This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. American Idol; Season 10.Watching TV Makes You Smarter. I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down. And yet you almost never hear this story in popular accounts of today's media. Instead, you hear dire tales of addiction, violence, mindless escapism. It's assumed that shows that promote smoking or gratuitous violence are bad for us, while those that thunder against teen pregnancy or intolerance have a positive role in society. Judged by that morality- play standard, the story of popular culture over the past 5. The usual counterargument here is that what media have lost in moral clarity, they have gained in realism. The real world doesn't come in nicely packaged public- service announcements, and we're better off with entertainment like . I happen to be sympathetic to that argument, but it's not the one I want to make here. I think there is another way to assess the social virtue of pop culture, one that looks at media as a kind of cognitive workout, not as a series of life lessons. There may indeed be more . But that's not the only way to evaluate whether our television shows or video games are having a positive impact. Just as important - - if not more important - - is the kind of thinking you have to do to make sense of a cultural experience. That is where the Sleeper Curve becomes visible. Televised Intelligence Consider the cognitive demands that televised narratives place on their viewers. With many shows that we associate with . By viewing our video content you are accepting the terms of our Video Services Policy. They say witty things to one another and avoid lapsing into tired sitcom clich. But assuming we're bright enough to understand the sentences they're saying, there's no intellectual labor involved in enjoying the show as a viewer. You no more challenge your mind by watching these intelligent shows than you challenge your body watching . Think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half- century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows and social networks. According to television lore, the age of multiple threads began with the arrival in 1. The earlier shows follow one or two lead characters, adhere to a single dominant plot and reach a decisive conclusion at the end of the episode. Draw an outline of the narrative threads in almost every . The vertical axis represents the number of individual threads, and the horizontal axis is time. A . The narrative weaves together a collection of distinct strands - - sometimes as many as 1. The number of primary characters - - and not just bit parts - - swells significantly. And the episode has fuzzy borders: picking up one or two threads from previous episodes at the outset and leaving one or two threads open at the end. Charted graphically, an average episode looks like this: Critics generally cite . The structure of a . The most ambitious show on TV to date, . An episode from late in the first season looks like this: The total number of active threads equals the multiple plots of . The show doesn't offer a clear distinction between dominant and minor plots; each story line carries its weight in the mix. The episode also displays a chordal mode of storytelling entirely absent from . As is tradition, Apple opened up this year’s WWDC with a broad proclamation: let’s kill some competitors. We go through this every damn year. The idea is simple. And every single thread in this . In a sense, this is as much a map of cognitive changes in the popular mind as it is a map of on- screen developments, as if the media titans decided to condition our brains to follow ever- larger numbers of simultaneous threads. Fast- forward two decades, and shows like . And yet multi- threading is only part of the story. The Case for Confusion. Shortly after the arrival of the first- generation slasher movies - - . CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (commonly referred to as CSI or CSI: Las Vegas) is a popular. Get the latest news on VH1 shows, cast, episode recaps, style news and exclusive photos. Find the latest TV recaps, photos, videos and clips, news and more on MSN TV. Episode Recap CSI: NY on TV.com. Watch CSI: NY episodes, get episode information, recaps and more. In one scene, the obligatory nubile teenage baby sitter hears a noise outside a suburban house; she opens the door to investigate, finds nothing and then goes back inside. As the door shuts behind her, the camera swoops in on the doorknob, and we see that she has left the door unlocked. The camera pulls back and then swoops down again for emphasis. And then a flashing arrow appears on the screen, with text that helpfully explains: . When a sci- fi script inserts into some advanced lab a nonscientist who keeps asking the science geeks to explain what they're doing with that particle accelerator, that's a flashing arrow that gives the audience precisely the information it needs in order to make sense of the ensuing plot. Implicitly, they say to the audience, . Worry about that guy lurking in the bushes. All