Watching Grey’s Anatomy is an artificial emotional experience, but it is therapeutic.
'Grey’s Anatomy' Is My Weirdest Pandemic Coping Mechanism
If you recently got into pasta making or tie-dying or started a lucrative side-hustle, bless your heart! I can’t relate. Nothing about the constant emergency conditions of the last year inspired me to pick up a hobby. But even in my lowest of expectations for myself, I did not imagine plunging into a marathon rewatch of Grey’s Anatomy.
Rewatching Grey’s Anatomy is an activity with equally zero potential for self-improvement or relaxation. It’s the TV-watching equivalent of texting four of your exes, “Hey...what happened between us?” and then just observing as your wellbeing collapses around you. Grey’s isn’t prestige TV, and it is not relaxing. It’s a woke medical soap opera that has been emotionally terrorizing people since I was in fourth grade.
https://twitter.com/baconnandmeggs/status/1373416039057330185
https://twitter.com/mrdrscrubcaps/status/1371829594916061194
https://twitter.com/sadboimeg/status/1352074467028193281
https://twitter.com/The_GreyMethod/status/1370899318681399298
And yet here I am in 2021, humming along to “Chasing Cars” and raining tears on my laptop as dozens, no, hundreds of characters go into v-fib. Watching the entire series Grey’s Anatomy would take 363 hours. That’s long enough for a commercial pilot to circle the world seven times, plus an hour-long break to think about why Shonda Rhimes named the protagonist of her show “Grey” and her hospital “Grace.” And it’s how I’ve chosen to spend my time. I’m not alone—now in its 17th season, Grey’s Anatomy is the highest-rated show on ABC. This season it’s had higher ratings in the 18-49 demographic than shows with similar appeal, like This is Us, Mom, and Young Sheldon.
What is it about going through real-life trauma that makes us want to watch fictional trauma? The premise of Grey’s Anatomy is, essentially: bear witness as beautiful people are emotionally and physically mauled, and then expire slowly, embalmed by their best friends’ tears. The show’s casualties and calamities have become almost comic over the years, even to hardcore fans—the bomb scare priming us for the ferry crash, which was merely an appetizer for the shooting, which raised the stakes when the plane went down, all of it sprinkled with miscarriages and disease, cancers and car wrecks.
AdvertisementIt’s like the reverse of that activity where kids build parachutes for eggs and try to drop them off a building without breaking them—the beloved characters are the eggs and the show’s goal is to break them as violently as possible. I stopped watching Grey’s long ago because it made me feel too much and too little at the same time. I was wary of the way it neatly packages and sells sanitized suffering. Now, its pristine, single-serve doses of grief feel almost like a relief.
Like the shiny-haired staff of Seattle Grace hospital, we have gotten used to living under laughably intolerable conditions. We are suspended in a state of emergency, primed for the reality of loss. We have no real social infrastructure, government support, or workplace support to help us process our emotions. There is an understanding that the people around us are already overburdened and exhausted. We are often simply too overwhelmed to take turns doing emotional labor for each other.
https://twitter.com/merderqv/status/1374401146987552768
https://twitter.com/Thomas_C_Mia/status/1373400618983944195
Watching Grey’s Anatomy is an artificial emotional experience, but it feels therapeutic. The show runs on a currency of crying. It isolates anguish and grief and allows us to practice them, just like sports fandom does for so many people. The same way a roller coaster turns near-death into a ride, Grey’s Anatomy turns grief and tragedy into entertainment. It brings us close to the thing we fear, it gives us a taste of catharsis with a sense of control—it’s always a ride we can get off.
AdvertisementWhat frightens me about shows and movies like Grey’s is that when we congratulate ourselves on feeling intensely human after watching them, we are practicing feeling empathy only for people who are very beautiful, and very remote. We feel like we’re bleeding for them, but we don’t have to risk actually knowing them, or owing them anything.
At the same time, the show’s strength is showing that all loss is tragic—the screaming anguish of a mother losing her baby, the abject horror of a teenager sliding out of consciousness, the deep unfairness of an older person dying alone and in pain. Grey’s Anatomy is helping so many of us cope, I think, because it never denies the reality of pain. Most of the time, most people pretend that death is far away. Grey’s Anatomy has dedicated 17 years to reminding us that loss is present and fearsome, and unfathomable. It never asks us to “look on the bright side” or “find the silver lining” or tells us that our loved ones who have passed “wouldn't want us to cry.” It’s dark and twisty, and so are we.
Life is short, but Grey’s Anatomy is very, very long. And if I lay here, if I just lay here, I might just watch it all—and that's okay with me.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Jenny Singer
