YMMV / Quincy, M.E.

• Anvilicious: Particularly in the later seasons, nearly every episode took on a "cause" of some sort. Whether ghost surgery, advertising alcohol on TV, Drugs Are Bad, or fraternity hazing, there was always some cause-of-the-week that the show tried to hammer home its message about as unsubtly as possible. It didn't help that Quincy (and in one episode Asten) was not above delivering speeches about the subject.
• Complete Monster: Otto Rademacher, from season 7's "Stolen Tears", is a Nazi who was nicknamed "Der Teufel"—German for "The Devil"—because his treatment of the prisoners at Auschwitz was "worse than Hell". When two inmates named Isaac Kroviak and Hyam Sigerski tried to bribe Otto into sparing them and their families, Otto took the bribe, and then made Isaac and Hyam watch as he raped their wives before shooting them and every other member of the two men's families, who were among the thousands of Jews who Otto proudly claims to have murdered during The Holocaust. After the war ended, Otto fled to America, where he lived under the name Charlie Wilson. When Isaac recognizes him on the street one day, Otto steals a car owned by a Jewish man named Leopold Ackerman and uses it to run over Isaac. He then kills Ackerman and leaves him to take the fall for murdering Isaac before going after Hyam. After Hyam is saved from him, Otto agrees to testify on his behalf in a libel lawsuit that was filed against Hyam by a Holocaust denier named Cornelius Sumner. Otto is not remorseful or looking for a deal, he merely wants to brag about his crimes, and call out men like Sumner who have the audacity to question the existence of the Final Solution, which Otto proclaims was "the most courageous act in modern history."
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In "Let Me Light The Way", Quincy attempts to persuade the law-enforcement bureaucracy to support the nationwide use of rape kits to collect evidence of sexual assaults. The penny-pinching reluctance of an FBI official to fund Quincy's plans seems a lot harsher when one considers that, forty years later, thousands of the rape kits which Real Life MEs and activists like Quincy worked so hard to make available have been left sitting in the evidence room, collected but never analyzed, because it would cost money to test them.
  • Many of the issues that Quincy fought for in the 70s to 80s STILL persist in Real Life as of the 2020s. Drug companies shelving vital medications because there isn't enough profit? Plastic surgeons being allowed to practice with only superficial medical credentials and no real certifications to their skills? Companies cutting corners on safety to save a few bucks? Just to name a few...
  • The mind control and interrogation techniques seen in "Sweet Land of Liberty" were very real- the episode was based on the government's MK Ultra experiments.
  • "Main Man", in which Quincy fears a high-school football star may suffer the same congenital illness that caused his brother to die on the playing field and tries to convince him to sit out the Big Game, resonates a lot more strongly now that all participation in American football is known to pose a risk of brain injury.
• Never Live It Down: While the later seasons in general are better known because of their tendency towards preachiness, "Next Stop, Nowhere," an alarmist polemic about the evils of punk rock is in a class of its own, as it has become a camp classic among punk fans in the same vein as Reefer Madness. There's a reason why it became the Trope Namer for the trope The Quincy Punk, which describes stereotypical punks even within the subculture itself.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • In "Visitors In Paradise," Jamie Lee Curtis is in a dressing room when our hero unintentionally takes a peek (he's looking for someone else and doesn't know what room it is).
  • Jonathan Frakes appeared in two episodes well before his Star Trek: The Next Generation days.
• Seasonal Rot: Quite a few people find the later seasons less enjoyable because of their tendency towards preachiness.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The apartment fire effect in season 7's "Smoke Screen" is a terribly done overlay that doesn't look close to real.
  • For the most part, the makeup job used in "The Depth of Beauty" is incredibly well done. But they only applied it during the interview scene where the woman unmasks, meaning closeups of her eyes in other scenes lack the heavy scarring.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: An odd example with two characters that had one episode each- actor Gerald S. O'Loughlin played the role of Jake Cutter in season 7's "Smoke Screen", a city insurance and arson investigator brought in on the episode's arson case. In season 8's "A Loss for Words", O'Loughlin returns as Arnold Chatham, an arson investigator that has worked for the coroner's office for 20 years, who has hidden his illiteracy. Same actor, same role, different names, different specific departments.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Dr. Hiro from "Has Anyone Seen Quincy?" is the chief corner of Los Angeles, but only had one episode and is forgotten about afterward.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: "What Happened To Morris Perlmutter?", in which a gripping murder mystery is inexplicably sidelined in favour of a PSA about the title character's hearing for almost the entire episode. (Why yes, this is from the final season, how'd you guess?) To wit: A blood test against a possible suspect turns out negative until it's revealed the suspect is anemic and requires frequent blood transfusions, which caused the negative result... then nothing. That little discovery ends the murder story and it's not touched upon again.

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