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FEELING BETTER ABOUT NETWORK TELEVISION.
"Grey's Anatomy" was my guilty pleasure. Yesterday, I stopped feeling guilty. Turns out that the show's writers worked with the Kaiser Foundation in order to embed an important public health message in one episode. Viewers were then polled to find out if they absorbed the information. The experiment worked. After watching a show in which an HIV-positive woman learns she has a 98 percent chance of giving birth to a HIV-negative baby if she follows proper precautions, the audience's awareness of the facts on HIV-transmission between mothers and infants increased by 46 percent, from 15 to 61 percent of viewers understanding the issue.
Of course, a typical episode of "Grey's," while often fairly medically accurate, features a plot built around some incredibly rare and gruesome condition, such as a 40 pound neglected tumor, or fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, an extremely rare genetic disease in which soft tissue progressively turns into bone, ossifying the entire body over time. The Kaiser study shows that there'd be a real public benefit to medical shows focusing more frequently on common public health issues, and especially on prevention.
--Dana Goldstein
COMMENTS (6)
In this case, I think that the net effect of this effort is good, but I worry about the notion of television writers intentionally "embedding" messages into their shows. I've never watched the show, but what if they did an episode on abortion designed to highlight the gruesome aspects and rally anti-abortion sentiment. It seems to me that this practice could easily go from merely informing viewers to pushing a particular viewpoint. I guess writers are free to do that, but I don't like the stealthy approach that you describe.
Posted by: a | September 17, 2008 9:56 AM
I'm all for spreading important public health messages, but if I recall that episode correctly, it really pissed me off. When the mother says she wants to have an abortion because she believes her fetus will be born HIV-positive, she should have just given her the facts about HIV not being an inevitability with the proper precautions and let her make up her own mind from there. Instead, Izzie goes into some moralizing and shaming speech about how "If you still want to have an abortion, that's between you and your God." I literally screamed at the television! Maybe that's just a function of Izzie being an annoying and self-righteous character, but it really detracted from the public health message of the episode for me.
Posted by: Caro | September 17, 2008 10:08 AM
I thought the whole point of these shows was flushing the hypochondriacs out to where the insurance companies can see them.
More common problems would completely undermine the main effort. Bad idea.
Posted by: V.O.R. | September 17, 2008 10:29 AM
It would, as you say, be wonderful... except that as Caro points out, the sequence was ham handed (and, in retrospect, felt like a public service announcement). I'm glad it raised awareness... but I'm not sure, long term, it will raise ratings. I'm afraid we'll just have to admit we watch tv for boobies, well defined abs, and soap opera-ish melodrama... and on all those scores, there's precious little separating Grey's from Gossip Girl. Which is probably why I like both. :)
Posted by: weboy | September 17, 2008 11:53 AM
' "Grey's Anatomy" was my guilty pleasure.'
I can't watch it now after it degenerated from a biting social commentary (in its first few episodes) on medical training, competitiveness, and medical errors (George screws up and gets nicknamed '007' by other internees), into who's f**king whom.
Posted by: Sick Puppet of the Great Satan | September 17, 2008 1:39 PM
How difficult does anyone think it would be for me to find a quote from, say, Lenin regarding movies being an educational tool?
And, of course, the idea that planted messages like this are rare is ludicrous. Nothing is pure entertainment and is derived from the viewpoints of those involved. And, of course, about 95% of that viewpoint is on TAPPED's side of the spectrum.
Here's just one example.
Posted by: 24AheadDotCom | September 17, 2008 1:43 PM