Our Family Beginnings

Bitching about Grey’s is like shooting fish in a barrel, it’s not even challenging anymore.  I am like the many fans who watch just out of habit.  I don’t even expect to have the show return to it’s glory days at this point, it’s not going to.  But, I still love the characters, and let’s face it, Patrick Dempsey is just a good looking man.  His voiceover on the Derek-centric episode? I wouldn’t mind hearing that all the time.  Now I’m zoning thinking about his whispery/gravely/sexy voice, and that’s not what I was gonna write about.

There was a great article that I 99% agreed with online this week, and they sum up my overall annoyance of the show. You can read it here: http://www.fancast.com/blogs/greys-anatomy/diagnosing-greys-anatomys-ailing-symptoms/. If you like the show, I highly recommend that you read it.

First, what I liked, because it won’t take long.

• Bailey and Alex’s interaction. “Take of your shirt.” “No way! You take of your shirt!”. Plus Derek and Mark randomly mocking him, though medically dumb since they’d know what was going on, had me laughing.
• The kid that played Arizona’s patient, who my friend has dubed Baby Burke. He even pushed on his glasses like Burke did.  You knew from the get go that there was no chance he’d live, but he was a cute little patient.
• Alex being good at Peds. We saw this when Addison was on the show, and he would take care of the babies that she delivered on the “vagina squad”, so I’m happy that they revisited this.
• Derek ignoring the fact that the Chief is ignoring him. He’s hot, the smug smirk of his makes me swoon.
• Meredith smiling (I like happy Meredith!) and Cristina’s annoyance with her happy demeanor. They are a great yin and yang…pun intended.
• The small nugget of Mer/Der. Ellen Pompeo had just given birth, so I am happy to have had anything at all.
• Cristina saying “Bitches” and later “Hey little pusher girl…”. I lol’d.
• The way that Arizona delivered her “I love you.” After some extreme emotions, it was said with subtlety and an intention that actually sold the emotion to me.
• A greatly reduced Lexie presence.

Now, for those of you brave enough to read on, what annoyed the living fuck out of me:

• I get that health insurance is fucked up in this country, and that cancer treatment is expensive. However, I don’t buy that a) the hospital’s health plan wouldn’t have covered more of Izzie’s treatment and b) given that she gave the hospital $8.5 million dollars for the clinic, they would have stuck her with a $200k bill.
• Arizona’s speech about magic. These are doctors, many of them presumable semi-competent. Cristina making faces at her summed up my feeling on it.
• Arizona repeating “tell me I’m great, tell me how great I am”. Mr. Badger was so annoyed that he yelled out “YOU CAN’T PRAY AWAY THE GAY” five times to underscore how that, and everything else that gets repeated on this show, is grating. Ditto for Hot-eyes/Jackson talking to Cristina about how hot her surgery was. I only give it a pass because he was drunk, and people get slurry-repetitive when drunk.
• The new characters. Evilpixie/Reed needs to die, though clearly she wants to get on Karev, and I’m sure there will be yet another *yawn* relationship triangle with Evilpixie, Alex, and Izzie.
• The fact that Arizona got a focused episode, and we still haven’t had one about Alex.
• Owen Hunt. Yeah, I don’t get what they’re doing with his character. I get how he’s treating Cristina even less.  Didn’t he heart on her because of how badass she is? And now it annoys him?  Presumably it’s because everyone is getting fired, and he doesn’t want her to get fired.  They kinda said that, but did in a piss poor way that makes me think that Cris needs someone more manly.
• Arizona being flustered with the family.  If you put Addison in the same scene, she may be just as flustered, but she wouldn’t have done it in front of the family.
• The Chief’s insistence that Arizona perform a surgery as risky as Derek’s the week before, simply because there was a lot of money attached to it.  I get it, the Chief’s a money-hungry, fearful of his job, douchebag. It’s getting dragged out, and not in a compelling way, in an obvious way that makes me want to scream “GET ON WITH IT ALREADY”. That being said, I am actually more scared of Derek getting chief, because I don’t see the writers being able to handle it without just making it so that he gets super involved with work, and abandons Mer like he did to Addison as a storyline.  I can see it a mile away.
• Mark and Lexie.  While I thought it was supercute when he was impressed with her photographic memory last season, they have made Lexie so freaking juvenile that I can’t get why they are so in love. Saint Lexie could, again, have been an interesting character, but they have made her so one dimensional that she is simply a cringeworthy annoyance.
• Cristina and Callie’s apartment as the new Mer’s house.  Now, trust me, I am happy that the not-married-no-matter-what-Shonda-says Meredith and Derek have the house to themselves. But if I wanted to watch Friends, I’d turn on TBS.  Go to Joe’s, people, it’s right across the street. Maybe it’s because aside from Cristina, I don’t give a shit about most of those people hanging out together.

I’m sure there was more, but it was all so useless.  Why complain? Why not just stop watching, you ask? Because that’s how deep the show hooked me in season 2.  Like a friend who is spiraling out of control, I can’t abandon it, I can only sit helplessly by and watch.  Then again, Patrick and Ellen’s contracts are up at the end of next season. I watched maybe 2-3 episodes of er after Greene died, and I don’t expect to keep watching Grey’s if and when they go.

One last annoyance, for now, if I haven’t already beaten this dead horse, is the post-it.  For those of you (Leah) who missed out, Derek and Meredith never got around to getting to City Hall last year, and so they wrote their vows on a post-it, framed it over their bed, and now consider themselves husband and wife.

Before I get to bitching, I have said since the show aired, that they are going to make this into something bigger.  Something will happen because Mer/Der are acting married without actually being legally married. I still stand by that. It may not happen this season, but I really feel like that was the point of not making it legal – that there will be legal ramifications.

But, assuming they aren’t going down that road, I am insulted with the concept of the post it wedding.  Sure, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell aren’t married, but they don’t claim to be. I’d also bet that they have legal wills drawn up for anything they need to deal with the other in some sort of medical emergency.

Meredith and Derek claiming to be married, is a slap in the face to anyone fighting for legal marriage in this country.  There are couples who are dying apart from one another because the law says that they have no business being in the same room if one is sick.  I get it, it’s a tv show, but come on.  It’s just insulting and out of character for the characters that were written.

As a side note, the guys who wrote “The Hangover” are writing a new movie that Patrick Dempsey will star in. While the plot sounds dumb, I could have said the same for “The Hangover” on paper alone, and that movie was awesome.