On this episode of I'm Obsessed With This, the podcast where we invite a new guest to share their current Netflix obsession every week, host Bobby Finger welcomes writer and I'm Obsessed With This producer Christine Friar (@christinefriar) to explain why she can't get enough of the Netflix original series Diagnosis, based on the NYT Magazine column of the same name. How is this show -- which centers on rare diseases/afflictions, their symptoms, and their treatment -- so comforting, and why might anxious people benefit from its presentation of medical crowdsourcing as, perhaps, one of the greatest things to have ever resulted from the internet? And, finally, why can't every doctor be like Dr. Lisa Sanders?! All episodes of Diagnosis are now streaming on Netflix.
On this episode of I'm Obsessed With This, the podcast where we invite a new guest to share their current Netflix obsession every week, host Bobby Finger welcomes writer and I'm Obsessed With This producer Christine Friar (@christinefriar) to explain why she can't get enough of the Netflix original series Diagnosis, based on the NYT Magazine column of the same name. How is this show -- which centers on rare diseases/afflictions, their symptoms, and their treatment -- so comforting, and why might anxious people benefit from its presentation of medical crowdsourcing as, perhaps, one of the greatest things to have ever resulted from the internet? And, finally, why can't every doctor be like Dr. Lisa Sanders?!
All episodes of Diagnosis are now streaming on Netflix.
[Music]
Bobby: Welcome to, I'm Obsessed With This, the Netflix podcast about the shows and films viewers cannot get enough of. Sort of like how Dr. Lisa Sanders cannot get enough baffling symptoms in her e-mail inbox. Today, I'm joined by writer and co-producer of I'm Obsessed With This, this podcast Christine Friar.
Christine: Hi.
Bobby: Hi, Christine. How are you?
Christine: I'm good. How are you?
Bobby: I'm fine. You’re the show's number one fan.
Christine: I am.
Bobby: You listen to everything first.
Christine: I listen to everything first and I stand the hardest. I'm going to go ahead and say it.
Bobby: And when we were talking about having people on the show, you were like I want to do Diagnosis.
Christine: Yeah, it was like—
Bobby: And I was, like, I really don't want to watch Diagnosis. Please anything for the love of God make me never have to watch Diagnosis. And yet here we are.
Christine: What can I say? I'm obsessed. I can't—the brain wants what it wants and my brain wants darkness. So, this show does that in a way that also gives you lightness and ethics and an idea of medicine providing a step forward.
Bobby: It's more comforting than I expected, but before we get into Diagnosis, the topic of today's episode—because we're friends and I know you and this is the opposite of darkness—I have to say, ever since starting I'm Obsessed With This, every single time I say the title and especially when I begin recording, I think of the video of Chris Jenner talking about how she's obsessed with books.
Christine: Yes. She's obsessed with reading.
Bobby: I'm obsessed with the Courvoisier book—I'm obsessed with reading.
Christine: She's like—
Bobby: I'll just get a new book.
Christine: . . . Chloe, I forgot to mention to you, I'm obsessed with reading. I'm obsessed. I'm reading this book. I'm obsessed with it.
Bobby: On Courvoisier.
Christine: And it's, like, a coffee table book.
Bobby: A coffee table book.
Christine: With the page—could not—it's like 98 percent photo and then the tiniest font for a caption on the photo. And she's like, I'm obsessed with reading.
Bobby: And the book would absolutely make the loudest creaking noise when opened to any page. You flipped through it without fully extending the spine, you know?
Christine: Yes, that is the first time that spine has been stretched, ever, in its existence.
Bobby: What else have you been watching on Netflix lately. I mean, I know that as an employee of Netflix, you're watching more than the average person. But, what—because you watch so many things, they can't all be winners, you know?
Christine: I feel like if anything my bar is higher to be impressed by something or to remember something, frankly.
Bobby: Watches The Irishman, oh, try again.
Christine: I'm like, who? Who is in that?
Bobby: All these old men.
Christine: They all were brunette and mad. Ghosts of Sugarland was something that I watched in the past 24 hours that I thought was pretty, like, unique for Netflix. It was like a 20-minute documentary about this group of friends in the Houston area who, like their childhood friend got recruited by Isis and moved abroad and is—
Bobby: Oh, I heard about that.
