Educational Programming

During the upcoming month, FOX will begin a broadcast season without any Arrested Development. While the choice to drop a show in which every season was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, it is FOX after all, and the execs evidently get paid per series they premiere. That this is such a funny series has been noted by this author and many others on many occassions. However, in this post I bring up a different aspect of the show.

In all the years of ER, I don't remember learning about the existance of a disease from the show. There have been great episodes of the hospital show dealing with a wide variety of maladies, but all the ones I remember dealt with filling in details of fighting a disease that I already knew about although I'd say it is probable that I learned of a new disease which did not make it out of the short-term memory buffer. Strangely enough, this is not true for Arrested Development. In the episode Prison Break-In, a disease must be found for the annual Bluth Foundation Dinner to raise funds to fight after the donors discovered that TBA was not actually a disease. Thus when Tobias develops Graft-Versus-Host Disease (GVHD) when his transplanted hair plugs start attacking his body, they pick that. I was reminded of this lesson today when I read of the death of four-time Iditarod winner Susan Butcher from GVHD. While it seems that GVHD is a complication of bone marrow transplants, not other transplants like hair, thanks to the educational aspects of Arrested Development, I was at least aware of the disease.