Learning from scriptwriters

It's amazing what you can learn from watching popular sitcoms. I mean, other than how to back-stab everyone in the neighbourhood while hiding a pregnancy by an escaped sociopath who loves animals and therefore can't be all bad.

 

But there can be some real take-aways from sitcoms. I don't mean those set in people's inner city apartments or suburban culdesacs where absolutely everything comes from the fanastical corners of a creative scriptwriter's imagination.

I'm talking about those sitcoms that require at least a basic fact checking, like those located in a hospital or police station. I mean, how much did MacGyver teach us about getting out of sticky situations with nothing more than a length of hose or a paperclip?


If you think about it, there are lots of sitcoms based in medical or police/legal settings. I can think of at least a dozen off the top of my head including ER, A Country Practice, All Saints, Castle, and the multiple versions of CSI and Law & Order.

But the lesson I wanted to share here, which I took away from an episode of Offspring, was that an adult with the correct blood type can donate slice of their liver to a baby needing a transplant.

Dr Google confirms that, because the liver regenerates itself, the section that's been cut out of the adult will regrow but even more impressively, the slice implanted into the bub grows with the child as if it was always there. That's pretty darn cool in my book.