Bedside Manner, Real and Imagined

It’s a day early, but here are two recent telecasts worthy of Thanksgiving.

Although about as different as programs can be, the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” and ABC’s superb drama series “NYPD Blue” intersected stunningly this week at the crossroads of pain, mercy and death.

They displayed faces of dying and terminal illness at once alike and dissimilar, one playing largely to jeers, the other to cheers.

A controversy has been raging on talk radio and in other media circles over Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” which aired a videotape showing Dr. Jack Kevorkian injecting lethal drugs into a Detroit-area man who was in the advanced stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Thomas Youk, 52, was said to be suffering and fearful of the painful death that likely lay ahead.

Kevorkian is widely known, and often reviled, for his scores of assisted suicides. By controlling the killing fluids himself this time, he sailed what CBS News termed his “in-your-face right-to-die campaign” into the murkier, more treacherous waters of euthanasia, seemingly in violation of Michigan law.

Youk “understood that it [his death] could be on television,” said a “60 Minutes” spokesman. So much for the CBS telecast’s invading Youk’s privacy as he accepted death willingly from Kevorkian.

The much stormier issues involve Kevorkian’s provocative act and “60 Minutes’ ” beaming it to America.

Did Kevorkian do the right thing? You’re on your own there. Did “60 Minutes” do the right thing in showing what Kevorkian did? Absolutely.

“60 Minutes” says it didn’t participate in making the videotape. It merely ran and built a legitimate story around it that was sober, not ghoulish. And the segment’s surfacing in a November ratings period--attracting more than 22 million viewers in one of the months that sets advertising rates for local stations--didn’t invalidate what Americans witnessed.

They heard a weakened, barely audible Youk repeatedly indicate to Kevorkian that he wanted to die. Then they saw him die: Kevorkian gave him a drug to put him out, then a muscle relaxant to stop his breathing, then potassium chloride, the doctor said, to stop Youk’s heart. Then Youk’s family endorsed what happened, and Kevorkian told Mike Wallace that he had wanted “60 Minutes” to run the video to provoke his arrest so that he could have a show trial over his right-to-die advocacy.

A blatant media stunt.

But one that elevated to its highest resonance yet a public debate over the complex legal and moral components of assisted suicide and mercy killing, a debate that, if conducted rationally, will produce greater understanding and a more informed consensus, either way Americans ultimately decide.

“The issue’s got to be raised to the level where it is finally decided,” Kevorkian told Wallace. “I’ve got to force them to act. They must charge me, because if they do not, they don’t think it’s a crime.”

Whether that would happen was uncertain, given the ambivalence Oakland County Prosecutor David Gorcyca displayed when discussing the case publicly this week after subpoenaing the tape.

“NYPD Blue” has a much warmer bedside manner than Kevorkian.

It’s unlikely anything but loud praise greeted Tuesday night’s “NYPD Blue,” which concluded with the poignant, achingly sad death of Det. Bobby Simone, who suffered terribly himself before and after a heart transplant that didn’t work out. This was the finale of a brilliant story arc--from producer Bill Clark and executive producers Steven Bochco and David Milch--bidding adieu to Simone, who had to be written out of the series because the actor playing him, Jimmy Smits, wanted to move on.

It was one of the best episodes of one of the best series ever to appear in prime time, intensely intimate and emotional--no dry eyes allowed--without being gratuitous or manipulating. Were ABC stations pleased that it came in a ratings period and not next Tuesday? You have to ask?

That was about the only thing here that was predictable.

When Bobby got his new heart from a fallen officer just as he was running out of time, you sniffed a pat ending, one cop giving life to another, the reliable 11th-hour reprieve just before the final credits. When he later had a devastating relapse while still in the hospital, and a young doctor suggested giving him 24 hours of life on antibiotics and hoping for a miracle, you expected that miracle to happen. Why, it had to.

The economics of TV demanded it, mandated the survival of Bobby so that the popular Smits would be eligible to occasionally revisit the series if he wished, most likely during other ratings periods.

Creative integrity intervened, though, dictating that Bobby die. After receiving last rites, die he did, with his distraught wife, Diane (Kim Delaney), bedside and his partner, Dennis Franz’s raw, tormented Andy Sipowicz, and other buddies from the precinct hovering tearfully nearby.

The episode had everything needed for a soaring crescendo, specifically heartbreak, conflict, uncertainty and closure, and a fine cast to execute them.

It had a clash of philosophies between that young doctor, who spoke from the heart when advising against taking extreme measures that would extend the gasping Bobby’s suffering, and a lofty specialist with an aloof manner who urged pushing those long-shot medical levers that would stretch his patient’s agony.

It had heartbreaking dialogue about knowing when to “fold ‘em,” as in Bobby telling Diane, “I don’t want to stop fighting . . . but it comes to a point . . . it’s hopeless.” And Diane telling him later, when he became worse, “Don’t fight anymore for me.”

As far as TV deaths go, this one was a heart-tugging colossus, with sweet, dreamy metaphors that merged Bobby with images of his past as he slipped in and out of consciousness during the last minutes of a life that ended peacefully, if tragically.

It was the kind of show that any viewer would prize and any series would nominate for an Emmy and precisely the kind that Kevorkian and Youk did not deliver on “60 Minutes.”

Whereas the young doctor who attended Bobby was warm and compassionate, Kevorkian, a retired pathologist, was austere and clinical (“And we’re ready to inject. . . .”), nourishing the popular image of him as a macabre technician with a doomsday machine. You wanted to give him a shot of antifreeze when all he could say after Youk died was, “He’s flat-lined.”

There was no beautifully crafted script here for Kevorkian and Youk, no director to tell Kevorkian to emote, no professional actors who knew how to engage an audience by pumping emotion. There were no tender, gauzy visions of this dying man’s inner thoughts and last glints of being, no prayers for him, no mention of miracles, no tears. And no loved ones, for Kevorkian said their presence might implicate them criminally.

There were only the reality and finality of death, along with Kevorkian, almost detached, it seemed, while making his TV pitch to the nation. As a performer in an era of big and splashy, he was the one who had flat-lined, raising the question of how much better a salesman he would be for his cause if he put on a better show.

The Ethics of Dying: * Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s televised assisted suicide raises new questions about how we choose to die. E1