La confusion des conditions. Une enquête sur la série télévisée Urgences

Abstract

This article identifies the main characteristics of the US series Emergency Room. Drawing on a survey of TV viewers, doctors and broadcasting professionals, it analyses interest in the programme. The series takes us into the medical world where it creates a setting that is described as realistically as possible. Yet the view it offers of this world is not a distant, objectifying and critical one, as is usually the case with a realistic position. On the contrary, it invites the viewers to enter this world, by multiplying calls for complicity and constructing positions of identification that they can occupy. It simultaneously defines this world, presented as real, as a perfectible one, one of challenge, pervaded by an intransigent moral demand. In other words, the fiction constructs a world that it presents as real yet which is ideal. Realism, identification and idealization are the three mainstays of the mechanics of the series. The impact that this presentation of the hospital world has on viewers still needs to be analysed. This would require reception studies to show how and with what effects the fictional narrative resounds in the experience of life.