"The game: they say a person either has what it takes to play or they don't. My mother was one of the greats. Me, on the other hand...I'm kind of screwed." - Ellen Pompeo as Dr. Meredith Grey
Grey's Anatomy: Season One DVD Review
By Jude Clement
Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) should be having the best day of her life. After graduating from Dartmouth, she has moved back to her hometown of Seattle where today was her first day as a surgical intern at Seattle Grace Hospital. She even made several diagnoses that helped to save the lives of patients. Not bad for a first day. Unfortunately, the one person she would like to share this with - her mother Ellis Grey (Kate Burton), a brilliant surgeon who once worked at Seattle Grace - doesn't even recognize her. Ellis Grey has Alzheimer's and is now confined to a nursing home. Oh, Meredith also discovered that last night's one night stand was actually her new boss, Dr. Derek Shepherd (Once and Again's Patrick Dempsey). Yep - it's one of those days.
Meredith's fellow interns have problems of their own. Christina Yang (Arli$$' Sandra Oh) has the bedside manner of a grumpy lion, stiffening like a board when patients try to physically express their gratitude and berating other patients for what she considers their bad decisions concerning their health. Isobel "Izzie" Stevens (Roswell's Katherine Heigl) grew up in a trailer park and is ashamed of her lingerie model past, but proud of the fact that she put herself through med school without acquiring any debt. George O'Malley (T.R. Knight) has talent but lacks self confidence, especially after a botched appendectomy leads the hospital staff to nickname him 007 (for "license to kill"). Alex Karev (Justin Chambers) is a crude lout who failed to leave his frat boy attitude behind after graduation. The interns' immediate supervisor is Dr. Miranda Bailey (Bob Patterson's Chandra Wilson) whose gruff personality has earned her the nickname The Nazi.
Bailey's supervisor is Dr. Shepherd. Like Meredith, he's relatively new to the hospital having moved from New York City six weeks earlier. He claims that he made the move because Richard Webber (James Pickens, Jr.), the hospital's chief of surgery, asked for his help, but this reason sounds a little suspect. His hiring is also an affront to Dr. Preston Burke (Isaiah Washington), a five year veteran of the hospital who fears that Shepherd is being groomed to take over for the soon-to-retire Chief, a job Burke feels is rightfully his.
In addition to learning to practice her profession on real patients, dealing with her ever deteriorating mother, and putting up with George and Izzie (she takes them on as roommates so that she can keep her mother's house), Meredith has a big decision to make: how to handle her non-relationship with Dr. McDreamy (as Christina names him). Yes, she is attracted to Shepherd, but she can't have an affair with her boss. Not only are there rules against it, if she dated McDreamy then every time she received a plum assignment both she and her coworkers would wonder if it was based on merit or on the fact that she's sleeping with the boss.
Grey's Anatomy is a pleasant mix of Scrubs and traditional hospital shows like ER and St. Elsewhere. If Scrubs features 75% comedy and 25% drama, Grey's Anatomy flip flops the percentages, putting the emphasis on the dramatic while maintaining a strong sense of humor. The surgical scenes aren't quite as graphic as those in ER but were obviously influenced by the NBC hit. From St. Elsewhere, the series borrows the storytelling technique of focusing on the lives of the doctors rather than simply on medical issues.
Like St. Elsewhere, the emphasis here is often on cases that are, to say the least, unusual. A man comes in with seven nails embedded in his skull after an accident involving a nail gun. A dying teen refuses the heart transplant that will save her life because receiving a pig's heart goes against her Orthodox Jewish beliefs. A woman comes in with a 60 pound tumor in her abdomen. A college student comes close to death after receiving a cheap-o Mexican stomach staple.
Several of the episodes focus directly or indirectly on mother issues. We've seen the parent-with-Alzheimer's plotline before, but thanks to deft writing and strong acting by both Pompeo and Burton, it seems fresh here. Meredith's grief over not being able to share her accomplishments with her mother is palpable. Izzie hasn't spoken to her mother in years. The college student who had her stomach stapled did so because her overbearing mother thought she was too fat. The staff looks down on the mother of the woman with the tumor because she never insisted that her daughter see a doctor. Christina berates a female patient for choosing to carry her baby to term rather than aborting the fetus in order to save her own life. (Christina's position is complicated by her own choice to abort an unwanted pregnancy.) The series is unafraid to explore the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, and it will be interesting to see how they are resolved in future episodes.
While the series does bring creativity to a hoary TV genre, it does have a few flaws. The patients and their illness are used to teach the interns professional and life lessons. The problem is that they learn the same basic lessons too often. Christina is involved in too many plotlines that hammer away at her emotional distance and her lack of bedside manner. Meredith's woes with her mother are conveniently mirrored in some to the cases she is faced with. Meredith is also too smart. She seems to know the answer to every problem in the hospital. She doesn't come across as brilliant so much as smug.
Several familiar faces pop up in season one. These include Keith David (The Job), Callum Blue (Dead Like Me), Anna Maria Horsford (Amen), Kathryn Joosten (Desperate Housewives), Bruce Weitz (Hill Street Blues), Ever Carradine (Once and Again), Josh Stamberg (Courting Alex), and Sarah Hagan (Freaks and Geeks).
The nine episodes that make up Grey's Anatomy: Season One are divided onto two discs. The discs are housed in a standard-sized keepcase with an interior swinging arm to hold the second disc. The keepcase employs theft protection tabs that must be opened before the case can be opened. The keepcase also slides into a cardboard sleeve, making this release more secure than Fort Knox. An insert included inside the DVD case includes brief synopses of the series' episodes.
The menus are simple and functional. Viewers can play all of a disc's episodes or choose an individual one. The episodes are divided into chapters, but there are no scene selection menus.
