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mess; you’d have to sit down every Thursday night with a medical dictionary at hand. (“Is peder permadicis spelled with a d or a t ?”)
    From a purely narrative point of view, the decisive line in that scene arrives at the very end: “AB.” The sixteen-year-old’s blood type connects her to an earlier plotline, involving a cerebral hemorrhage victim who—after being dramatically revived in one of the opening scenes—ends up brain dead. Fifteen minutes before the liver-failure scene above, Doug and Carter briefly discuss harvesting the hemorrhage victim’s organs for transplants, and make 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 ER—an otherwise perfect liver donor showing up just in time to donate his liver to a recipient with the same rare blood type. But the show reveals this twist with a remarkable subtlety. To make sense of that last “AB” line—and the look of disbelief on Carter’s and Lucy’s faces—you have to recall a passing remark uttered fifteen minutes before regarding a character who belongs to a completely different thread.
    It would have been easy enough to insert an explanatory line at the end of the scene: “That’s the same blood type as our hemorrhage victim!” And in fact, had ER been made twenty or thirty years ago, I suspect the writers would have added precisely such a line. But that kind of crude subtitling would go against the narrative ethos of shows like ER. In these modern narratives, part of the pleasure comes from the audience’s “filling in.” These shows may have more blood and guts than popular TV had a generation ago, and some of the sexual content today would have been inappropriate in a movie theater back then—much less on prime-time TV. But when it comes to storytelling, these shows possess a quality that can only be described as subtlety and discretion.
    It’s not a headline you often see—“Pop TV More Subtle and Discreet Than Ever Before!”—but ignoring these properties means overlooking one of the most vital developments in modern popular narrative. You’ll sometimes hear people refer fondly to the “simpler” era of television’s alleged heyday, the days of Dragnet and I Love Lucy. They mean “simpler” in an ethical sense: there were no sympathetic mob bosses on Dragnet, no custody battles on Lucy. But when you watch these shows next to today’s television, the other sense of “simpler” applies as well: they require less mental labor to make sense of what’s going on. Watch Starsky and Hutch or Dragnet after watching The Sopranos and you’ll feel as though you’re being condescended to—because the creators of those shows are imagining an “ideal viewer” who has not benefited from decades of the Sleeper Curve at work. They kept it simple because they assumed their audience at the time wasn’t ready for anything more complicated.
    In this, they were probably right.
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    T ELEVISION DRAMA is the most dramatic instance of the Sleeper Curve, but you can see a comparable shift toward increased complexity in most of the sitcoms that have flourished over the past decade. Compare the way comedy unfolds in recent classics like Seinfeld and The Simpsons— along with newer critics’ faves like Scrubs or Arrested Development— to earlier sitcoms like All in the Family or Mary Tyler Moore. The most telling way to measure these shows’ complexity is to consider how much external information the viewer must draw upon to “get” the jokes in their entirety. Anyone can sit down in front of most run-of the-mill sitcoms— Home Improvement, say, or Three’s Company— and the humor will be immediately intelligible, since it consists mostly of characters