you have to do is follow the arrows. By this standard, popular television has never been harder to follow. If narrative threads have experienced a population explosion over the past 2. Watching our pinnacle of early 8. TV drama, ? Will Furillo marry Joyce Davenport? Will Renko find it in himself to bust a favorite singer for cocaine possession? But the present- tense of each scene explains itself to the viewer with little ambiguity. There's an open question or a mystery driving each of these stories - - how will it all turn out? A contemporary drama like . Anyone who has watched more than a handful of . And then you realize that you're supposed to be confused. The open question posed by these sequences is not . Popular entertainment that addresses technical issues - - whether they are the intricacies of passing legislation, or of performing a heart bypass, or of operating a particle accelerator - - conventionally switches between two modes of information in dialogue: texture and substance. Texture is all the arcane verbiage provided to convince the viewer that they're watching Actual Doctors at Work; substance is the material planted amid the background texture that the viewer needs make sense of the plot. Conventionally, narratives demarcate the line between texture and substance by inserting cues that flag or translate the important data. There's an unintentionally comical moment in the 2. In his speech, he warns that . It rushes by, the words accelerating in sync with the high- speed tracking shots that glide through the corridors and operating rooms. The characters talk faster in these shows, but the truly remarkable thing about the dialogue is not purely a matter of speed; it's the willingness to immerse the audience in information that most viewers won't understand. Here's a typical scene from . Her parents, JANNA AND FRANK MIKAMI, follow close behind. CARTER AND LUCY fall in. MIKAMI: She was doing fine until six months ago. CARTER: What medication is she on? MRS. MIKAMI: Ampicillin, tobramycin, vitamins a, d and k. LUCY: Skin's jaundiced. WEAVER: Same with the sclera. Breath smells sweet. CARTER: Fetor hepaticus? WEAVER: Yep. LUCY: What's that? WEAVER: Her liver's shut down. Let's dip a urine. Start lactulose, 3. NG. CARTER: We're giving medicine to clean her blood. WEAVER: Blood in the urine, two- plus. CARTER: The liver failure is causing her blood not to clot. MIKAMI: She's been Status 2a for six months, but they haven't been able to find her a match. CARTER: Why? What's her blood type? MR. MIKAMI: ab. They share a look. From a purely narrative point of view, the decisive line arrives at the very end: . Far earlier, before the liver- failure scene above, Carter briefly discusses harvesting the hemorrhage victim's organs for transplants, and another doctor makes a passing reference to his blood type being the rare AB (thus making him an unlikely donor). The twist here revolves around a statistically unlikely event happening at the E. R. But the show reveals this twist with remarkable subtlety. To make sense of that last . Shows like . Does the contemporary pop cultural landscape look quite as promising if the representative show is . When people talk about the golden age of television in the early 7. If you're going to look at pop- culture trends, you have to compare apples to apples, or in this case, lemons to lemons. The relevant comparison is not between . Many reality shows borrow a subtler device from gaming culture as well: the rules aren't fully established at the outset. You learn as you play. On a show like . The final round of the first season of . All of a sudden the overarching objective of the game - - do anything to avoid being fired - - presented a potential conflict to the remaining two contenders: the structure of the final round favored the survivor who had maintained the best relationships with his comrades. Suddenly, it wasn't enough just to have clawed your way to the top; you had to have made friends while clawing. The original . As each show discloses its conventions, and each participant reveals his or her personality traits and background, the intrigue in watching comes from figuring out how the participants should best navigate the environment that has been created for them. The pleasure in these shows comes not from watching other people being humiliated on national television; it comes from depositing other people in a complex, high- pressure environment where no established strategies exist and watching them find their bearings. That's why the water- cooler conversation about these shows invariably tracks in on the strategy displayed on the previous night's episode: why did Kwame pick Omarosa in that final round? What devious strategy is Richard Hatch concocting now? When we watch these shows, the part of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of the people around us - - the part that tracks subtle shifts in intonation and gesture and facial expression - - scrutinizes the action on the screen, looking for clues. We trust certain characters implicitly and vote