Caitlin Cook Prompt #3

 Modern Medicine: Disney Resuscitates Doogie

The Disney Doogie Kamealoha premiere proved to be a reimagined reboot to the 1989-1993 Doogie Howser series. While both shows center around a 16-year-old genius doctor, the strength of Doogie Kamealoha is that it has been reworked away from a privileged, white, upper middle class, male perspective.
In the reboot, there is a refreshing gender reversal; the main character, Lahela, who is playfully called “Doogie,” is female. In the opening scene, Lahela is introduced as an athletic female surfing with her father at her local beach. Writer Kourtney Kang intentionally adds this scene to portray her protagonist as not only smart, but strong. She continues this gender role reversal by portraying the father as the nurturer and the mother as the chief of staff at Lahela’s hospital. At the family dinner, for example, Lahela’s father and brothers clear the dinner dishes, while Lahela and her mother remain seated. This is a stark contrast to the 1989 show where Doogie’s mom is a housewife and where the only female hospital worker was a nurse who tried to seduce Doogie. Zeisler (2008) reminds us that “we look at...television shows as shorthand for what happened at the time and how we experienced it” (p. 4). When Zeisler calls feminism a “work in progress” (p. 14) in the 1980’s, she acknowledges that “there were TV characters who seemed to be striving for feminist ideals, but for most of them—as it was for women in the real world—it was almost impossible to be feminist superwomen in a world that was still stubbornly unequal”(p. 13). She further describes the conflict that while “characters were nevertheless expanding the definition of what women could do on screen...pop culture will always be uneasy bedfellows in a larger culture that remains conflicted (to say the very least) about how much power, agency, and autonomy women should have” (Zeisler, pp. 14-15). Of course, Kang should be applauded for flipping the gender roles of the original show, but she lacks the commitment to portray all of her women as strong and powerful. For example, Lahela’s mother, Dr. Clara Hannon lacks authority and confidence in her roles, both as mother and hospital chief of staff.  In addition, Steph, Lahela’s best friend, shamelessly seeks the attention and approval of Lahela’s older brother. These contradictions reflect the larger culture’s contradictory feelings towards feminism.
While Doogie Kamealoha almost exactly resembles the original pilot, this revised pilot introduces a greater diversity of actors. Although 1989 was twenty years after the Civil Rights movement and Stonewall, Doogie Howser still featured a mostly white heterosexual cast. Thirty-two years later, with some social progress such as the legalization of gay marriage through the abolishment of DOMA, the MeToo movement, and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, Kang weaves diversity into her script. This diversity allows for a richer viewing experience because, as Hall (1997) explains, “meaning arises through the ‘difference’ between the participants in any dialogue. The ‘Other’, in short, is essential to meaning” (p.236). In the second scene, Lahela, multiracial herself, happens upon a traffic accident while taking her driving test. While the original version of this scene shows an all white cast from the DMV worker to the policemen and paramedics, this updated version includes African Americans as the DMV worker and the paramedic. Additionally, while the original show featured predominantly white hospital workers with speaking parts, this modern version includes Dr. Li, the heart surgeon with a noticeable accent, Charles, an effeminate African American intern, and a hospital staff that is largely multiracial. By creating a cast of characters who are all diverse, Kang tries to avoid characters who are “different.” Hall explains that “‘difference’ ...is a constant and recurring preoccupation in the representation of people who are racially and ethnically different from the majority population”(p. 230). In contrast to the homogenized hospital staff, the original Doogie had two minority patients. This is what Hall refers to as a “binary form of representation,” when “people who are in any way significantly different from the majority-’them’ rather than ‘us’...are frequently represented through sharply opposed, polarized binary extremes-good/bad, civilized/primitive” and in this case: healthy/sick (p. 229). The first was Mr. Finkelstein who threatened to sue Doogie because he was too young to treat him. Since this original scene carried anti-Semitic undertones, Kang replaces this patient with Mr. Lin. In the reboot, Kang also does away with the image of the smart white boy as savior to the helpless black boy when she replaces the black pediatric heart patient with the white elderly man. In fact, Kang also makes an effort to challenge some Asian stereotypes, as she overemphasizes that Lahela’s older brother is a C student, and her younger brother as obsessed with pizza bagels.
While Kang tries to combat some stereotypes, this reboot isn’t perfect. For example, Kang seems to think it's acceptable to perpetuate other stereotypes if the characters refer to themselves in self-deprecating ways. However, any stereotype is still a “racialized regime of representation” and damaging because it “means [individuals are] reduced to a few essentials, fixed in Nature by a few, simplified characteristics’” (Hall, 1997, p. 249). For example, when Lahela’s mom, a red-haired white woman, refers to her “Catholic guilt” and “pounding a 40,” this line perpetuates Irish stereotypes. Also when Dr. Li tells the elder Dr. Kamealoha that he “wishes he had a white mom,” the implication is that his Chinese mom is the stereotypical “Tiger mom.”  Meanwhile, Charles, the effeminate doctor, is portrayed as silly. While Kang’s inclusion of the LGBTQ community is progress after their exlusion from the original series, portraying the gay man as a brilliant surgeon would have been a more powerful image for young viewers.
Still, since pop culture is “critical in shaping societies” (Zeisler, 2008, p. 3), this reboot, while not perfect, is promising in the ways that it exposes young viewers to stronger, smarter women and more diverse characters than its 1989 counterpart.