unrealistic

One of the reasons why I stopped reviewing Grey's Anatomy was because that it just plain tired me out. With so many characters and storylines to keep track of, it became very difficult to cover them all in my reviews. Another reason was that the increasingly soapy melodrama was wearing me down, a notion that was confirmed to me last week when George and Izzie drunkenly slept together at the end of the episode (Though it did give birth to Jonathan's clever use of the name "Gizzie").

But what also got to me about the show was its complete lack of medical realism. Yes, I know it's a TV show and it doesn't have to be hyper-real, but in the day and age of ER and reality medical shows on TLC, you need to come somewhat closer to medical realism than, say, Marcus Welby, M.D. did 35 years ago.

The last straw on this front was when I saw Meredith Grey at the beginning of last week's episode. Despite the fact that she was clinically dead for what seemed like hours, she came out of it not only OK, but prettier than ever!

I came across an interesting article while perusing Ken Levine's blog last night. He was quoted in an LA Times article that came out on Christmas day; the article discusses the fact that most comedy writers intensely dislike Studio 60 and think that the show is completely unrealistic.

But here's the interesting part: like the rest of us who have mixed feelings about the show, they're so fascinated by it that not only do they keep watching, it's also all they can talk about the next day. The comedy troupe Employee of the Month even does a weekly sketch show imagining what the sketches conceived for the show would be like. Because the sketches themselves weren't funny, they inserted jokes about the program as part of a "backstage" portion of the show. Other writers have cited the fact that the S60 writers are way too smart for their own good and never laugh at anything, which many writers think is the best part of the job. Ironically, many writers like 30 Rock, because the sketches are goofier and the depiction of a sketch show's writers' room is much closer to reality than it is on S60.