others off the island in a heartbeat. CBS. com Enter your email address below and we'll send you an email with instructions. The Coroner - TV Tropes. Also known as the Medical Examiner or ME, he or she tells the detectives how the victim died and hands them any interesting trace evidence. Typically, this professional is the detectives' first stop depicted after examining the crime scene such as in Law & Order. This is usually played for comic effect, such as having the coroner eat a sandwich while working, or reacting calmly to a murder so gruesome it even freaks out the heroes. Many have a tendency to speak to the deceased, either in jokes or sympathy over a particularly violent death. This tends to be Truth in Television. May or may not be involved in dismissing violent murders as suicides or accidents; the role can also be filled by another member of law enforcement. In some jurisdictions both positions are held by the same person, but in others the coroner is a lawyer or paralegal who handles the paperwork, conducts inquiries, etc., while the medical examiner is a forensic pathologist who conducts the autopsies. In some areas the coroner is an elected official like The Sheriff (indeed, in the United States this is very common), and a few US counties even combine the two offices. In some areas, too, there aren't enough suspicious deaths to justify the cost of a full- time forensic pathologist; in these areas, a local surgeon or GP usually handles less suspicious cases while obvious murders are farmed out to freelance forensic pathologists. Also, in Real Life most deaths reported to the coroner or medical examiner aren't investigated, since most deaths that have to be reported aren't suspicious deaths. Handles autopsies and verification, she usually works behind the scenes. Harashaw of Ghost in the Shell: Innocence Notable for being a cybernetic pathologist - she's called in by Section 9 to look at . Knox of Fullmetal Alchemist averts the usual attitude of this trope. A former surgeon, he was forced to perform horrific medical experiments on Ishbalans during the war and chose to become a coroner after the war out of shame. Though he would never admit it, he is grateful that he gets to save Lan Fan and May Chang. In fact, Detrot only has one coroner (plus or minus an oversized hamster): Slip Stitch, a pony who starts out on the strange side, then jumps right offthat slippery slope. Add to that the fact that he occupies the Detrot Morgue and Ice Cream Parlor, and, well.. Yes, I have. Goes down smooth, gives a heady rush. Laurel Weaver (Linda Fiorentino). Bedpan, who is having a children's birthday party in his morgue. Bedpan: We've got painters in the flat. It's my son's eighth birthday, so we've moved the party here. Where's your wife, then? Bedpan: Over there, slab 2. Joyce Brothers is the coroner investigating York's killing. In an amusing twist, she's portrayed as surly and insensitive. Coroner: All right. This loser has taken the chicken shit way out and punched her own ticket. Delia Surridge informs the police that V's victims were killed with commonly available poisons which are therefore untraceable. It turns out that she worked at Lark Hill an Evil Scientist, experimenting on the prisoners. She is killed painlessly by V in her sleep for her later remorse. The dead man isn't really dead—in fact, the . Kay Scarpetta, of the series by Patricia Cornwell. Before the series degenerated into total Writer on Board, she served as the Chief M. E. He also gets this line. The heart and lungs - the perfect example of healthy asphyxiated tissue. Why - it was a pleasure to hold them in one. Ito in the Sano Ichiro series, a position that is especially tricky in Edo- period Japan as performing autopsies violates Shinto practices of the time. In addition, he uses forbidden Western medicine knowledge and techniques to do them, an issue which has already gotten him . He gives Harry (and sometimes Murphy) information on suspicious or just plain weird cases that end up in the morgue. He can do surgery if he wants when Harry can't go to the hospital because of those pesky mandatory reporter laws. He has a thing for polka. As High Priest of the Dead, part of his job is to examine the bodies of people dead under unusual circumstances for probable cause, then help figure out who did it. Granted, he does the figuring out using Blood Magic, but still. She is hardworking and honest, which is a rarity in the Moscow militia (police forces), and jaded and cynical far beyond her years, which is not. As the novel is set in the last few months of the Soviet Union, the militia have to make do with dwindling resources. Case in point, she arrives at a theory that the victim of the book was killed by an incendiary device of copper sulfate and red sodium separated by a permeable barrier like paper or cheesecloth; when the sodium soaks through and comes in contact with the copper sulfate the device ignites. So to test her theory, she invites the lead investigator to come with her to the car junkyard, where her test equipment consists of a