospital the next day.
All these television tropes are causing real harm, she says, and ignore the complexity and choices people face at the end of life.
the desire to make movies more palatable for wider audiences comes only from either the production houses trying to make more money, or the Mary Whitehouse style Republicans who believe it makes Jesus cry when we say poopoopeepee on TV.
The concept is called attraction to mediocrity - in which with so many competing detractors, art by committee ends up being bland, fake, dry, mass produced and mass consumed.
Also, plenty of people are interviewed for interest segments in media and still have hobbies? It’s not like this doctor dedicated years of her life to these comments.