There is no greater argument in favor of fiction than police and medical series.
Most people do not want to enter hospitals or police stations, but they swallow thousands of hours of fiction set in those places.
Art may imitate life, but the viewer of
The Unit
or Grey's
Anatomy
doesn't want her life to imitate that art.
Perhaps the popularity of these genres has to do with the games of cops and robbers and doctors, which would confirm a truism that many contemporary moralists deny: that the game is fiction (in English and French, the actors do not act, but
they play
).
When children kill themselves while playing, they don't rehearse to really kill themselves.
Except for the real doctors and policemen, who follow these series out of vanity or to question their credibility, the public watches them to feel like children.
In the case of hospital fiction, things would change a lot if they were starred by patients instead of doctors.
Outside of
Jurassic Park
, Michael Crichton was the creator of
ER
and the guru of the so-called medical novel, but no scholar would catalog his books on
the disease literature
shelf , next to, say,
Thomas Mann 's
The Magic Mountain .
Great literature has almost always sided with the sick.
Doctors are secondary.
However, on TV, they are the heroes.
And this is so because
ER
(the great and insurmountable fiction about hospitals, which has been recovered on HBO Max and has great addictive power) is not a meditation on mortality, but a way to continue playing doctors and cultivate morbidity through some cursed places that we don't want to step on, but we can't stop looking.
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