A Statement About Grey's and the Ginormous Shark

Grey's Anatomy, where have you gone?

I remember a time, not-so-long-ago, when I knew and loved (or loved to hate) every character on Grey's Anatomy.  I didn't know everything there was to know about all of them, or any of them, but I rooted for them, hoped for them, and tough-loved them through any number of traumas, family dramas, and patients.

So what the hell is going on?

Season 3 was dark and unrelenting; George's dad died, Meredith's mom died (and Meredith almost joined her), Izzy and George slept together, Alex fell in love with a mentally unstable patient, Bailey's marriage started to fall apart, the Chief and his wife ran hot and cold, Burke left Cristina at the altar, and Meredith and Derek "broke up."

We came back hopeful in Season 4, but it took a while to clean up the mess from the previous year, and then the disaster that was the Writer's Strike occurred.  Finally, finally, things got back in the swing when they returned.  Creator Shonda Rimes announced that she had watched all of the show's DVDs during the strike, and she was going to recapture the tone.  In the season finale, Meredith standing in the field surrounded by candles, making the big romantic gesture for Derek was exactly what we wanted; a sign that the old Grey's was back.

Oh, how very wrong we were.  The Izzy/Denny "thing"... there aren't really words.  It was good to hear late last week that there is a plan, that in theory there will be an explanation that will make sense to everyone.  But reflected in this is a larger problem.  A story that potentially bizarre and polarizing should not take eight episodes to wrap up.  And if it's going to take that long, the audience should not be kept in the dark to the point that they feel compelled to give up before the payoff.  Viewers have to have faith in the writers of any show, and when the writers go so completely off the deep end without even a hint of explanation, that trust is shaken.  Seriously.

Factor into this more new characters than anyone could possibly care about (that said, Kevin McKidd's Owen Hunt is yummy, and does indeed make a perfect addition to the cast... too bad he has to share his time with Melissa George's ridiculous Sadie...), and it seems that the old Grey's is irrevocably lost.  We still love our core characters, but they are not given enough attention for us to put up with their antics any longer.  And since it is virtually impossible to back-track once these characters have been added and these mistakes have been made, it brings us to a defining moment, and a sad conclusion: Grey's Anatomy has jumped the shark.