The Rise and Fall of Grey's Anatomy -- A Season Eight Finale Post-Mortem

Well, the season eight finale of Grey’s Anatomy came and went exactly as I thought it would – Lexie Grey met her end in order to help pay for the renewed contracts of original series stars Patrick Dempsey, Ellen Pompeo, Chandra Wilson, Sandra Oh, James Picket Jr.,  and Justin Chambers. Thus, this once vibrant and iconic show is reduced to using the old “death of a main character” TV trope – again -- to gain publicity and ratings. My, how the mighty have fallen.

Once a must-see, talk about in the office the next morning type of show, Grey’s Anatomy has fallen from an astonishingly high 20 million+ viewers an episode in its initial seasons to an average of 11 million an episode. It also holds the distinction of being the single most DVR-ed American network show – which tellingly indicates it is no longer must-see TV for about half of its core audience anymore. So what brought this once-mighty TV titan down?

Grey’s Anatomy premiered as a mid-season show i.e. not considered good enough to start in the Fall. Despite this lack of confidence from ABC, the show took off with its dizzily romantic core storyline of the brilliant but fractured resident Meredith Grey pining for her handsome one-night stand who turned out to be her new boss at Seattle Grace hospital. 

The show put together a winning formula of gruesome but surprisingly realistic medical cases (the famous episode of the pole going between two people’s chest cavities meaning only one of them could live once it was removed was based on a real medical case), complicated and flawed but still very likeable characters to root for, workplace romantic couplings, lots of sexual tension, a great indie rock soundtrack, a multicultural allegedly color-blind cast (we'll get to that below) and Deepak Chopra/Oprah Winfrey-style life philosophy lite where the issues plaguing the patients of the week served as metaphors for the doctors’ own messed-up lives.

When the first season ended with the shocking but brilliant cliffhanger of Derek’s estranged wife Addison showing up to salvage their marriage, the audience was completely hooked. Despite the fact that she turned out to be a cheater, to the credit of the show, they also made Addison complex and very likeable which split the audience into Team Meredith and Team Addison long before Team Edward and Team Jacob were fashionable. 

The show broke out never to look back and became a critically acclaimed, highly rated pop culture mega-machine with two more brilliant seasons full of engrossing storylines symbolized by the much-beloved and ill -fated romance between resident Izzy Stevens and her patient Denny Duquette.

The next two seasons were critically lambasted and saw the beginnings of the show's audience drop off. Storylines became repetitive and the once intriguing romantic couplings became a ridiculous merry go round of seeing who would go to bed with who next even when some of those couplings clearly didn’t work at all due to lack of chemistry between the characters and the actors portraying them (i.e. O’Malley and anyone). 

These culminated in season five with the awful romantic coupling of Izzie and the freakin' ghost of Denny Duquette (whom she became engaged to just shortly before his death) and even included them having sex. Though this was plausibly medically explained as hallucinations brought on by brain cancer (which is documented as medically possible) and though it resulted in the dramatic storyline of Izzie’s potential death, critics and the audience were livid at the entire storyline which seemed to be a self-parody of the show. The show also displayed an alarming allergy to having happily married TV couples with divorces, affairs, and refusals to marry long past the point where a normal couple should be married being commonplace.

The storylines didn’t get any better throughout seasons six and seven, with the seventh season’s faux marriage between Derek and Meredith which they didn't formalize until they needed to for an adoption and the extremely ill-advised musical episode highlighting the show’s serious plotline problems. In an almost exact copy of the Chicago Hope musical episode (Remember that medical show and that special episode? Don't worry, nobody else does either), a main character falls ill, hallucinates while under medical care, and everyone starts singing. Unfortunately, the only actual cast members with singing ability were former stage musical actors Sara Ramirez and Chandra Wilson, a fact which oddly didn’t seem to raise any alarms amongst the producers. The stunt episode itself received extremely mixed reaction and the ratings were only slightly above what a normal episode got.

Another sign of Grey's Anatomy's crumbling storytelling have been the constant “death is coming” season cliffhangers, which the show never relied on in its acclaimed earlier seasons. At the end of season five, the producers ended up resorting to this tried-and-true trope and have used in three out of the last four season enders overall since then. O’Malley was hit by a bus (he died) and Izzie had cancer (she didn’t, though she should have). At the end of season six’s admittedly gripping finale with a bereaved husband going on a shooting rampage throughout the hospital, Karev and Sheppard were shot (neither died).  At the end of this season, Lexie died in a plane crash and a different kind of casualty occured when Teddy’s career at Seattle Grace was killed off.

In a revelation that is very indicative of the producers’ lack of social skills (which is typical for most TV producers), the actors killed off in the shootings in the seasons six finale revealed in interviews that they only found out they were out of a job at the script’s table reading as the producers didn’t even have the courtesy to inform them beforehand they were being let go. Actor Jesse Williams  found himself having to console his fellow actors after the table reading. Compare these to the simple yet emotionally wrenching ending of season one with Addison’s appearance at Seattle Grace confronting the woman sleeping with her husband (Meredith Grey, in case you forgot.)

It wasn’t all the producers’ fault that storylines got messed up. Backstage tensions also helped rock the show right off its tracks as the cracks started to show both in front of and behind the camera. After an ugly incident in which Isiah Washington got into a fight with Patrick Dempsey after getting angry at T.R. Knight for being late to set again (an absolute no-no in the profession of acting) and angrily calling him a gay slur, he was let go from the show at the end of the third season. It was during the aftermath that he implied that he had actually auditioned for the role of Derek Sheppard – Dr. McDreamy himself – but the network refused due to his being black as they didn’t want a black man as the cornerstone of their show’s main romance showing the limits of just how multicultural and color blind network TV was really willing to be. 

The network also famously forced creator and exec producer Shonda Rhimes to drop a gay storyline between two female characters that she was pushing hard for, causing great financial stress and emotional hardship for the actress who moved her entire family from NYC to take the role only to be abruptly let go, proving that there was more network interference in the show than people had previously realized.(Rhimes got hers back: there is now a sustaining plot line of a lesbian couple who've had a baby together, and are happily married.)

In addition, Katherine Heigl won a Best Supporting Actress and was becoming a movie star thanks to Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up and began throwing her weight around, infamously ending with her public declaration of removing herself from contention for Best Supporting Actress again due to a lack of quality storylines for her character which as you might imagine didn’t go over very well with anyone (even if there was a great deal of truth to it). She left the show as did T.R. Knight after complaining about a lack of storylines as well. And does anyone have any doubt that the reason that actresses Kim Raver and Chyler Leigh were let go was to help pay for the expensive renewed contracts of the main cast?

So what’s the problem with Grey’s Anatomy? The same medical ailment that eventually plagues every television show that has run on too long: more of the same old, same old tired storytelling.

Don’t go feeling too sorry for the patient yet, though. It still pulls in 11 million viewers a week and is one of the most profitable shows ever made for TV. Like Denny, O’Malley and Lexie, it’s still on life support and has a short while to live but it’s eventually going to die and it won’t be pretty when it does.