Christine: Yes, and it's fascinating for a number of reasons but one—this is not the reason to go into watching it but it is what I took away—there is like continuity in the anonymity universe of the documentary because all of these people are fearful of their friend's Isis contacts watching the documentary and then pursuing violence against them, so they all wear super hero masks to shield their identities.
Bobby: Okay, I was going to ask, is this the one where they're all in masks because I did—I read—
Christine: Yes.
Bobby: . . . about this.
Christine: So they're all wearing—like there's a Spiderman, there's an Ironman, but then there's continuity in the flashback pictures and archival footage that they show—like from these peoples' childhoods. Like, Spiderman is always Spiderman—they edit all the photos so that there's a little corresponding mask on each person. So, there will be—you're watching a documentary. It's about a group of friends. The tone is always 100 percent serious and, honestly, politically relevant. Things I didn't know about the Houston area. Things I didn't know about, you know, a lot of things about the American experience but then like on top of it there's this never acknowledged comedy beat—or, like, comedy facet—that everyone is dressed like a seven-year old on Halloween and, so, there will be this very serious documentary montage where they're like, here are the boys, on a trip at the lake at age seven; here are the boys at their high school graduation. But, they have edited a Spiderman mask on top of the head of the graduating student and it just makes me laugh.
Bobby: But it's not a funny documentary?
Christine: It's not funny at all. It's serious. It's really serious.
Bobby: Not at all funny.
Christine: It's a very informative 20-minute watch that I would recommend to anybody but if I were recommending watching it to my friend, the thing I would tell them to watch for is the masks because that's what made me go, well, this is fun to watch versus any other 20-minute documentary. Like, how many times do you read Isis online a day?
Bobby: But, it's also like a serious cultural document.
Christine: It's a very serious cultural document.
Bobby: That happens to have masks.
Christine: That happens to document our culture in other ways as well.
Bobby: In 20 minutes.
Christine: Who doesn't have 20 minutes? The other thing—I know this will be of particular interest to you because I know we've talked about it before. I have finally watched How to Make an American Quilt.
Bobby: Oh, what did you think?
Christine: I loved.
Bobby: Isn't it good?
Christine: It's delicious.
Bobby: It's just little vignettes.
Christine: And they fit so much into one feature film. Ellen Burstyn is stunning, which you forget.
Bobby: Ah, Ellen Burstyn and Anne Bancroft smoking weed on their porch, oh, it's so good.
Christine: There's some good weed sister joke in that scene, I forget what it is. She's like, I'm going to need a hit or else I'm going to punch her, or something, to Winona Ryder. And I'm like, oh, aunts. When you're smoking weed with your—
Bobby: I also loved—
Christine: . . . smoking weed with your sister.
Bobby: I like—I like how—you watched it recently?
Christine: Yes.
Bobby: There is something about that movie—it's my go-to example of a '90s aesthetic—this sort of inimitable mood of kind of the mid-90s ensemble—like, dramatic ensemble. I'm not quite Oscar "baity"—this isn't a prestige movie, but it's a serious drama.
Christine: Even the young—like when a character is young—the young version of them is like Claire Danes, Jared Leto—like every single—
Bobby: Samantha Mathis.
Christine: . . . person in this movie is a very famous person.
Bobby: Samantha Mathis. But there's also, in addition to that, there's a little bit of hokeyness and corniness to it.
Christine: Oh, yeah.
Bobby: Those movies that sort of toe that line in a way that either we're incapable of doing now, or, I don't know what the little secret sauce of those mid-90s movies is—and the music, an iconic Thomas Neuman score in that movie, where the movie emboldens everything else, you know? Like, the music sort of convinces you that it's a better movie than it might actually be because it's so dramatic and sweeping.
Christine: It earns them a lot of leeway for the sentimentality and the kind of Notebookiness or, like, Hope Floats—
Bobby: Shameless sentimentality.
Christine: It's very, like, think of The Notebook when they're getting together and you're seeing kind of like a Pinteresty aspiration lens applied to a romance but in a way that's still like delicious and valuable to you. It's sort of like—I don't know—it has that but manages, like you were saying, the goofiness factor so deftly and it also sneaks in a lot of different types of women and a lot of different types of love stories in a way that doesn't feel like 1994. Like Maya Angelou and her daughter are—
Bobby: Oh wait, she's in that movie, she's in that movie.
