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I came across an interesting article on FOXNews, which sheds a bit of reality on Izzie’s plotline involving her desperate need to save Denny. You know, the one where she manipulates the system to save him, and no one else stops her.
Essentially, he breaks it down thusly:
Arthur Caplan, the Emmanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, says what would then happen in the real world is this:
–Dr. Stevens would probably face murder or manslaughter charges, since she began a process that resulted in the patient’s death. She would face criminal charges for falsifying medical records. She would be dismissed from the intern program and almost certainly never get a medical license.
–The hospital, aware it could lose its accreditation to do transplants and have to pay a huge damage settlement (not just to this patient’s family, but to the family of the one who didn’t get the heart due to the fraud), would report what happened to the state medical board, UNOS and the police.
–The other interns could also face criminal charges. Their medical futures would be in doubt since they could be considered accessories to the crime.
I admit that when watching TV shows I hang my disbelief as far away from the television set as possible, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes nitpick.
What do you think of Izzie’s actions and of the lack of consequences that followed? Do you think the TV show has a responsibility to represent such topics accurately, or do you think fiction allows for oversight on these matters?
That’s a very interesting question – also a hard one.
I view shows are entertainment and thus don’t expect them to accurately reflect reality (I mean, how entertaining is reality really, save for the odd news sections?).
I think that’s not necessarily true of every single person representing their audience. Maybe one of the solutions is stay true to your storyline, but eventually add a disclaimer stating that in real life such actions would have very strong consequences.
I think that we can’t expect TV shows to get things right. If you look at any child birth scene on TV or in movies and they’ve always gotten that wrong. They can’t always say this is not how it is, but it very rarely is how it is.
The fact that nothing happened to her is obviously not realistic. Probably, something should have happend, and then they could have resolved that in the magical way that TV shows have of resolving things they want to go away.
But all in all TV shows are what they are and you just have to take them with a grain of salt. And I think most people do or else this world would be in one big mess.
I definitely thought Izzie would have to face criminal charges in the show! That’s what expected to see this season…not just a slap on the wrist and back to work!
What she did, though it was in love, was a crime of passion – even those who act in the heat of the moment must face at least SOME punishment besides enduring guilt.
It’s fiction – its a tv show and NOT real. We all know that. It is why we keep watching every week.
We’re forgetting the season hasn’t finished yet… and from what we see in previews, the hearing is still coming up so wait for it.
But still its just TV. AND in real life people DO get away with crime more often than we’d like.
I don`t think it’s irresponsable entertainment, we can see in other programms fight and shoot and how people are killed than is this ‘just’ a mirror of how live can be in normal live.
I don’t think it was an irresponsible move on the part of ABC or Grey’s Anatomy. We can’t watch fictional television shows expecting to see the truth. OF COURSE that’s not how it would work in real life….it never even occurred to me that that’s how it would happen in real life….it’s a TV show!
That’s just ridiculous. If the show had done everything that would’ve happened in real life, there wouldn’t BE a show because almost all the main characters would have been fired and the hospital would’ve lost all credibility. One could argue, in this case, that Shonda should never have written that storyline in the first place, but it makes for good drama. And that’s what this show is and that’s why we watch and continue to love it. Plus, as Merrique says, the hearing is still coming up.
Obviously this show is not a reality series, it is just a fictional drama. It is not their obligation to put true information, because a real life series would be boring.
Fiction is, well, fiction. I think people should be a lot more in an uproar over “Reality” shows that obviously are anything but reality!!
[...] The other days I asked if you guys felt the show was acting irresponsibly in its lack-of-punishment of Izzie’s actions. It seems to be the majority that feels that it’s just a show and should be given the liberty to stretch reality a bit. I agree with that. I mean, even “reality” shows have elements of fiction to them. [...]