Why I hate Grey's Anatomy

So much for a witty post title. Last week, I posted that I really thought I was going to give up Grey's Anatomy. But I have a hard time dropping a show in the middle of its life, so I decided to tune in for the season premiere to see if it was more tolerable than I remembered.

It wasn't. There were two storylines in the episode that absolutely drove me nuts.

First, Lexy Grey. Much like essentially every other doctor at Seattle Grace, she has no concept of how to be appropriate. Near the beginning of the episode we learn there is a huge car pile up, and that the victims are being brought to the hospital. These victims, of course, are the medical stories we will follow throughout the rest of the episode. As the victims come rolling in, Meredith is directing her interns and trying to figure out what to do next. And Lexy walks up and tells Meredith her first name. At which point Meredith tells her to get moving, clearly busy trying to...I don't know, save a life or two. But Lexy then chooses that moment to tell Meredith she is her sister. Yeah, totally inappropriate. To further showcase her bad timing, she then interrupts Meredith as she is having a conversation with Derek. Now at this point, Lexy has no idea Meredith and Derek are dating. But she doesn't have a problem walking up to two superior doctors (one an attending and the other a resident) and interrupting their conversation about a patient to apologize to Meredith for having bad timing earlier.

I wasn't surprised, since this is exactly the type of inappropriate behavior Meredith and Izzy engaged in for the first three seasons of the show. Actually, Meredith showcased another example during the first scene of the episode, when she showed the interns the cots they can sleep in and awkardly started babbling about how they shouldn't sleep with each other and certainly not with attendings. Do Shonda Rhimes and the writers think we will find this charming? Amusing? Because certainly we aren't expected to find it realistic, right?

The second storyline that had me gritting my teeth was that of Miranda Bailey. At the end of last season, Bailey didn't make Chief Resident even though she expected to; Callie was given the honor instead. So for the entire episode Bailey pouted like a child, belittling Callie and constantly saying "not my responsibility" whenever something went wrong. Most ridiculous, however, was her treatment of the Chief. This man is the Chief of Surgery at the hospital. He is respected and he is her boss. When he asked, more than once, to speak with her, she again pouted, telling him that she refused to talk with him about the Chief Resident position. This is her boss. But because he chose not to give her a position she wanted, she refuses to speak to him?! This is appropriate?

And after that behavior, why would the Chief have given Bailey the job? She didn't show any maturity or ability to communicate. She didn't show any ability to deal with personal criticism (and not getting the position is an inherent critique). Wouldn't a reasonable person have tried to figure out what qualities they lacked if they weren't given the position? And if they couldn't come up with any, wouldn't the reasonable response be to ask the Chief what she could have done differently? Not here. Apparently the reaction a competent individual should have to such an affront is to throw a quiet temper tantrum. One thing the show could have done to redeem itself, slightly, would have been for the Chief to call Bailey on her crap and tell her she was acting like a child and that although she was struggling (on her first day in the position), Callie wasn't acting like an overgrown brat. But no, we got a stupid trumped-up excuse that Bailey wasn't chosen because she was such a good surgeon. Gag.

So yeah, I still hate Grey's Anatomy.