23 May Seriously Shonda?
Warning – includes spoilers for Season 8 Greys Anatomy TV drama.
Last week I planned a quiet night in with my person.
The plan was to sip on a glass (or a bottle) of full bodied red wine and enjoy a final date with the characters of our favourite TV series – Greys Anatomy.
I know… I know, rationally speaking it’s ridiculous to think that you have a relationship with fictitious characters, as we all know that TV characters bear absolutely no resemblance to real people, and that they are made up by some writer who lives thousands of miles away.
But, when you just can’t wait to find out what happens to the half-cast child of two surgeons and a hunk, when you hypothesize on why the Chief of Surgery slept with a stranger and broke his wife’s trust, when you get angry at McSteamy for not saying those three words to the woman he adores, you know you’re hooked, and that the emotional link doesn’t get more real.
In fact if the story line is any good, TV characters like McSteamy, McDreamy, Adisson and little Grey, get entrenched inside our very being. We identify with Yang, Sloan, and Bailey. We live with Meredith inside our heads, and Kepner inside our hearts. As silly as it sounds, we end up feeling as though we know them, know how they will react, know what will happen to them and what they’re thinking….of course, the truth is that we know jack….
The illusion of familiarity gets even worse when you meet one of the actors in real life and her demeanour turns out to be exactly and precisely like that of her character in the show. This is what happened when I met and interviewed Kate Walsh (Adisson) .
But I digress.
As I was saying…we had a date….
The wine had been poured and the final episode of Greys Anatomy’s Season 8 was on.
Five minutes into it, the wine had been nervously gulped down and I was desperately abusing the TV remote rewinding and replaying the same ten seconds that had just shocked the wits out of our skins.
What just happened?
Rewind, play, rewind, play, rewind, play, pause, breath, breath, play, pause.
Seriously?
Seriously?
How can they kill off the entire cast when the next series is already confirmed?
Seriously?
Forty minutes and gallons of tears later, the lights were on and I was staring at my person wide eyed hoping for some answers.
‘Tell me that one of them was dreaming’, I pleaded!
But when we both stared back at the box, sadly no revelations jumped off the blank screen at us.
Then, just as quickly as the tears had hit, I got angry. The idea of having to wait until September to find out what happens, maddened me.
So, true to my nature, I tweeted Shonda Rhimes – the pure genius behind the show – I intended to tell her off for devastating the story line, for screwing up my evening, and for killing off our hopes.
But it didn’t quite go this way because upon reading Shonda’s Twitter status, my anger swivelled into embarrassed laughter. It read- I make stuff up for a living. Remember, it’s not real, okay? Don’t tweet me your craziness.
The woman is hilarious, and her humour supersedes everything she does.
In her blog, Deborah Cahn -the writer who was ‘forced’ to write this last show wrote:
“What’s left, when you take away carnage and the death of our loved ones?
Emotional devastation.
Sorry. It’s all we had left.”
If not for anything else, just for this rare candidness, I’m renewing my vows and my everlasting love for this show!
But Shonda…please get Sloan to hang in there.
