Grey’s Anatomy 2x16/17 - “It’s the End of the World”/”As We Know It”
The *other* long running medical drama.
Hi and welcome back to another instalment of this feature where I take a look at an episode of a show I’ve never seen before. Last time it was ER, so it only felt right here to try its spiritual successor, Grey’s Anatomy.
It’s the mid-2000s and here is the state of play.
ABC (American Broadcasting Company) is a television network in a bad state of affairs. The channel started the 21st century with one huge success in the US version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but they overplayed their hand, airing it too frequently and driving it into the ground. As such, the channel has almost no hits. With corporate owners The Walt Disney Company also not looking in such great shape, everyone’s job is on the line. As the network works on developing a new slate of shows for the 2004-05 season, the pilots have to work. A miracle is needed to turn ABC around.
They will get one.
The channel’s management have some wacky ideas. ABC chairman Lloyd Braun is obsessed with his idea of a drama series predicated on “Cast Away meets Survivor”. That the first attempt at a script turned out horribly didn’t deter Braun, full of conviction in his idea, from greenlighting it to the most expensive pilot ever made, shot way out in Hawaii. He knew he was likely getting fired so put all his eggs in this basket. His Disney bosses were dumbfounded and dismissed him after the show had already begun shooting. Lost seemed all but certain to be a huge waste of money for the network.
It will be a smash hit.
Braun’s colleague, ABC president Susan Lyne, had her own pet project. Looking at the success of HBO’s Sex and the City, she felt that the broadcast networks were missing a trick with a slew of more male skewing procedural shows and there was money to be made in a more explicitly skewing female hourlong soapy drama. Her bosses weren’t necessarily opposed, but Desperate Housewives wasn’t exactly seen as a sure thing.
It would be an even bigger hit than Lost, redefining the channel’s entire brand for the next decade.
Of much lower priority was a different show. With ABC pushing for big shows unlike anything else on TV, another medical drama in the long shadow of ER didn’t seem like the answer. Though its writer seemed to be well liked within The Walt Disney Company, the scribe behind lesser sequel The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement and Britney Spears acting vehicle Crossroads didn’t immediately scream quality. Still, the pilot came in well enough to sneak Grey’s Anatomy onto the schedule, as a midseason replacement running just nine episodes.
It would become the most successful thing ABC has ever aired.
What made Grey’s Anatomy a hit, in my reading from the entire two episodes I’ve just watched, is that it understood both what made ER tick and what didn’t. The walk-and-talk direction, the gradual raising of tension, the sense that anything could happen in this hospital at any moment, are all present in Grey’s Anatomy. And particularly in this installment, since I assume every week doesn’t have plot stakes as high as a bomb inside a patient (it sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, but they really do sell it!). But what it also does is recognise this isn’t all that matters to the characters. While the consequences are somewhat more severe if you mess up, a hospital is the same as any other workplace. The doctors care about their jobs, yes, but their lives are framed and shaped by personal drama. It’s no secret that Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes is a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show with an elastic metaphor of “high school is hell”. What Rhimes seems to do here is take the idea that a hospital, or maybe any workplace where the same people see each other every day, feels like high school, which is hell. In that show, fantastical issues with life or death stakes were contrasted with the struggles of life. In this one, it’s the real world life or death stakes of a hospital that are pitted against the character drama.
Nowhere in the two parter is this more apparent than the terrific scene in which Meredith and the head of the bomb squad (guest star Kyle Chandler in a terrific turn. I can’t tell if he’s simply that trustworthy or it’s a residual Coach Taylor effect) have to move the patient and the hospital bed to another OR room. It’s an extremely severe situation, contrasted with Meredith’s desire, perhaps even need, to gossip with Cristina. As well as simply being a terrifically well written, performed, directed, edited scene, it underscores what feels like a mission statement for the show: life and death stakes aren’t the things that resonate most. Characters, relationships, frivolous “soapy” aspects often dismissed by those after “serious” material, can carry just as much weight.
And boy does Grey’s not have an issue with soapiness. A touch of soap is arguably the secret ingredient in so many great TV shows. When it comes to the development of serialised storytelling in the post-Sopranos era, the soap opera’s influence is often ignored completely, despite it pioneering the ongoing narrative on the small screen. Something as influential as Twin Peaks is very obviously indebted to the genre, but almost all future prestige shows hide it. Grey’s Anatomy, unafraid of what you think of it, wears the soapiness on its sleeve. In some ways, it was the perfect storm: the serialisation of the soap made it fit into a new TV world of long form storytelling, while keeping it rooted in a very classical, very traditional genre for the medium.
It might be these genre attachments that have framed the way not just Grey’s but the whole medical drama genre has been perceived. Its cousin, the cop show, remains comfort food yes but also became elevated to the prestige arena. From Hill Street Blues to NYPD Blue to The Shield to even True Detective, that kind of show is unquestionably seen as a serious proposition. Grey’s, the show that defined what a medical drama is for the post ER era, took the genre in a soapier, explicitly coded feminine direction. There can be no doubts of its influence in terms of increasing onscreen diversity, and Rhimes has become seen as a champion of this, but the text is still often viewed as lowbrow. Perhaps this is a fair reflection. I have, after all, only watched these episodes. But there are choices being made in what counts as “quality” in the medium, and even the very best soapy medical drama will often be excluded in this.
Even though the show is still airing, it feels like we’re living in a post-Grey’s world. Sandra Oh is having a second wave of career success driven by Killing Eve. Rhimes had a second buzz-y hit show with Scandal that has now come and gone, and she moves onto yet another phase of her career at Netflix. ABC’s brand as the home to soapy serialised narratives, pioneered by Grey’s and Desperate Housewives, has drifted away somewhat as linear TV audiences decline. Much to my irritation, this kind of show feels on the wane as everyone becomes obsessed with the wretched concept of being “cinematic” (read: a film stretched out to six hours) instead of a television series. But TV has never been about that. TV has always been about having a story engine that can keep going and going, which the soap opera and medical drama genres both give you. Everyone wants to be Breaking Bad, but perhaps more shows could learn from Grey’s Anatomy.