“Diagnosis” is a Netflix reality show first, a comment on American healthcare second, and Lisa Sanders’ medical show on crowdsourcing the diagnostic process a distant third. If you wanted to see more of what made her book and column great, like I did, well, tough luck: this ain’t it. Because — and this isn’t a surprise — most people with access to a tertiary medical center do get an adequate diagnosis. Those who are undiagnosed either lack access, or have a functional-slash-undiagnosable condition that ultimately doesn’t change much in their management.

Realizing this, the producers add a spin: the crowdsourcing they bring is also there for emotional support, connecting with people, getting different treatment recommendations. As if Facebook didn’t exist. If this show were a clinical trial, it would be a phase II with an unimpressive response rate but hey look at those bio markers we hadn’t initially planned on doing!

Warning: spoilers for Episode 1 ahead. I may get to the other ones, eventually.

Only the first episode half-lives up to its promise. A young woman from Las Vegas has a problem. Her local doctors don’t know the cause; I certainly didn’t, but could make a ballpark guess as to which type of a disorder it was and which subspecialist she should see. However, instead of giving her a referral to the nearest university medical center, the doctors flood her medical bills, and sue her for non-payment to boot. Only in America!

Enter Sanders: her NYT article gets a bunch of people across the world sending video suggestions as to the possible diagnosis. A medical student from Turin, Italy, offers a free work-up. Netflix, bless their hearts, films the patient and her partner flying to Italy to get it done, marveling at the wonders of a single payer system. I can only presume travel and boarding were paid for by the production team. But why not pay for a trip to San Francisco instead? Well, the skyline isn’t as dramatic as that of Turin; and it would rob Dr. Sanders of the opportunity to marvel how crowdsourcing brought the answer from half way across the world, literally.

In a nutshell: Because of No Insurance and TV Drama Makes Better Ratings, woman from Nevada flies to Italy — instead of driving to California — to get diagnosed with a rare medical condition.

To be continued…

Serbia’s public broadcaster, RTS (that’s PTC in cyrillic) has a good chunk of its archive spread across multiple YouTube channels, and it is magnificent (this one in particular).

Observe the 1960s-1990s televised plays and TV dramas. I still have vivid memories of watching one particular product the first time it aired, about a Serbian family keeping in touch with their ex-pat relatives in Germany via VHS tapes. Replace camcorders with smart phones and speed up the timeline to account for the internet, and it could have been shot today. Technology changes, people don’t.

My favorite childhood TV show hasn’t aged well at all; then again has anything from the ‘90s? If you consider most of it was made during a civil war and in a time of hyperinflation it is actually quite good. What was 90210’s excuse? Better kids’ shows have been made in Serbia both before and after.

Best for last: the celebration of hard core nerddom that is Serbia’s longest-running quiz show, important enough to have its own channel. It starts with anagrams and math problems, makes a detour to Mastermind, then finishes off with three different ways to test for trivia. Jokes about the autism spectrum would be writing themselves if this were an American show, but it’s not, and (before I left, at least) Serbian viewers still had some admiration for the participants. It is all very serious and competitive, and has been on the air every weekday for the last 24 years. (A political side-note: this does not mean Serbia is free from anti-intellectualism, quite the opposite in fact. Some combination of militant anti-intellectuals, gas-lighters, and proponents of economic/financial scientism has been in positions of power since the early 90s. There are no lessons here, just observations).