Why TV medical hits are just like real life – but also not at all

George Clooney and the gang in scrubs, ready to flirt and fix people … what’s not to love about TV hospital dramas? This is what they get right – and wrong.

Oh, to be a doctor in a medical TV show.

Just for a shift or two – not too much to ask – with the lighting just right (highlighting the gloss and toss of my hair), my scrubs tailored, flirtations simmering (everybody is youthful and attractive, of course, it’s just the way hospitals are), the diagnoses challenging but never impossible, and everything tidily wrapping up with a moral gem or two after a strict 60 minutes (with or without advertisement breaks).

And the heroism, that sweet, appreciated courage and pluck worn brightly on a fashionable yet earnest sleeve.

None of us would look haggard or bewildered by the general state of the world. We would be decisive, and esteem would be our constant companion.

Flirtations simmering, diagnoses challenging … actors like Julianna Margulies George Clooney set the template in classic medical drama ER.

The enduring popularity of television medical series is no surprise. It’s the drama of the whole world, I suppose, condensed into a single emergency department, into a single snapshot. The human condition on show.

But here’s the paradox.

Emergency medicine is exactly like the TV shows, and nothing like them at all. So where lies the truth? Most times, in real life, we’re hollow-eyed and exhausted in the face of inexorable demand, trying to do our best within the crumbling fabric of society.

Our scrubs are not ironed, we eat chocolate instead of steamed chicken and we substitute dark jokes for therapy. It’s all just so busy. There is little glamour to be found. Diagnoses are not always clear, and heroism – that sort of TV heroism – is often in short supply.

Keeping it real … doctor and author Michelle Johnston.

Aliens and more … Emily McLaughlin in General Hospital.

The TV productions, however, to their credit, are getting better. The writers have improved, the audience’s appetite for fidelity is growing. I watched ER when it first came out – I was a terrified registrar running a busy inner-city emergency department single-handed in 1994 when it did. The show was all so cosy, and I wondered, in my stricken state, why I couldn’t have such a snug and ordered relationship with the illnesses that turned up, the patients, the staff. Mind you, this was a country mile more real than the original General Hospital, with its storylines of thrice-risen coma victims, convenient episodes of amnesia, the odd alien, and a spot of mind control. So, yes, the dramas of today are much grittier. The Pitt takes it even further, showing life in the emergency department in simulated real time with all its warts: understaffing; reduced budgets; a distinct lack of glitzy endings.

Fiction, though, when it comes down to it, is sometimes the best way to tell the greater truth. A well-told story can reach into the depths of that human condition like no documentary can.

Warts and all … The Pitt has been acclaimed by critics.

War, friendship and a past reinvented … Michelle Johnston’s new novel The Revisionists features a protagonist whose actions as an ambitious journalist during the 1990s conflict in Dagestan may not be quite as they once seemed.

I have tried to straddle both worlds: the non-fiction and the fiction. The doctor and the author.

Something surprising happens in fiction, in novels. By plunging into the depths of character, the immersion of place, the complexity of story and plot, truths about the world become more real than simply a regurgitation of facts.

My latest book, The Revisionists (with a doctor in there, always a doctor in my books), delves into the knottiness of humanity. It’s the story of an ambitious rookie journalist, of Dagestan, of war, of friendship, of bad relationships, of good relationships, of memory, of moneyed Manhattan, of tested ethics, of the power of language, and of a small Australian town.

It shines a light at what happens when we reinvent our pasts (which, one could argue, we all do a little).

It’s the best way I can get to those truths, by writing.

And nobody minds if my hair is not done.

What happens when the desire for acclaim meets principle? … Find out in The Revisionists by Michelle Johnston.

The Revisionists by Michelle Johnston is on sale now, published by HarperCollins.

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Originally published as Why TV medical hits are just like real life – but also not at all