Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 141

P.C. on the Frontier:
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
Although television is by far the most pervasive and influential purveyor of
our popular culture, and therefore plays a unique role in shaping and maintaining
that culture, television programming’s creators can never stray far from concerns
about the entertainment value of their product to the commodity audience ( Meehan
564). In order to survive in the increasingly brutal ratings wars, each program
series must draw a large audience whose parameters are defined by the advertising
industry, (and whose loyalty can be documented through respectable Neilsen ratings)
and provide that audience with elements capable of sustaining interest over time,
ideally for a sufficient number of seasons to make the series attractive in aftermarket
sales. Recent audience trends further complicate this task. “Formats with discrete
themes for teenagers, small children and adults, as well as for the family as a
whole, suggest a new “demographic” in which several markets are laced together
to create new kinds of mass audiences and a renewed need to avoid offending
views” ( Taylor 52). Television dramas in particular, since they cannot rely on the
ready appeal of humor, and since violence in the age of the V-chip is no longer a
simple crowd-pleasing solution, are hard pressed to find compelling narrative to
hook and hold this cobbled-together audience.
One way that television drama has found to create compelling narratives which
resonate with diverse audiences is to co-opt our culture’s powerful myths.
“Television has assumed the mythical role of story teller and is carving out for
itself something of a monopoly in the creation and propagation of myth” (Breen
and Corcoran 136).
Myths, which are stories “about ourselves about who we are, how we got that
way, and what we hold to be trustworthy ( O ’Boyle 77), become, in the hands of
mass media, ideological and marketing tools cloaked in narrative realism. With a
combination of intuition and cynical calculation, myths are adapted to be maximally
appealing to the network television commodity audience.
A case in point is “Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman” ( DQMW), a program
with surprising ratings success which aired on CBS from January of 1993 until its
cancellation in May ,1998 and has since become a mainstay of Paxnet cable. A
weekly hour-long drama, it features the eponymous Dr. Michaela Quinn, a woman
physician in post-civil War Colorado Springs. She has left her upper-crust Boston
family to escape the male-dominated medical establish, and is almost immediately
thrust into the role of adoptive mother to three orphans. DQMW refurbishes one of