Medical TV Show Review: Grey’s Anatomy
Medical TV Show Review: Grey's Anatomy
Grey’s Anatomy: The midseason replacement medical drama of 2005 that changed Shonda Rimes life and TV as we know it.
I was a medical student when I started watching this. I am a double-boarded attending now. the show is almost old enough to vote!
Also weird: I sutured someone’s head back together in medical school on a drunk college kid as a loud Grey’s sex scene played in the background. SO AWKWARD. SERIOUSLY!
Date/Seasons: 2005-current, 17 seasons, 363 episodes
Main cast: Ellen Pompeo, Sandra Oh, Kathleen Heigel, Justin Chambers
Premise: Surgical interns compete against each other to get ahead at a Seattle teaching hospital. Long running due to popularity of its dwindling original cast and behind-the-scenes-drama.
Pros: The first six to ten season are really good. The original cast has a lot of chemistry, and pretty good longevity through season ten of the show. The anchoring duo was the love and lives of Dr. Meredith Grey and Dr. Cristina Yang and Meredith’s ongoing relationship with Dr. Derek Shepard.
Cons: The cast slowly departs due to drama or jobs. Shonda Rimes, started backing away in 2011 when she moved onto other projects – hence why some people consider the sixth season the pinnacle or the tenth season when Sandra Oh left. The current showrunner Krista Vernoff is awful, and it’s a slog to watch with ponderous, overly dramatic storylines made worse by linking to Station 19. The characters have become shallow caricatures of themselves and veer from one unrealistic scenario to the other.
Overall Impression: Spend 2 months binge watching the first ten seasons and call it a day. Sandra Oh is doing some good work at Killing Eve. Read some more realistic medical drama books. No ghost sex or endless cheating promised.
[…] Cons: The drama between characters is really, really, really slow moving. You may be waiting two or three seasons for your favorite characters to hold hands, let alone kiss. Also, once they kiss, one of them has better than average odds of being brutally murdered or burning to death. They do let the deaths cast long shadows unlike Shonda Rimes shows . . . […]
[…] 19: Soap opera that sort of takes place with firefighters currently on ABC trying to keep the Grey’s Anatomy franchise alive after its upcoming ability to vote in the next presidential election. ABC’s […]