Christine: And, like, the whole reason that quilt making gets passed down to these white women is because Maya Angelou's mother sold their family quilt to, like, one of the woman's mother and—I don't know, there's just so much there that isn't necessarily there in a Sandy Bullock or Julia Roberts vehicle from the same era. Which is kind of what you think when you see Wynona Ryder in denim, like, in a 1994 movie cover—you're, like, oh this is going to be—
Bobby: I have to write my thesis again. She's like, I keep changing my thesis.
Christine: She goes to the public pool and someone flirts with her and she's like [honk noise].
Bobby: I don't know how to handle this.
Christine: "I'm engaged. What are the ethics of this?"
Bobby: Who was the—it's Dermot or Dylan. Dermot Mulroney or Dylan McDermott, which one? It's Dylan—no it's Dermot Mulroney.
Christine: It's Dermot Mulroney, you're so funny.
Bobby: He's like, I want to build us a house. And I'm like, you're 18.
Christine: They're engaged and planning a wedding and that's the thing she's getting cold feet about. And moving into a house together—he's building the house for her and, for the first time in this movie, as a couple—offhandedly—they're so committed to one another. He asks her for the first time if she would like to have children and he's like, do you even want kids? And I'm just like, wait—how do you get—
Bobby: You're getting married tomorrow.
Christine: How do you get this far and not know that? Like, what are you talking about?
Bobby: It's the 90s. It's the 90s. We weren't asking those questions.
Christine: You've just got to run to the alter and figure out the specifics after the contract is signed.
Bobby: Fall in love first, get married second, the details can come later. But, yeah, it's one of those movies—this movie does not hold up to scrutiny as you can see right here, but in the moment—
Christine: You're loving it.
Bobby: . . . they're just like all-enveloping and just—they're quilts, they're quilts.
Christine: Oh my God, they're quilts. They're quilts.
Bobby: Just a lovely quilt that you just want to wrap yourself up in. I loved mid-90s ensemble dramas. Fried Green Tomatoes. The list goes on and on. Unfortunately, we're not going to talk about How to Make an American Quilt which now I want to. We're going to talk about something I don't want to talk about which is the medical industry. Diagnoses of any kind. A gluten-intolerance diagnosis would make me uncomfortable and this show chronicles much more severe diagnoses than that. It is called Diagnosis and it's based on a New York Times Magazine column of the same name, hosted by the woman I mentioned at the beginning of the show, Dr. Lisa Sanders. What she does is, she solicits questions from people who have all of these mysterious symptoms and no diagnosis, like, they go to so many doctors, bring them their symptoms and the doctors are like, we don't know what you have. And, so, she uses her own knowledge and then the knowledge of the crowd—she loves talking about the crowd—she crowd-sources diagnoses from not just other doctors around the world, but other people who may or may not be suffering from that—from those symptoms, or know people who are suffering from those symptoms, are suffering from those symptoms—and uses all of their knowledge—combined knowledge—to figure out what these people have. Because, as she repeats over and over and over again throughout the show, you cannot get better until you have the correct diagnosis. And that's what the show is. Christine, didn't you watch it like the day it came out?
Christine: Yeah, I think so.
Bobby: What drew you to the show initially? What is your fascination with the medical industry? Doctors? Sickness? Health?
Christine: Oh, like, what a question—I live inside of a body and my body has a brain that is—like I have anxiety disorder and, so, things that can be solved through reasoning are very appealing to me. The idea that there might be a system of logic that you can apply to, like, your biological systems and deduce what's happening in a given situation is so calming to me. So, it's nice—like, I'm the kind of person that the moment I notice a symptom in my own body, I'm documenting it in a note in my phone. I go to my doctor at my annual physical and she's like, come on, um . . . like, just take Excedrin Migraine. It's okay. I'm like, okay, I just wanted to bring it up and make sure, you know, it didn't seem like a wider pattern to you. But, that said, from my personal experience, I have an intimate view, I guess, or like a first-hand experience with how painful it can be to go through a diagnostic process with somebody. And how challenging it can be to watch so many different things be at play at the same time when you're really so worried about someone's physical well-being. It's hard through just narrative story telling to convey to people the web of interacting things that are going on because these doctors are dealing with patients that they don't necessarily see all the time. They're dealing with patients who might have sought treatment from other doctors who they're not privy to, like, what that back story is. And you're also watching families kind of take the role of quarterback for these people's medical journeys and have to advocate for their loved ones and effectively be a social worker. It's a huge endorsement, I think, for a documentary as a form of communication—for journalism specifically—and that I think having a New York Times editor or columnist behind the decision-making process of the way the narrative function of the show works means that the kind of, like, spine of every episode ends up being ethics even though the medical system is not very ethical.
