A lot, actually!

BY SCARLETT HARRIS

This may come as a surprise to some of you, but this week, the ABC medical drama Grey’s Anatomy began its 21st season, making it the longest-running primetime medical show in history. Perhaps you gave up on the show after the death of the much-beloved Dr. George O’Malley. Or after the death of Day One love interest, Dr. Derek Shepherd. Or maybe you had to take a long break after Dr. Izzie Stevens had a full-blown love affair with a literal ghost to reflect on what exactly you were watching.

The brainchild of screen queen Shonda Rhimes, Grey’s has, over the course of its 20-year run, gone from a steamy Thursday-night soap about interns having sex in various hospital closets to a groundbreaking, history-making medical drama that reflects the world we live in—for better and for worse.

Like most medical shows that came before (and, indeed, afterward), the central characters, a group of first-year interns, were majority white, with the exception of Sandra Oh, who played the now-iconic Dr. Cristina Yang. But what was revolutionary about the show, even in its infancy, was its portrayal of hospital leadership composed entirely of Black doctors, all of whom were given unique stories with the kind of depth and complexity normally reserved for young white ingenues. These characters—chief of surgery Dr. Richard Weber (James Pickens Jr.), chief of cardiothoracic surgery, Dr. Preston Burke (Isaiah Washington), and the interns’ direct manager, Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson)—were not shoved to the side as in most prime-time procedurals. They were refreshingly and, in true Shondaland fashion, essential in driving the larger story forward. 

Rhimes herself has bristled at the term “diversity,” arguing that her shows “normalize” seeing different kinds of identities on-screen. “[‘Diversity’] suggests something… other, as if it is something… special. Or rare. As if there is something unusual about telling stories involving women and people of color and LGBTQ characters on TV,” she said in 2015. “We changed the faces that you see on television. And it should not have taken so long for that to happen,” she added in an interview with Variety in 2021.

While much of the original cast has departed in the two decades since Grey’s Anatomy premiered, Rhimes’ ethos has remained a constant. Grey’s broke ground by hosting the longest-running lesbian character in Dr. Arizona Robbins (Jessica Capshaw) and, in recent years, has also upped its transgender representation with several trans and non-binary doctors, including Dr. Casey Parker (Alex Blue Davis) and Dr. Kai Bartley (E.R. Fightmaster).

The series has also managed to stand the test of time thanks to its outlandish medical cases and the plethora of patients who have cycled through Seattle Grace/Seattle Grace Mercy West/Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital (phew, I think I need an attractive doctor to check my vitals after writing that!). These cases have allowed the show to expose the gaps in care in the American medical health system. In one storyline, the show’s namesake, Dr. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), commits insurance fraud to provide lifesaving medical care to an uninsured cancer patient. And while the idea that a doctor would risk their career to save a life feels like a fantasy, Grey has long served as a sort of avatar for medical care providers nationwide who have gone above and beyond the call of duty.

Medical racism has also been a focal point in the series, specifically through the experiences of Dr. Bailey. In season four, she is forced to save the life of a white supremacist who refuses to be operated on by her or the other available doctor, Dr. Yang; then in season 14, shey had the too-common experience of having her pains dismissed by other medical professionals, only to later discover she was having a heart attack. Black women are more likely than any other group to report being discriminated against by healthcare professionals. “You’re either accused of being a hypochondriac, or you can get dismissed if it appears you know too much,” Bailey’s portrayer Wilson told People magazine at the time.

And then there’s abortion—a word that 20 years ago you were hard-pressed to find uttered on TV…except on Grey’s. In season one, Dr. Yang had an unplanned pregnancy. She’s in the middle of her first intern year, so it’s a no-brainer that she would terminate. But before she can go in for the procedure, she has a miscarriage. Yes, that was a bit of a cop-out—convenient miscarriage is a common pop culture trope—but Rhimes later said that she was pressured by the network to go the miscarriage route. Seven years later, Rhimes got the ultimate say: Dr. Yang did go on to have an abortion in season eight. 

Meanwhile, staunch reproductive-rights defender, Dr. Addison Montgomery (Kate Walsh), an OBGYN, served as a proxy for the show’s unapologetic stance on abortion. Her character is routinely shown performing abortions on her patients, including a second-term one (which a pro-life character calls a “partial birth abortion”) in her spin-off Private Practice in 2011. A more recent storyline sees Montgomery and Bailey running an abortion-mobile, driving to meet pregnant people whose reproductive rights have been severely limited post-Dobbs. 

Fine, Grey’s skeptics—I’ll admit that the show might occasionally veer into the fantastical (do doctors really have that much sex in on-call rooms or are they busy, you know, saving lives?). But it’s been bringing medical education, feminism and patient rights awareness to millions for 20 years. They’re allowed a little ghost lovin’ every now and then. 

 

 

 

 

 

Scarlett Harris is a culture critic, author of A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment, and editor of The Women Of Jenji Kohan.