Grey’s Anatomy: Season 8 Premiere

Grey’s Anatomy is an annoying show. It’s about self-absorbed hot doctors and their sex lives. That is not the annoying part though. The annoying part is that it is incredibly well-written and sucks you right in. You start to care about these people and empathize with their problems, despite the fact that they don’t have any real problems. They’re freaking well-paid, hot doctors. The only serious problems they manage to garner are the ones that they bring on themselves through stupidity… and you’d think that these smarty-pants docs would have an IQ high enough to avoid any obvious “don’t do that” type actions, but they don’t. And so, when we should be suspending our suspension of disbelief and changing the channel—or at the very least, yelling at the TV when such an obvious “no-no” begins—we sit, riveted. It’s amazing. Annoyingly amazing.

Last year was a busy one for me, and I missed pretty much all of Season 7. So when I was assigned to review the Season 8 Premiere, I was sure I had been freed from the baffling mesmeristic-hold this show once had on me.

Of course, I was wrong.

Even though I had no idea what the recent happenings were with these characters and even though I was disoriented at first, the damned thing vacuumed me in again like a Shop-Vac. Why, I wondered, was Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) staying with Christina (Sandra Oh)? I thought she and Derek (Patrick Dempsey) were living together. Where did this baby come from that they seem to be splitting custody over? Why are they splitting custody? Weren’t they married? Christina’s pregnant? What the hell? Why isn’t Owen (Kevin McKidd) talking to her? These were just a few of the questions I had, and that was only the first five minutes.

And leave it to these superb writers to make a one in a million disaster completely relevant to the exact situations these doctors are going through in their personal lives. Freaking phenomenal. Here’s the scoop—there’s a massive sinkhole that opens in Seattle and though many people are injured and it’s really dangerous, we focus on two things. First, there is the husband and wife who were on the verge of splitting up after a very nasty argument in their car. After the sinkhole traps the wife’s leg under the car, he won’t leave her side and he’s the only one who can amputate it to save her life—this was completely tense and horrifying by the way. At the hospital, all is forgotten and they find their love again. This ties directly to Christina and Owen because they were in a nasty splitting argument as well, but after witnessing this, there is no way they can’t resolve their differences.

The second occurrence follows the father who wakes up after surgery worried for his son. It’s his only concern. Luckily, Derek was able to operate on the son’s spinal and neurological injuries, and it looks like he’ll fully recover. This ties directly to Derek and Meredith and the fact that they need to drop the petty crap and come together for the baby.

The above two examples, while intense and moving, are a mere fraction of the episode’s content. There are many other mini-plots that interweave between the main focuses, and these create…and I’m sorry for using such a hackneyed phrase, but it just fits so perfectly here…a rich tapestry of detail so that you feel like you know every single character on the show. I almost want to schedule a coffee with some of them to help them talk out their problems.

Also worked into the show is the change in ability and maturity that these doctors have gained from experience. To highlight this, new inept interns have arrived to juxtapose that experience. What’s interesting about this is that these new nearly useless interns are, ironically, close replicas of how Meredith Grey and the other residents used to be in the early seasons of the show. It’s pretty meta actually.

These differences between the interns, the residents, and the attendings make for drama all on their own. Throw in emotion, sex, and poignant moments of reflection stemming from close calls and life and death situations, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for something extremely watchable. It seems all you have to do is get out of the way and let it go. No wonder medical dramas have been a television staple ever since the caveman days of broadcast TV.

And Grey’s Anatomy, in my humble opinion, is still one of the best medical dramas to ever hit the small screen. Watch it. It’s good. And you don’t even need to see the earlier seasons to feel like you’re in the thick of it—but you’ll probably want to go back and watch them anyway once you get the taste.