Bobby: Right.
Christine: And it creates a really wonderful workspace for all of the problems to be demonstrated really easily with a lot of different, like, families and cases and symptoms.
Bobby: And so much of like, you were talking about the diagnostic process, can be such a horror show—that's one of the things that worried me about watching the show, but what's good about the show is that it's the best case scenario for someone who is in need of a diagnosis.
Christine: Yeah, like, these people who are getting helped by the show are really getting helped, in a big way.
Bobby: The show is very aware of the fact that this is taking place in a larger universe and a larger system that is really incapable of doing these things. Like, when you need to solicit the help of a New York Times columnist—there's a larger, more fundamental systemic problem here, in the American healthcare industry. But, at least it's working for these people.
Christine: Right. It's like it's doing the work of reporting on the ground—like, this is what a family in Queens is going through trying to figure out best steps for taking care of their daughter who has some sort of encephalitis related illness. Or, like, here's our father who came home from war in the early '90s and has never been the same since. There are all these different people who you may have heard about abstractly but maybe you don't have all of the sensory details to imagine their day and their life and they report it and see it through to the end and a lot of cases really end up, unfortunately, documenting the toll that it takes on families trying to figure out the problem and the toll that it takes on the patients and their quality of life obviously. But, then, also how these people's access to healthcare is dictated by geography and by who they know and by—
Bobby: My buddy.
Christine: . . . who they're able to get in touch with and by how well they're able to articulate their problem and by how much they understand of what's going on in terms of, like, mental health versus physical health. Or, I don't know, it's a really stunning framework. I don't know how to describe it.
Bobby: Based on my own anxiety and hypochondria—which I feel like manifests itself very differently than yours because I see you as, like, that impulse to write down your symptoms is a more, I don't know—measured or—I can't speak to what's actually going on in your head but that sort of physical outward reaction is so much more controlled than my own one would be—which would just be to panic, you know? And to absolutely lose my mind whereas you may be doing that internally—like, at least you're doing the things that maybe the doctor would need. Like, if you did have some sort of wild diagnosis—wild series of symptoms—like the people in this show—I feel like you are better equipped to handle those symptoms than I am. Not just be—like, for you—
Christine: Thanks, Bob.
Bobby: . . . would be writing them down and I would just be, like, I'm losing my mind. I'm losing my mind. I'm losing my mind. And you would be, like, Bobby, I'm also losing my mind—
Christine: And I notice that when I lose my mind—
Bobby: . . . but here's the way to—
Christine: . . . I feel hungry and also thirsty. So, in eight months when somebody asks me, I'm going to tell me about it.
Bobby: Yeah, so it's just like—and, so that's why I didn't want to watch the show. But what the show is, is kind of—because it's showing you the best-case scenario for all of these things, it's comforting to see all of the things work. Because all of these end with, if not a conclusion—like an actual diagnosis—the hope that one is around the corner or that they had taken the steps to finally get better. I didn't watch the last two because honestly they were the ones that I looked at the descriptions and I was like I can't do this. It was a struggle to watch five.
Christine: Which one was five?
Bobby: I have to say—no, it was a struggle to watch the first five.
Christine: Oh, okay, got you.
Bobby: And there was one about déjà vu which made me—I started it and I was like this makes me very uncomfortable and then the final one was about paralysis.
Christine: Yes.
Bobby: Which, again, is very triggering to me.
Christine: The paralysis one I was—that was the one I warned you about and was—no, the déjà vu one actually is great. That's an episode where he's a 20-year old, he's like a gamer—and he starts having these, like, really serious seizures after spending an inordinate amount of time without sleep and drinking energy drinks. He has one seizure-type event and then it somehow becomes, through muscle memory or through some kind of, like, quirk of the body—it interacts with his preexisting psychological problems, so the episode is actually about how any time he gets stressed out he ends up having a seizure. And, so, it becomes about his relationship with his mother and they have to go through therapy together so that he can—or not therapy together, but like pursue therapy separately—and then have a conversation together so that he can stop having seizures.
