Like many, I have a love/eye-roll relationship with Grey’s Anatomy (GA). Shonda Rhimes’ television series about the lives (and loves) of a group of aspiring doctors, centering on one Meredith Grey, is one of the longest running dramas in broadcast history for a reason. Mostly, that reason is the writing. That’s not to say every song on this album is Thriller.
The early seasons of Meredith’s journey from intern to attending physician is some of the best writing you’ll see on television. Sadly, as the series progressed the writing became more stunts, games, and gags and less substance. Different rant, different time.
Obviously, there will be ten-and-fifteen-year-old spoilers. Read accordingly.
The thing that has remained consistent about the writing on Grey’s Anatomy is how the writers treat relationships, especially friendships. GA began with the idea of friendships sustaining people through the head-spinning highs as well as the soul-crushing lows. Meredith begins her internship by moving into a huge house she inherited from her world-renowned-surgeon mother and then offering her co-interns free rent and a short commute so she doesn’t have to live alone with memories of surviving a world-renowned surgeon as parent. They all become friends, posthaste—as will happen when someone saves someone else a ton of money and time.
But Meredith’s best friend, her “person” is fellow intern, Cristina Yang. Ironically, Cristina is the only one of Meredith’s circle of friends who doesn’t live with her. Over the course of five seasons the friendships evolve, dynamics shift, ties are strained, and ultimately, broken.
Sure, much of the writing I praise came in the form of salvage for Human Resources issues. As a result, I’m tempted to type “aside from egos and shitty behavior,” but really that is the main point, here. What the scripters constructed are exactly what everyone else does, we rewrite our lives in response to how our friendships change.
What GA does (did?) best is to take the trope of eternal best friend and rough it up with some back-biting reality. One of the reasons Cristina is Meredith’s best friend is because Cristina doesn’t need housing, a short commute, or a study buddy. Cristina, like Meredith, (unlike Stevens, O’Mally, and Karev) is brilliant. Like Meredith, she comes from money, attended the finest schools, and is ambitious. Unlike Meredith, Cristina is ruthlessly ambitious.
While they share visions of aging—unmarried—together, Cristina never pauses, never hesitates in pursuit of advancing her career. Sleep with a man old enough to be her grandfather to get additional attention? Sure. Ditch your friends after a deadly plane crash for an opportunity at the Mayo Clinic? All about it.
Yang only returns to Seattle after her mentor at Mayo dies. When she loses an award for surgical innovation because of her ties to the hospital, Christina says “goodbye” to Seattle Grace. The hospital, like many of her relationships was little more than a stepping stone to her ambition to head up her own program.
So, egos...
Am I singling out Yang? Is this end of personhood an anomaly? Hardly. Izzie Stevens nearly dies from a rare cancer, (after weeks of delusional psychosis). With fresh perspective and several damaged relationships, (mostly damaged by herself) Izzie leaves Seattle Grace with the declaration that it was, and I paraphrase, just a place she worked, not her home.
Years later, Alex Karev (the character with the arc of a straight edge) abandons a woman he professed undying love for, his career, and his “person” (Meredith) to flee Seattle Grace for a second chance with Izzie. Yes. Her. The woman that he told wasn’t good enough for him. And, yes, people do horrible crap like that to each other and then end up together, regularly. That’s why God gave us divorce attorneys.
It’s funny because it hurts
So, you ask, they’re all assholes, then? Not quite. George O’Malley is everyone’s confidant. Comforting, kind, and loving, George is like a puppy. Meredith, Izzie, Alex, and Cristina, kick him like one, too. George is the target of relentless ridicule—the audacity of not attending an Ivy League medical school—to the point of labeling him “007” or licensed to kill. When George follows Cristina’s advice to date a woman in his “league” Alex purposely woos said woman, passing on an STD. When George finds someone with some sense and marries her, his friends (who regarded him as a nuisance) wage a scorched-earth campaign to wreck his marriage. When George dies saving a pedestrian he never met, Meredith and Cristina attend his funeral only to laugh at the pedestrian for expressing more grief than they can be bothered to fake. For the successive twelve (12!) seasons, it’s like George never existed.
Just like in real life…
Of course, your results may vary. However, the friendships as written on GA ring true to my experience. The childhood best friend, more likely than not, is a friend of proximity. As your circle (and range) expands that friendship fades or expires.
High school BFFs, army buddies, and/or college ride-or-die—it doesn’t matter. One day you wake up and realize you have nothing in common with that bestie you endured the horrors of adolescence or worse, early adulthood with. Maybe their jokes are suddenly, painfully, unfunny. Maybe you just realized that you seem to always be the butt of the joke. Or, maybe, you’ve made them the butt of your jokes for years and you don’t want to be in that *cough*bullying*cough* dynamic, victim participation or not.
Mistakes are made, character is developed, bonds come unbound. My father spoke of the men he served with, the men who saved his life during warfare. He never saw them again after they left the service and often remarked he wouldn’t have known what to say to them if he did meet them again. They were no longer the same people.
The GA writers got it. People evolve, devolve, or otherwise change. People grow, often apart. In short, you are your own person.
The photo at the top is promotional material for Grey's Anatomy and belongs to the American Broadcasting Corporation. It is used for illustrative/educational purposes and covered by the Fair Use Act.
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