Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman And The State Of Period Dramas
By Guest Contributor Kendra James
Principal cast of “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.”
Late in the second season of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, there’s an episode where the Klu Klux Klan comes to Colorado Springs in the form of a bank official peddling a “social club” for men. “Like the lady’s quilting circle,” the women claim, unknowingly sewing uniforms for the men to use during their first outing.
But when they put those uniforms on and Grace, half of the show’s one Black couple, is cornered by three Klan members, the situation takes a disturbing turn. The Klansmen grab her in broad daylight and hold her down against one of her restaurant tables. At first it seems an act of rape is imminent. Yet, somehow, when they rip her hair down from the carefully constructed bun she wears and begin to slowly carve it away with a barbershop razor while she screams, it seems almost worse–more intimate–than what could have been.
Jonelle Allen as Grace on “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.”
That episode, “The First Circle,” aired during a season where the show averaged 13.46 million viewers per episode for CBS–an incredibly strong showing for a family-oriented show that aired at 8:00 on Saturday nights. As the 49th most watched show in America, it was up against the 104th and 113th most watched shows from ABC, NBC, and FOX, and was outperformed only by another CBS Saturday-night show, Walker, Texas Ranger. Dr. Quinn, which starred British actress Jane Seymour, had a relatively family-friendly facade and–since “family-friendly” often goes hand-in-hand with a sugarcoating of American history–the topics it chose to handle are always a welcome surprise.
Episodes like “The First Circle” were an indication of not only how good Dr. Quinn could be, but how much television has changed and what our current period television dramas often fail to do and acknowledge. In its own way, the show regularly dealt with issues like racism, immigration, and gender equality, but often touched on more nuanced subjects as well. The white encroachment on Cheyenne lands, mob lynchings of African-Americans, marital rape, and domestic abuse were only a few themes explored throughout the series. Unlike many period dramas, Dr. Quinn never shied away from dealing with the difficult realities of its setting laid out.
It’s certainly possible to have the social discussions Dr. Quinn presented outside the medium of family television. If a CBS of 1994 (hardly the most progressive of networks) could do it while employing Chuck Norris at the same time, it can’t be that difficult. Yet, while we now have a television landscape full of period dramas, I can’t see this show or its subject matter fitting in to a 2012-2013 lineup.
One of the few things the show had in common with its modern counterparts is a traditionally attractive white couple in the romantic-lead spot in Michaela “Mike” Quinn (Seymour) and Byron Sully (Joe Lando). While Michaela struggled to be accepted as a forward-thinking female doctor in the frontier west, Sully was a “mountain man” and “friend to the Cheyenne.” Despite many of the townspeople thinking that Sully is at least half Native American, the fact that Sully is a white man is never forgotten by the writers or Sully himself. His character often negotiated with the United States on the behalf of the Cheyenne people (he’s even an Indian Agent for a season), but the show is careful to toe the line of him speaking as anything other than a white man.
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