Bobby: Wow. Okay, I might watch that one. The paralysis one I think I'm actually going to skip, but, so to go back to one of the episodes that I really liked—and a lot of them involved children, I would say half of them are about children who have these debilitating illnesses, these strange usually neurological disorders where there was the girl who was having seizures constantly. There was the girl, Kamiya, who collapses—it wasn't really paralysis and it wasn't really seizures. She was just sort of—
Christine: Frozen.
Bobby: . . . falling.
Christine: Yeah, like all of her muscles would stop.
Bobby: And they were like, oh, she's dropping again, she's dropping. And, so, the fear is that she would fall and people are around and then hurt herself because of that fall. And this woman—the woman who kept—who was just desperate for something and when she goes on a monologue about how, like, you think that whenever you have this rare disease that you're going to be taken care of—like, the spotlight is going to be on you a little more brightly and that doctors are going to pay attention to you—but when you are the extreme rarity, when you feel like you're the only one, then you feel utterly helpless. And that's the position she was in—where it was doctor after doctor after doctor could not figure out what was wrong and because of the crowd they found two other children who had the exact same symptoms.
Christine: Right.
Bobby: And then they found that other doctor who was studying it in rats—
Christine: That was amazing.
Bobby: . . . I mean, the whole thing, everything came together—[overlapping/unintelligible 0:21:38.7] good.
Christine: They found—so it went—the case went from being, like, oh my God my daughter is the only case of this recorded in people. There's no research on it. There's no hope that somebody might be developing a drug that she can try—there's nothing. She's just the only person in the world. They identified the gene and they were, like, it's a break in this gene and it's not anything that she inherited, it just happened. And then because of the New York Times article went out, there was a researcher in Maryland who was, like, I've spent my whole career studying this gene.
Bobby: Whole career.
Christine: We've never seen it in a person. We didn't know people like that were out there. I've been doing it to mice for years. I would love to develop a drug for your daughter to try. And it's the most beautiful, like, bow.
Bobby: And then there's that other company at the end and that postscript that's, like, they are also developing some drugs for it and they're going to treat her free of cost, free of charge, which is wonderful.
Christine: Right, like, the research community in Europe is very responsive to this show. There's Italian doctors who are, like, wait you have a person—you let a person live 30 years like this? Send them to us. People on—that's actually one funny part of the crowd sourcing is having people Skype in and sometimes, you know, it's a pediatrician or a vet or someone where you're like, oh, I can see what the tie-in is and then sometimes it's just a lady or someone from really far away and that's very cool.
Bobby: I think another thing the show does well is, just by the nature of it being a documentary where they have these camera crews following these people throughout their personal lives—they're not even explicitly called out—but they are on camera—you witness these hurdles that these people have towards actually getting the diagnosis. Leave New York Times out of it—the one teen who had the black urine and who would just get extremely sick every few months.
Christine: Hm-hmm. [affirmative] the first episode.
Bobby: Yeah, and then she had her father who was like, I want grandkids. This is all in your head. Why can't you get cured? Who was frustrated—you could tell it was because—probably because she had been dealing with this for so long and he just couldn't figure it out that it was frustrating to him—but it was all of these hurdles that were in her personal life just to getting to the doctor. Leaving the doctors out of it. Leaving the money out of it. Just—
Christine: Being sick and physically getting to a doctor when people can't tell you what's wrong is—
Bobby: When the people closest to you are also frustrated and really don't know how to express it in a way that is helpful, you know?
Christine: Right. Just, like, yelling at you.
Bobby: And then that one was, like, oh, you can't—just change your diet sweetie—that was a very satisfying one.
Christine: She says that, like, the beginning of the episode—if all of this is that I needed to change my diet, I'm going to be so mad. And then, like, 45 minutes later her diagnosis is, just change your diet. She's like, great.
Bobby: Wasn't that also someone from Europe who was like, it's fat.
Christine: Yes, it was that—
Bobby: Your body can't process fat.
