A Review of Grey's Anatomy's First Season That No One Asked For

When the first season of Grey’s Anatomy aired on ABC in 2005, network TV was having one of its last truly glorious seasons. Desperate Housewives and House M.D. had just premiered, and Lost was quickly becoming one of the most watched and discussed shows on the air. When ABC saw what they had on their hands with Grey’s Anatomy, a medical drama in the tradition of ER (which, by the way, hadn’t even ended yet), they were so confident that they paused Boston Legal for the Spring and replaced it with Grey’s mid-season. Their intuition about Grey’s certainly proved sage, even after cable shows got bigger and binging caused live-TV numbers to decline. Grey’s has now surpassed ER in number of seasons, and continues to bring in impressive ratings for ABC.

The story of Grey’s is and always will be much bigger than that nine-episode first season. If nothing else, the success of Grey’s launched Shonda Rhimes as a mega-showrunner, who is now confidently among the ranks of Chuck Lorre and Ryan Murphy. And Rhimes is responsible for putting more people of color in leading roles on her shows than perhaps the entire previous fifty years of ABC programming combined.

But Grey’s first season is sort of an oddity. It only has nine episodes, for starters, which is quite low even for a mid-season replacement. And having seen many seasons of this show, what struck me about this particular entry in the Grey's canon is that though I knew that it was different than ER despite cosmetic similarities, the pitch for this new medical drama based on these nine episodes appears to be: what if ER, but nothing really matters?

These nine episodes are so unwilling to hold any of its characters accountable for their decisions that by the end of the season I regarded it dramatically equivalent to a spy thriller where characters fall out of 20-story buildings onto cars and run off without complication. Grey’s is always full of healthy suspension of disbelief (and, lets face, probably a ton of medical inaccuracies), but this first season shamelessly renders all risky decisions void through coincidence or luck. It is established in the first episode that the internship program at Seattle Grace is prestigious, rigorous, and competitive. The competition between the interns is fun, and the stakes of the program feel real. However, the interns are often extremely reckless and insubordinate, and none of the interns treat the program with the same level of caution and respect that it ostensibly demands. Each of these doctors, who are all likely over the age of 25, take their careers as doctors and their place in the program as seriously as a thirteen year-old boy takes a PE basketball game: with equal parts competitiveness and recklessness.

In one episode, Meredith Grey, our titular protagonist, wanders up to the NICU in Seattle Grace to broodily stare at babies while she contemplates the fraught nature of her romance with her boss, Derek Shepherd, and notices a heart murmur in one of the babies. She ignores orders to not get involved (another, more senior, doctor is in charge of the baby’s care) and corners the baby’s parents to notify them. In every respect this is professionally problematic and almost definitely legally compromising. However, because of a subplot involving Burke’s desire to prove himself to the Chief, and a deus ex machina for Meredith in the form of the murmur being a serious problem after all, Meredith suffers no consequences and learns nothing.

In another episode, Izzie and Christina perform an illegal autopsy against the wishes of a patient’s family to confirm that his death was not their fault. Their decision to commit what is legally an assault on this man is almost played as a joke, and no repercussions materialize since they accidentally discover a genetic condition that could save the life of the man’s still-living daughter. In another, George accuses an anesthesiologist of drinking at work in front of an OR full of doctors and nurses, again only to be absolved of blame (and given a manly pat-on-the-back from Shepard) because the anesthesiologist was indeed drunk.

(An aside: I’m aware that this sort of thing happens all the time on TV, even on shows that take their characters very seriously. There’s an episode of ER where Carol Hathaway is buying a house and her notary comes to the hospital to get her to sign something only to have a heart attack before she can get to him. Hathaway literally uses his unconscious hand to sign the document minutes before he dies, and the whole situation is played for laughs? Even in later Grey’s there are lots of times where it feels like people aren’t sufficiently chided for reckless behavior for TV Reasons™. My point is that this first season is egregious in its having characters make horrible choices and either get away with them or be rewarded for them.)

The personal lives of these interns, specifically where Christina and Meredith are concerned, are equally lacking in consequences. In case you missed it, the big twist of the Grey’s pilot is this: Meredith Grey awakes on her living-room floor next to a handsome one-night-stand and rushes off to her first day as a surgical intern at Seattle Grace. When she gets to the hospital, she discovers that her aforementioned one-night-stand is also her new boss Dr. Derek Shepherd. Wrapped up in this premise itself is the show creating an out for Meredith. She did sleep with her boss, but it was before he was her boss, and the subsequent decision to continue dating him is more sympathetic. They make some drama out of the other interns and her immediate boss, Dr. Bailey, finding out about them, but by the end of the season, pretty much all parties have decided that Shepard doesn’t professionally favor Meredith, so any consequences concerning their relationship evaporate.

The only real consequences for Meredith and Derek arrive in the very final moments of Season One, and those moments are, admittedly, some of the most exciting in the show’s run. It is revealed to the audience and to Meredith that Derek is (and I hope you’re sitting down for this fifteen-years-old plot twist) married. Though this introduces one of my favorite Grey’s characters in the terrifying and charming form of Addison Shepherd, no part of this moment presents an opportunity for Derek or Meredith to reflect on their mutual decision to have carried out a inferior-superior relationship for nine episodes. In fact, the show goes on to excuse both Meredith (who didn’t know he was married) and Derek (who was cheated on by Addison, making his infidelity understandable) where everything complicated about this situation is concerned.

Christina Yang is having a parallel dalliance, though much more secretly, as she dates another attending, Preston Burke. The only real consequence of her relationship with Burke is an unplanned pregnancy which, in Season Two, works itself out like many unplanned pregnancies do on TV (and in movies—I’m looking at you, Singles) by exploiting the pregnancy for drama only to have it result in a miscairrage, leaving the show to carry on without a baby to deal with. But that’s a Season Two mistake, so I won't include that in my assessment of Season One. Season One has plenty of its own dramatic sins to atone for.

How few episodes they have to work with here may explain how strangely flimsy the drama is. It is my personal conviction that hardly any network dramas, whether ultimately great or not, start to really feel their oats before their fifteenth episode. Grey’s does really get it together in Season Two (which is, in contrast, a whopping 27-episodes long). But the first season remains an infuriating disappointment, mostly because the show insists on making every decision, professionally and personally, meaningless, even though the decisions these doctors make have such potential to be interesting.

In many cases, they’re bumping up against the ways in which the institution they work for prevents them from doing what they believe is right. They’re presented with the ways that institutions protect people to a fault, and with the ways that they sometimes make it obscenely difficult to make the right choice. However, in some cases these doctors are simply encountering situations where the selfish choice is the wrong choice, and if the show cared to make any choices mean something, the differences between those situations could be explored. Instead the show treats this hospital like a playground, and the doctors are allowed to play around with real stakes without ever getting hurt. I almost wish the finale of this first season ended like St. Elsewhere famously (or infamously) did, by zooming out on Seattle Grace inside a snowglobe and insinuating that the whole thing was a child’s fantasy of that hospital. That’s about as serious as Grey’s first season can claim to be.

For the record: the lackluster first season of Grey’s is completely forgiven by its second, which rules. Excuse me because I’m about to go watch Izzie cut Denny’s LVAD wire and also Meredith sticking her hand inside a body that has a live bomb in it while Kyle Chandler orders people who are definitely not going anywhere to leave the OR.