stopwatch, a paintboard and brush, various membranes to be tested, and a bucket each of red sodium and copper sulfate. In her late fifties, she works as the city coroner, although she prefers to be called . According to Stephen Leeds she spends most of the time playing internet games and prefers the dead to the living - but then again, he might be a little biased. Also David 'Superdave' Philips, assistant coroner (played by former real life coroner David Berman). Alexx Woods (played by Khandi Alexander) on CSI: Miami, although she was eventually Put on a Bus. Shannon Higgins, who actually replaced Alexx.. Tara wound up replacing her shortly thereafter. Hammerback has Cool Glasses. There's also been Dr. Evan Zao (who disappeared with no trace), Dr. Peyton Driscoll (who got Put on a Bus) and Dr. Marty Pino (who showed up twice in season 2 before showing up again in season 5, having been fired from the coroner's office, become a gambling addict, and making the money for his gambling debts by make drugs out of dead drug users and selling it. He also happens to get his wife killed in that episode and ends up in jail by the end of it. Homicide: Life on the Street had several. Most memorable were the stereotypical crusty sardonic old man Dr. Lausanne, and the very unstereotypical Dr. Julianna Cox. Series 1 and 2 had Max Debryn (who also appears in the prequel series Endeavour). In series 3, the pathologist is Grayling Russell, and Laura Hobson, who goes on to appear in Lewis, is the pathologist in the specials. Series 4- 7 have various one- off pathologists. After Fabbri's death, she appears less frequently and other women also take her role. Giorgio Gaiba, who has a similar role to that of Leo Graf, also works in that aspect. Loretta Wade. She loves the city and the surrounding area at least as much as Pride. In the NCISBackdoor Pilot, she explains that she originally came with a round- trip ticket and still has the return ticket from all those years ago. Bullard later retires and is replaced by Dr. Kate Wilding, who herself ends up leaving and being replaced by Dr. Kam Karimore. On Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie). Dana Scully's specialty certification is in pathology; prior to and occasionally during her tenure in the eponymous unit, she taught forensic path at the FBI Academy in Quantico. Despite being a pathologist, or at least working in the morgue, he retains a very odd mix of loser and cloudcuckoolander. In fact, the reason he was shifted to the morgue is that he is a horrible doctor, having killed nearly all of his patients. This is what leads him to being such a great pathologist: he has seen nearly every way someone can die, because he probably caused it at one time or another. Still, he is seen forgetting where he left bodies, tagging patients before they've died, and playing Texas Hold'Em with a group of corpses. Word of God say he lets them in because he has a crush on Emerson. Lanie Parish in Castle. Sidney Perlmutter - one of the M Es who eats his lunch in the morgue. Thanks to the industrial- strength disinfectants, it's the cleanest place in the city. Maura Isles of Rizzoli & Isles; also gets points for an amusing tendency not to notice which of the morgue refrigerators is for staff use. Ran a lottery based on the corpses time of death. Often bribed by Kolchak into giving him information. Woody looks like the typical coroner.. He's predicted how Shawn and Gus will die, offered to hold organs in the freezer overnight (not for medical reasons), and when he woke up from a drunken stupor surrounded by a white powder he assumes his cocaine problem returned. But his autopsies are usually right, at least. Ogden in Murdoch Mysteries is more sensitive than most examples, but her occasional mild jokes over the bodies are enough to make the straitlaced Murdoch uncomfortable. Ogden makes Murdoch uncomfortable.) Her temporary replacement at the start of Season 4, Dr. Francis, maintains a constant stream of barbed sarcasm, apparently thinking Murdoch discovers murders just to annoy him. From Season 5, the coroner is Dr Emily Grace, who is essentially a younger Dr Ogden, although once Dr Ogden returns to Toronto, she also helps out occasionally. In the episode Der doppelte Lott he even has a cross- over with his colleague from the Cologne . Joseph Roth. Roth is a doctor in real life.). Mort, the opera- singing coroner on Due South. The patient didn't think much of Chase as a diagnostician, but did insist on having his surgery done by Chase, as he apparently had the best surgical record. Temperance . A full autopsy, flesh and all, usually falls to Dr. Camille Saroyan. They've been known to butt heads over who gets the body first - reasonably in the case of Saroyan, since Bones is only interested in the bones and tends to do things like dissolve the flesh off with acid in order to be able to see them better, which would destroy any soft tissue evidence. Max Bergman of Hawaii Five- 0 is the Asian and Nerdy medical examiner with an Ambiguous Disorder.
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