HBO's Getting On Is the Brainiest (and Fartiest) Comedy You're Not Watching
BY INKOO KANGfacebook.com/gettingonhbo
Hospitals are depressing. Until recently, medical shows glossed over this basic fact of life by focusing on the most glamorous clique within them: doctors. For the past two decades, the upwardly mobile audience identification integral to most TV shows taught us to look away from the bedpans and sheaves of insurance paperwork and focus instead on the halos (ER), the lip gloss (Grey's Anatomy), the chicken soup for the soul (Scrubs), or the preening intellect (House) of every hospital's upper crust.
Grey's Anatomy is still going strong in its 11th season, but since House's departure from the airwaves in 2012, we've been living in the twilight of the docs. Last year, Shonda Rhimes' cornerstone series was the only medical show to crack the top half of the broadcast ratings. This week brought news that Fox has canceled its pediatric-ward-set Red Band Society. Already a kind of backlash to its treacly cousins, House ushered in a wavelet of even more self-aware or cynical medical shows including Showtime's Nurse Jackie, Cartoon Network's Children's Hospital and HBO's Getting On that channel viewer disinterest in the goodliness of doctors and, arguably, the nation's growing suspicion of medical professionals.
Of those three programs, Getting On is the least known but the most daring, insightful and poignant. Now in its six-episode second season (after its Nov. 9 premiere), the superb workplace comedy continues to explore themes of power, gender, class, corporatization, mortality, and the mysteries of the stuff that comes out of our butts. (Believe me, you don't know as much as you think you know.) For the show's impressive sophomore year, showrunners Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer have embraced greater serialization to make one of pop culture's most incisive commentaries on the failures of the American health-care system.
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