Television, I often joke, is very important. If you don't watch the news, you won't know what's happening in the world. And if you don't watch Desperate Housewives, you won't know...what's happening on Desperate Housewives.
The latter program, I'm starting to think, can be used as a litmus test. Either you think it's a stupid soap opera, or you think it's a scathingly brilliant satire on the status of women in American society, and a scathingly brilliant satire of soap operas. Personally, I think the show is the television version of crack; it's bad for you, sure, but you get addicted very quickly and, short of transferring your life to another continent, can't get off it.
This year, I'm in Desperate withdrawal. From looking on the Web, I know that Bree is going to pretend to be the mother of her daughter's baby, and Lynette has cancer.
Oh, and there's a controversy about a line in the season premiere, in which, told that she's going through menopause, Susan (man, I hate Susan) asks to see her doctor's diploma, just to make sure it isn't from "some med school in the Philippines."
Damn...I had to see Edie hook up with Carlos last season, but I missed this?
Unlike the Filipino and Filipino-American medical community, though, I don't see the line as being some attack against Filipinos or the Philippines per se. I think the joke was meant in the spirit of, "let's make sure they're not from some off-shore medical school I've near heard of." It could just have been, "some med school in Zimbambwe" or any other country three-quarters of Americans can't locate on a map, and the producers--possibly unaware of how many Filipino-trained staff work in American hospitals--just made an error in judgment by choosing the Philippines as the butt of this joke. But the controversy, as well as my recent experience with The Elephant Man, has made me wonder if maybe Americans aren't just a little too prejudiced against non-American-trained medical personnel.
Should the show have issued an apology? Maybe. Should the line be deleted from future airings and DVD? In my opinion, no. The damage is done. I think it's kind of worse to pretend things like this never happened.
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The problem with situations like this is that once it's out there, it's out there, and you can't get it back. Apologizing doesn't really undo the damage, does it?
As for Americans and medicine, I think the bias is not against the doctors themselves but what we always think are inferior standards in education in other countries. Obviously, a Japanese doctor will be good: the Japanese are good at almost everything. A British or French doctor? That's interesting. But bring in an Asian or African doctor, and we're going to be checking where the diploma came from. If it came from the U.S., they're OK, despite their nationality (it's only their nationality, not their different-colored skin that we object to, you know) because the American school will have taught them better.
As for "Desperate Housewives," I thought it was funny at first, but it got so off-the-wall and you had to see all the episodes in just the right order that I gave up on it. I find it's easier lately to give up on TV shows. They do so little for us.
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