Anyone watching Breathless Sunday nights on PBS? I think it’s only three 1.5-hr episodes and the second one was last night. You can catch up on the PBS website or on the PBS Roku channel.
A London hospital in the 1960s. Charming, competent doctor name of Powell, who takes risks, legal and emotional (Don Draper?), straight-arrow nurse who keeps resisting him (Peggy?), slimy colleague (Pete Campbell) married to redhead (Joan?), striking blonde (January Jones?)… it’s an interesting cast and it shines a light on the appalling way women were treated in hospitals back then. The clothes, the sets, the backgrounds are wonderful, just like MM. The situations are touchy, the man-woman relationships seriously retro, but I’m enjoying the program a lot. I wish there were more episodes to come.
I am curious about one thing: why is Powell called Mr. Powell, not Dr. Powell. He clearly is a doctor.
Maybe this will turn out to be one of those threads that I start and no one posts to? I’m prepared with a box of tissues.
The limited form is good for complex stories, I think. If it ran too long, they’d fall into the MASH trap of inventing future treatments to save patients.
Relevant to another current thread, don’t the Brits have (or had) a lower-tier doctor with a Bachelor’s in Medicine? Under the older structure was something more like a Ph.D. - a senior and largely teaching degree. I believe Watson is a BM, not an MD, in some of the Holmes stories, although the series begins with him declared an MD.
I would guess that it would be because he’s a Doctor of Obstetrics and not an M.D. It’s also possible he got his training in the field instead of at college.
I started watching and about 2 minutes in I said “Mad Men and abortions.” Turned it off about 20 minutes into it. I thought it was rather boring. I believe specialists (like surgeons, etc.) are referred to as “Mr”. The lowly GPs are “Dr”
I was afraid the abortion theme would dominate, but it hasn’t.
Speculation follows. Not a spoiler, because I don’t know what’s going to happen.
I think it will turn out that the Powells aren’t married. He brought the blonde from Cyprus to rescue her from something, and the kid isn’t his either. This will free the doc up to be with the straight-arrow nurse in short order. I can’t figure out what mustache man is all about.
Why do the two nurses not want Powell to know they’re sisters?
I was traveling last week when I saw the first episode. Now at home, my local PBS station ran it last night; it did give me the chance to clear up a couple questions I had.
I wanted to like it more than I did. The new dark-haired nurse is not interesting/not well-acted. She has no chemistry with the head doctor who has ‘never felt this way before’. He seems much more sympatico with the redhead. In fact, that scene in his office when she asked for a prescription for The Pill, I got the feeling they’d had an affair at some point.
I do think the show gets the claustrophobic early 60s atmosphere correct. Every time they have a scene showing the interns and the resident (whatever his title is in the UK) making jokes and asking patronizing questions during rounds, it gets my hackles up.
Right idea, but I believe you’ve got the implications reversed (at least historically/etymologically). Originally doctors were gentlemen of learning; surgeons were the chaps who got their hands dirty, so to speak. Doctors had medical degrees which entitled them to the title; surgeons didn’t. Eventually surgeons turned “Mr.” into a badge of honor, rather than the opposite.
I’ve been watching it (in the USA, so, just the first two of the three episodes). I’d say, in response to the first post, that this show would not have existed if not for Mad Men.
I like the way it looks. It’s sort of a fantasia-on-the-fifties, rather than being authentic 1950s décor and dress. The super-saturated colors rather remind me of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy movie.
I’m not a fan of the political view on offer (at least as I interpret it, two eps in). It’s very “good women don’t have abortions, and women and men who have anything to do with abortions must pay (by having a bad marriage, etc.” and also a bit of “women who want to work after marriage are not really quite the thing, are they? …they deserve their adulterous husbands!” But perhaps after I see the third episode I’ll decide that this was a rush to judgment.
I thought the straight-arrow nurse was already married…? I may have missed something there, as certainly no husband has shown up. (I’m clueless about why she and the redhead are pretending to be unrelated.)
As for the mustache man: he knows about Mr. Powell’s drink-induced mishap in Cyprus, and has a yen for Mrs. Powell, and is blackmailing her into sex. (I think.) All very icky.
also: oops, early 1960s (not ‘fifties’ as I said in the previous post).
Not a fan either, but you do realize this is perfectly true to the times, right? That abortions were illegal? And that a woman was not expected to work after marriage? If she did, it was a blatant statement that her husband was a wimp/slacker/loser and incapable of supporting her (X2 if he was a doctor).
Oh yeah, she is married, but her husband is off somewhere in the service or something.
It’s not the depiction of these things as having been part of the times; it’s the depiction of these things with approval or disapproval. It’s the value judgments implicit in the writing.
