We’ve seen it so many times. A young, handsome man rushed into the emergency room with a gunshot wound. A flurry of white coats racing the clock: CPR, the heart zapper, the order for a scalpel. Stat! Then finally, the flatline.
This is Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider’s biggest pet peeve. Where are the TV scripts about the elderly grandmothers dying of heart failure at home? What about an episode on the daughter still grieving her father’s fatal lung cancer, ten years later?
“Acute, violent death is portrayed many, many, many times more than a natural death,” says Ungerleider, an internal medicine doctor and founder of End Well, a nonprofit focused on shifting the American conversation around death.
Don’t even get her started on all the miraculous CPR recoveries where people’s eyes flutter open and they pop out of the hospital the next day.
All these television tropes are causing real harm, she says, and ignore the complexity and choices people face at the end of life.
Or just look at Home Alone reviewed by trauma surgeons
Home Alone gets a pass because it exists further into the animated cartoon laws of physics side of fiction.
That’s a whole different thing, because Home Alone is a live-action cartoon. The bandits play the same role as Tom chasing Jerry.