'Grey's,' 'Private Practice,' 'House' get healthy
ABC
Like our healthcare system in general, the big network medical dramas all entered the new season with leftover issues -- tone problems, narrative problems, personnel challenges and, of course, the fate of millions (viewers and dollars) hanging in the balance.
It would easy to blame last season's writers strike, but for the most part the issues were more organic. ABC's "Grey’s Anatomy had turned around a disastrous slump, using the season finale to put the moldy old Derek-Meredith question to rest, but even so it remained more soap than drama.
Its spinoff, " Private Practice had grown just plain silly, with main character Addison ( Kate Walsh) so dippy she was virtually unrecognizable as her former self and the Oceanside Wellness Group chock-full of doctors more determined to exploit every L.A. stereotype available than actually treat patients.
Over at Fox, "House" seemed to have traded Vicodin for helium -- the cast just kept getting bigger, the stories more scattered and uneven until you had a bunch of great actors forced to stand around watching Hugh Laurie hold the show together by the sheer force of his will. (He looked thin and extra haggard; we worried quite a bit.)
“ER” has it easy by comparison; it's only facing the age-old challenge of the final season. After 14 years and a cast of millions, the NBC show that changed televised medicine forever is ending. Will it go out with a bang or a whimper? And, more important, will George Clooney be involved?
One week into the season (or in the case of "House," three), and the prognosis is positive for everyone.
If there were an Emmy for problem solving, Shonda Rhimes should win it. The creator of both " Grey's Anatomy" and "Private Practice" has put her shows on similar rehabilitative treatments: a very welcome focus on the medical part of "medical drama."
In a brilliant one-two punch that revitalizes both narrative and tone, Seattle Grace and Oceanside Wellness each face external, financial crises that not only supersede all those sticky icky internal ones, they also may be a direct result of them.
This season opened with Seattle Grace having fallen from the third-best teaching hospital in America to the 12th, a pointed-enough reminder that a romantically distracted staff will take its toll that the Chief (James Pickens) finally grew a spine (go, Chief!). Love is still very much in the air at Seattle Grace, with the welcome addition of Kevin McKidd (late of "Rome" and "Journeyman") as a macho military doc, but there is a definite shift back to the patients and the pressures of the medical life.