Christine: . . . and they loved it because she was Italian so the city that she had to visit in Italy was where they wanted to have their wedding, like, when she came back she was, like, we've got to go back to Torino.
Bobby: Which episode would you recommend to someone first? Probably that one, if—that's the first one, isn't it?
Christine: I think that's like the best demonstration if you're kind of worried about getting freaked out about icky medical visuals or you just don't know if the show is for you, episode one is actually a really great example of what the show does because the fix her problem, they diagnose her, and they also demonstrate why it was so hard for her to get diagnosed in the first place. So, that's really what the show is at its best. But then, I think, if you want to get to the heart of it, episode two is really the cutest one, to me, Sadie.
Bobby: That's the girl with the—
Christine: They give her a brain implant.
Bobby: . . . who has seizures?
Christine: . . . and the end—
Bobby: Or like a pacemaker.
Christine: Or like a pacemaker, yes. I thought that was so great that they were able to find a solution for her that felt like it was in the modern times.
Bobby: And that would also work in sort of medical history because it was saying, you know, years and years ago—maybe very recent history—they would just default to a lobotomy. All these doctors were, like, we really don't want to have to do—like, we don't want to do this. This is antiquated medicine, but it's still on the table which is horrifying to think about.
Christine: Yeah. It's such a daunting—it really gave me insight into what specifically is stressful about being a parent—as a non-parent—I was, like, oh wow. There's going to be situations where you just—there is no right answer. You're looking at six or seven doctors who have all told you to give your daughter a hemisphere-otomy and remove half of her brain from her skull so that the infection doesn't spread. And that mother, I think, did a wonderful job of being, like, you know, I appreciate the input, but I think we're going to keep pursuing—I just can't imagine even being able to be found and, like, do that. These people are wildly brave.
Bobby: Brave? Oh, yeah. Every single person they spoke to—and I think you have to be at some point. Whenever you are a parent and you're dealing with a sick kid, I feel like there's obviously the learning curve, initially, where you're, like, what do I do? I feel helpless. This is impossible. I have to make sure my kid is okay. And you're probably behaving in this sort of—you're in this manic mode—you're probably being very irrational. But, whenever it becomes this persistent thing—this ongoing thing—you have to learn how to deal.
Christine: It's like someone—there's like a representative—there's a representative that a parent can send out who's the strongest, most articulate advocate that I have not—I don't have that in me, yet. I have not—but it's wild to watch somebody when I can imagine I would only be crying, sobbing, wetting my pants—like, where—just be completely composed and receiving information and, you know, trying to do—it's a crazy thing to let a documentary crew into your house to watch you experience, live. And these families, I think, are doing a lot more work for other people, too, than they probably realize.
Bobby: Oh, yeah. And that columnist, too—and I had ready the column before but there's something about—there are certain things that lend themselves to this sort of visualization—this actual documentary angle, because I think those personalities and those interactions between the parents and the doctors and the parents and the patients and just the patients themselves—can't really be shown to their fullest extent just in the written word. You need to see these people interact with each other and you need to actually see their demeanor to be as impressed as I was by pretty much each and every one of them in all these episodes.
Christine: And you need to feel the way that conversation feels in a room.
Bobby: I think Dr. Lisa Sanders is so wonderful. She's just—the platonic ideal of the pragmatic doctor that you yearn for when you go to maybe, like, an urgent care when you don't really know what you're going to get, you know? You're like, please give me Dr. Lisa Sanders.
Christine: She sounds like an expert, she's calm, she has at least one funky piece of jewelry at all times and not funky like throwback funky—cutting edge. She's at the boutiques. She is finding that chunky necklace. I also love that they make New Haven look so nice. It's always cutting to her house in New Haven with beautiful yellow leaves blowing past the camera and her colonial home—
Bobby: Her kitchen.
Christine: . . . with like a red door, yeah—
Bobby: That beautiful kitchen. I was, like, oh you have updated your kitchen—
Christine: Futuristic kitchen.
Bobby: . . . Dr. Lisa Sanders.
Christine: Yes. I'm like, wow, they really are selling Connecticut here in a way that I'm not sure it fully deserves.
Bobby: In the way that I just explained, that I tend to avoid stories or shows or media art about chronic illness—is there a category of television/film just general media—that you have a strict, absolutely not, I won't read or watch that, policy?
