Listen, sometimes I watch Private Practice. It’s pretty embarrassing – I would claim it’s even worse than something like Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or Sarah Palin’s Alaska, because at least these shows have some cultural cache. People talk about them, it’s super fun to rag on them – at least you can pretend you’re trying to keep up with the conversation. There’s not much chatter about Private Practice, and so the fact that I occasionally keep up with the happenings at Oceanside Wellness is something I generally keep to myself.
Xander, no!
But last week, Private Practice actually made the internet rounds, due entirely to its Very Special Episode In Which A Cast Member Gets Raped. As television representations of rape go, it wasn’t really that bad. There was very little sentimentality, and the episode stayed surprisingly true to a realistic outcome – the victim refused to report the crime, and the rapist was set free, even though the police actually had him in custody. (Also, the rapist was Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Xander Harris, which of course led me to believe a simple demonic possession was to blame for everything.) Taken as an event inside larger project of Private Practice, the incident is of course absurd. I’ve written before about the way dialogue on the show has an uncanny way of mirroring the metanarrative. Violet, in particular, is prone to moaning things like “It seems like we’re all cursed!” and “Why do bad things keep happening to us?!” After the horrific events of…well, of every season ending on this show, it seems incredibly unlikely that a cast member would be the victim of yet another violent crime. As a single episode, though, the whole thing was startlingly plausible. “Props to you, Private Practice,” I thought. “Huh, I wonder what will happen next week?”
This week, of course, all that good representational and narrative work just went to hell. First up, the continuing rape plotline. After all my happiness that Charlotte’s rape went unreported and un-avenged (not out of a lack of empathy for Charlotte, mind, but out of respect for the political project), sure enough, just one episode later characters are poking and prodding into a possible rape and voila! Addison pulls some secret DNA tests out of a drawer. Not only that, Sheldon charges back down to the police station to demand they arrest that crazy guy they had a few nights ago, and yep! Retribution ahoy.
Turns out, the wife is the abuser! That's so wacky!
It gets even worse. The B-story this week was about a marital abuse case, except the abuser was a wife with a cancer diagnosis, and the abuse victim was her loving husband. Debate raged among the Oceanside staff – should they report the abuse? Should they leave it alone, as the husband insisted? “Would we be having this discussion if the victim was the wife?,” they wondered, and the answer was, “No, probably not. We’d totally just throw that guy in jail.” It’s supposed to be a thoughtful discussion about the gendered discourse of domestic violence, and for a second, it looks like Private Practice might pull this thing off.
But wait, this abuse debate isn’t quite as even-handed as it seems. As it happens, the wife isn’t just some evil abuser – a tumor on her ovary is secreting testosterone and that’s what’s causing her violence and uncontrollable outbursts. The doctors try to surgically remove the tumor, but it doesn’t work, and the couple has to deal with what to do next. Rather than sending the wife to hospice where her rage can be managed and her husband won’t get hurt, obviously the happy, abusive wife gets sent home with her devoted spouse. Because despite that discussion we all had just a few minutes ago, we know that wives don’t hit their husbands unless they have some physical cause, and even then, their husbands should just deal with it.
For a second, I worried that Private Practice might be reforming, but I needn’t have worried. One decent Very Special episode does not a decent show make.
