YMMV / Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman

• Anvilicious: Sexism is bad. Racism is bad.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Hank gets this treatment in-universe; he's the local pimp, he has a nasty temper, he's racist, he has no problem hitting women or animals, and he's pretty much just an all-around bastard, but he's pretty and every time he does something like keep a couple of drunk jerks from tormenting his illegitimate son, everyone goes, "Awwwww! He really is a good guy!"
  In a court case involving a woman defending herself against her abusive husband:

  Hank: He only hit her. Hell, I've done worse to my whores!
  • However, in an episode about antisemitism, Hank refuses to join the other townsfolk in trying to run out a Jewish businessman by pointing out that he was once saved and nursed back to health by a Jewish family, after traveling through the mountains one winter.
  • He's also seen literally throwing a rude customer out of his saloon, yelling, "NOBODY treats my girls like that!", implying that he's either mellowed or that the guy did something so despicable that even Hank was disgusted.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Rev. Mr. Rogers
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The series is downright memetic in Poland. Including having regular reruns, thirty years after the premiere.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The second episode "Epidemic" is difficult to watch in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not just because it deals with a killer infectious disease, but because the episode eerily recreates, beat for beat, the same scenarios that became prominent at the start of the pandemic, including distrust of medical science, distrust of medical doctors, use of dangerous and unregulated home remedies that ended in death, hoarding of food and supplies, general civil unrest, and racism (in this case, towards Native Americans).
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Mike and Sully, you say?
  • There is now a real Dr. Mike, highly popular celebrity doctor Mikhail Varshavski.
• Older Than They Think: The Walt Whitman episode was probably the earliest example of a family show (at least in the U.S.) tackling homosexuality and homophobia. It aired in 1997. In fact, it aired a few days before the "coming-out" episode of Ellen.
• Replacement Scrappy: Very narrowly avoided when Daniel returned to town to help Mike search for the missing Sully. The plan was to kill off Sully (Joe Lando wanted to leave the show to spend more time with his family) and have Daniel as Mike's new love interest. Fans responded by flooding producers with a vehement "Save Our Sully" campaign, forcing them to amend their decision. Although Daniel did stay on as the new male lead, Sully survived his wounds but had considerably reduced screen time in order to accommodate Joe Lando's wishes.
• Retroactive Recognition: In one episode, we are introduced to Hank's son Zach, played by a very young Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
  • Season 1 Episode 14 features a young Larisa Oleynik as one of Colleen's friends.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Dr.Quinn herself can fall into this in some episodes with her tendency to run roughshod over everybody else and go on personal crusades for things that are simply utopian or just plain impractical for the time and place she is living in. Not that she's wrong, mind you, but she seems to expect everyone else to be just as ahead-of-their-times as she is. That she is usually proven right by the show for no other reason that she's the protagonist does not help.

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