Christine: Oh, there has to be. There's so many types of masculinity that I just absolutely don't care about, like, a Marvel movie. I don't even want to have the conversation about you, with you, about why I don't watch it. Like, I think—
Bobby: A Marvel movie.
Christine: . . . anything with punching. If there's a punching sound effect in it, I won't like it. Like, a car chase—I won't like it. So, anything that Tom Cruise is in, anything that, like, Will Smith is in—
Bobby: All I was thinking was Mission Impossible.
Christine: I just really—
Bobby: I was, like, I'm with you honey. I don't want anything to do with Marvel.
Christine: And then you were like, wait—
Bobby: . . . but then you mentioned punching. I was like, uh-oh.
Christine: There's something about—I can handle—it's not like an anti-violence stance or an anti-spies stance or whatever—it's more like, if that is going to replace dialogue, the plot better be so fuego and it never is, and it never is. It's always like "someone stole something" like, okay, great. This is not art. This is a photo shoot.
Bobby: In the most recent three Mission Impossibles, they stole nukes. Enormous implications for stolen nukes. A funny thing about Mission Impossible is that they realized the highest stakes they could ever possible have are nukes.
Christine: And, so, they're just sticking with it.
Bobby: They just only do nukes now, which is kind of satisfying.
Christine: Is it the same nukes or is it new nukes?
Bobby: It's the same—the last three have been the same people, generally, involved.
Christine: Okay.
Bobby: But it's not the same nukes. It's the same, like, sort of nebulous group of super villains.
Christine: Got you. But, they're making new product all the time?
Bobby: Yeah, or finding, or just purchasing new product, yeah.
Christine: Got you.
Bobby: But, they realize that they can't do more than nukes.
Christine: The people know what they're scared of and it's nukes.
Bobby: So, the movies I like watching on planes, are the ones you would prefer to avoid, always, okay. Okay.
Christine: Yes, I think, on a plane, I'm more apt to pick maybe, like, the children's hit that won an Oscar that year or, like, a romcom I've already watched. Or, like, T.V. There's not really a tier of my resting brain where I'm like, okay now I deserve Mission Impossible. I just take it off the menu.
Bobby: You're like Moana, again.
Christine: Yeah, I'm like, Moana for the 17th time, I love that.
Bobby: But before we end that, I want you to sell—pitch Diagnosis to our listeners. Convince them to watch it. Because I think it is a hard sell, it's a tough sell. It's a very tough sell for me.
Christine: It's hard to describe what's valuable about it, but if you kind of like heartwrenchy, political narrative drama, you're going to like this because it's documenting what's flawed with our medical system, what's wrong with the way that our culture kind of supports and handles illness to begin with. And tackles stuff that you're not going to necessarily see in unscripted programming in a way that's actually very digestible and not a downer. You actually feel optimistic that things can be solved and that people are good and that people can help each other. And, it's nice.
Bobby: Yeah, it's such a warmer and more comforting show than I ever expected it to be, or was capable of being, you know? Like, the fact that a show like this can leave you feeling good—
Christine: Right.
Bobby: . . . is really shocking to me.
Christine: It's like she kind of drops into people's disorganized medical situations and Maria Kondos them for them, but in ways that are very meaningful. I guess Maria Kondo was very meaningful to her clients, too.
Bobby: And I think she has really ruined me for other doctors. When I go to my physical, soon, I'm just going to be upset that it's not Dr. Lisa Sanders.
Christine: You're going to be, like, I don't know that Lisa Sanders would have said that, but I guess it's fine.
Bobby: I'm going to just wander the streets of New Haven holding a printout of the façade of her house, just looking for it until I find it and just ring the bell.
Christine: That's a good idea.
Bobby: Knowing her like I do, I think she'll accept.
Christine: She'll answer.
Bobby: Just come on it.
Christine: She has a teapot going.
Bobby: Thank you for talking to us all about Diagnosis, Christine. It was a great conversation. It was great to have you.
Christine: Thanks for having me.
Bobby: I'll see you on slack.
Christine: I'll see you on slack, too. Bye everybody.
Bobby: You can all watch Diagnosis right now on Netflix. All episodes are now streaming. See you next week.
[End of audio]