This show is less about medicine and ore about personal relationships. It is unlike many medical shows of the past, St. Elsewhere for example, in which Paltrow went to great pains to not only explore the impact of medicine on it practitioners and patients, but to get the medical facts correct. His show showcased the ills of the time both of society and medical, in a manner that informed while entertaining people. It was the first show to openly talk about AIDS, and through many characters explored its social and personal impacts - homosexuality, fear of death, guilt, people becoming pariahs of society with a disease that they had gotten by means not related to direct sexual contact, all were looked at in depth. Producer/directors like Bruce opened the public's mind to the realities of the situation in a multidimensional way. Grey's after the first season, degenerated in to improbable personal situations, medical improbabilities, and missed the opportunity to inform as well as entertain.

I have often had lunch with Jack Klugman after he made the PSA for OCF. I am lucky to have developed a friendship with him, and he is quite the raconteur. But he has mentioned of accounts in which people come up to him to relate how they learned some medical factoid via Quincy and were able to apply it in their own lives, once in actually saving a life.

Clearly the dumbing down of our TV media, from our news programs that only tell you what they think you can absorb in 3 minutes or less, and in which news is served up as entertainment, the advent of mindless reality shows, is depressing. There is a book I just read about the value of telling good stories. How they make ideas stick with people for prolonged periods of time, motivate them to change, and more. TV today is tabloid fodder in too many instances, and the richness of good story telling has been replaced with the superficial.

On a more positive note; in order to effect change you must first define reality. America