It’s a given, for example, that the attractive young woman to whose bedside the two-doctors-and nurse were called, will decide to have her baby. There’s no possible room for debate: good women simply do not have abortions, in most popular culture (including this show). That’s a value judgment with which some viewers will agree and some will disagree. But it’s certainly the only one visible in television dramas.
Additionally, the three medical professionals who came to the woman’s bedside appear to be being ‘punished’ for their choice; the anesthesiologist is tortured and tormented and may have committed an error leading to another woman’s death; the nurse is punished with an adulterous husband and in-laws who despise her; and the show’s main character is pining for a woman not his wife. That’s not all that much of a punishment…yet. But I’m curious as to what the final episode will bring to that character.
Interesting. I’m not seeing the value judgments “implicit in the writing.” I think the writing is within the historical context of the show, if that’s what you mean. IOW this program isn’t looking back on the times and presenting an impartial overview–it’s written from the pov of the times.
Powell said to her, “Do you want to go through with it?” which I took to mean do you want to go through with the abortion or with the pregnancy and that either would have been okay with him and he would have supported her decision either way. Do you see Powell as being judgmental? I don’t.
It’s so interesting to me that you see these circumstances as the writers punishing the characters. I don’t at all, but your position is quite fascinating.
It’s true that in films of that time, if there was an affair or something, one of the people would surely die before the end of the movie. No adulterous couple was ever allowed to live happily ever after.
I believe the reason is that he’s a surgeon. In the UK, surgeons are customarily called mister while GPs are called doctor. I don’t fully understand why.
That’s just the sort of thing I’m talking about. And of course those stories were presenting artificially-imposed value judgments about ‘committing adultery’ and the like.
In other words, in real life in 1960, it’s not the case that people who committed adultery would automatically die. In films, they die; in real life, some die but many do not. In real life there’s no automatic ‘hit by a bus’ mechanism for punishing adultery. (I don’t mean to insult anyone’s religious views here, by the way. This is merely my own opinion.)
Having an adulterous person die before the end of the movie represented the writer or film studio saying, in effect, ‘this is what this person deserves.’ That’s an over-simplification (since ‘what audiences expect’ also plays a role), but what I’m getting at is that what writers show happening to characters is not unrelated to the judgments writers make about the characters’ actions.
A television series made in 2014 might well show the conditions and attitudes present in (say) 1960. But it’s under no obligation to duplicate the value judgments that writers of the day would have expressed. The 2014 writers could show the three medical professionals who attended the pregnant woman having nothing but career and personal success after the secretive visit to her home. They would still have to fear being found out, of course, since their action was unlawful. But the writers could have chosen to make that a minor consideration in their happy lives, while other doctors who expressed disapproval of assisting in an abortion (such as the Indian doctor) could be shown having terrible professional and personal experiences after expressing that disapproval.
Again, I’m waiting to see the final episode. But so far I’m troubled by the treatment of the show’s one-and-only non-European character (that Indian doctor). I’m not liking the way he’s being depicted as an ambitious sneak. It seems to be a pandering to race prejudice among viewers. But maybe that will change in episode three.
This is brushing up against the strict, arbitrary and sometimes silly Hayes Code requirements, which did indeed dictate the line-by-line content of most movies from the mid-1930s into the 1960s.
One famous example is “The Bad Seed.” In the original ending, the horrid little girl who is the centerpiece of the movie skips on into the sunlight and the rest of her Damien-like life, while the mother committed suicide. No, no, no, the Hayes office said… and Mom survives heroically while the little girl is literally vaporized by a stroke of lightning. (Get it? Get it?)
So any “typical” portrayal of adultery etc. in 1940s-50s-60s movies is due to a review board that had a known, peculiar and widely loathed standard.
Yes, that’s what I was alluding to with my overly-succinct mention of “the film studio.”
My point is that what happens to characters–in entertainments created in 2014 just as much as in entertainments created in 1961–does have something to do with value judgments placed on the characters’ choices, actions, and (sometimes) demographic traits.
The best writing makes these judgments difficult to spell out or at least ambiguous; the most ham-fisted writing leaves the judgments as obvious as that bolt of lightning that took out little Rhoda. (Not that The Bad Seed isn’t an entertaining movie; it is.)
I do see what you mean about the implicit judgment in scripts written during this period and reflecting the *public *values of the time, but I don’t see these judgments being part of the writing in this show. I mean I don’t see that people are being punished for adulterous relationships or the like.
Give me an example. For instance, are you thinking that the old girlfriend that Truscott is sleeping with is being punished by the writers for sleeping with a married man by getting a cancer diagnosis?
I’m also at odds with your take on the portrayal of the Indian doctor. He seems quite professional and not the least bit sneaky. He is treating Powell’s friend, whom he defeated and whom he is now supervising, very graciously IMHO.
Wish we were sitting in a bar having this conversation over some snacks and drinks. That would be quite enjoyable.
