Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Twenty years ago this week a group of surgical interns entered Seattle Grace Hospital and began their residency, little knowing that they were joining one of the most successful medical dramas in US television history. Grey’s Anatomy is not the longest-running one (that honour belongs to General Hospital, saving lives since 1963). But it is one of the biggest, with a historical weekly audience figure of 37.9mn viewers and a second life on Disney platforms where it has garnered more than 3.2bn hours streamed around the world. Grey’s is a trove of record-breaking numbers: at a fee of $20mn per year (as per her contract negotiation in 2018) Ellen Pompeo, who plays the show’s titular star Meredith Grey, is one of the highest-paid actors on the small screen. Callie Torres (played by Sara Ramírez) was among a vanguard of characters who played long-running LGBT+ roles. Shonda Rhimes, the show’s creator, head writer and executive producer, is now arguably one the most powerful showrunners in the industry. Season 21 started airing in September, with Pompeo making only fleeting appearances, as and when her schedule allows.For 19 years, I was largely unaware of Grey or her anatomy. The show premiered when I was pregnant with my daughter, and until last year I had only caught brief fragments of the drama, mostly featuring surgeons wearing masks, staring moonily at each other over operating tables, and doing a lot of acting with their eyes. Last autumn, however, with a Trump administration fast approaching and not much to relish in the world, I watched the pilot episode out of interest. I’ve barely left Seattle Grace (now known as Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, as I discover in what must be a major upcoming plot denouement) ever since. I’m still only halfway through it. Each season is about 10,000 episodes. But with its predictable formula of gruesome surgical procedure and sexual misadventure (I hope those linens in the communal dorm-room get laundered daily), it’s the palliative balm I need. Grey’s is real crime with more bodies but fewer murderers, and better hairMaybe it’s the tincture of nostalgia that keeps it top of the downloads. Having debuted before the advent of smartphones, and many other technological advances, Grey’s remains suspended in the prelapsarian period of the social media age. Its episodic story arcs are also one of its anaesthetising virtues: cases come in, cases are solved. Grey’s is real crime with more bodies but fewer murderers, and better hair.Over the course of some 200 episodes, I’ve gleaned slim surgical expertise. I do know that pulmonary embolisms are fairly common after surgery, and that any patient who coughs blood is probably on their way out. Anyone shot in, or approaching a vehicle, is almost certainly about to crash it. And if, like Izzie Stevens (played by Katherine Heigl), you start up a new relationship with your dead husband it’s a sure-fire sign to call an oncologist. Right now. Some of the plot lines are fantastic — the hospital shooter episodes! The Bomb! Others are fantastically awful: Heigl left Grey’s after the culmination of her hallucinogenic cancer episode, having withdrawn her name from Emmy award contention because she did not think she “was given the material . . . to warrant” one. Her story arc was an unfortunate digression, but other dramatic experiments have been quite fun: I loved the musical episode (sing it, Dr Owen Hunt) and the dream-sequence episode where Meredith Grey imagines, if for a few decisions, how differently her life might have turned out. At the heart of Grey’s, however, are the human struggles: the constant tug of sexual passion, endemic partner swapping, the battle of the surgeon’s ego with the id. Ambition is the throbbing pulse that really propels its characters, as reliable and mechanical as its cardiopulmonary bypass pumps. The surgeons are narcissistic and career-obsessed. Their extraordinary capacity for self-absorption is so overwhelming it never feels too wrenching when one of them gets bumped off. (Except for George O’Malley: a prince among the fools.) Besides, Rhimes’ inviolable power as showrunner means no star’s survival can be taken for granted. You never know when a run will be cut short by terminal illness, or the approach of an articulated truck. Good guys die and nasty doctors prosper. It’s what keeps us entertainedIs the cut-throat careerism of Grey’s an enlightening expression of the American condition? Is shagging senior staff and clawing over your peers in your quest for self-improvement how one really gets ahead? Or does it reflect the journey undertaken by Rhimes, who as a Black, female television executive has achieved the kind of career fulfilment of which Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) can only dream? Grey’s always swings the moral compass in a direction you least expect. Good guys die and nasty doctors prosper. It’s what keeps us entertained.As someone watching the show some years later, most things hold pretty firm. It’s a delight to see the diminutive Black general surgeon Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) consistently command the action, get the best lines and, incidentally, the best-looking men. Less delightful is the contagion of toxic masculinity which, now as then, keeps stinking up the scenes. Dr Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), the brilliant brain surgeon who plays Grey’s love interest, is a paradigm example — patronising, petty, selfish and very often cruel. A display of horny manhood, he toys with Grey’s affections, seduces and then spurns her, and blames her for every little thing that doesn’t go his way. I can’t believe “McDreamy” survived a full 11 seasons. I would have called “time of death” on him in that pilot episode.Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
