Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 143

P.C. on the Frontier: Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman

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past harshly, and with a really noteable lack of understanding as if people who
lived then were exactly like us” (Foote 43, ital. added).
A troublesome facet of this approach is that television’s strong preference for
realism causes myth and history to seamlessly merge, creating an ambiguous
category of knowledge where fantasy is closely interwoven with documented
history. Schwoch, et.al. suggest that “Here, television as a medium— the exemplary
mass medium — is understood as having the capacity to produce modes of
knowledge that are culturally significant and thereby to function as a mode of
pedagogy” (1). DQMW accomplishes this by weaving its very contemporary
narratives around kernels of historical fact. To term the knowledge that is generated
“revisionist history” is probably a stupendous understatement.

The Frontier of Inclusion
Though painfully didactic, DQMW does not encourage the viewer to wallow
in guilt. Rather, the program’s predominate approach to the more unpleasant aspects
of the story of our Western expansion, is positive intervention, or what Himmelstein
(“Kodak’s” 244) terms “the restorative impulse”. Often taking as its starting point
recognizable, historical events (i.e., the coming of the railroad, the deployment of
black “Buffalo soldiers” to subdue the plains tribes (Gates 14, or the massacre of
the Cheyenne at the Washita [Josephy, “They Died” 146]); noteable persons (General
Custer, President Grant and Walt Whitman, among others, put in appearances); or
pertinent issues (such as miner safety, water pollution, women’s suffrage), characters
intervene in the course of events, rewriting history for the better, at least in the
eyes most of contemporary viewers. Since this is television, the intimate medium,
these problems are framed as personal adversity, and solved through the actions of
right-thinking individuals. The viewer is reassured that the wrongs perpetuated in
the name of Western Expansion must surely have been mitigated by acts like these,
undertaken by people whose thinking is remarkably in tune with ours.
Our frontier heroes have changed remarkably in this 1990’s version of our
past. They are significantly more often women, children, Native Americans, and
former slaves than adult white males (who here are usually dragged kicking and
screaming into doing the right thing). Grounding the series in a recognized genre,
familiar archetypes persist in stock Western characters but most often with a twist:
There are whores with hearts of gold , one of whom soon walks away from her
profession, marries, becomes a working mom and eventually leaves her husband
altogether, while another chooses to remain a prostitute in order to save for a business
she plans to open. There is a black couple, former slaves, who, instead of sweeping
the floor, as they most likley would have done in earlier Westerns, are now both
successful business owners. Finally, there are the Cheyenne people who, in sharp
contrast to past television and film counterparts, are rational, open-minded,