They say that your life flashes before your eyes when you are about to die, but no one talks to you about the way in which one becomes aware of their own mortality and existence when they see the twentieth season of Grey’s Anatomy premiere on Disney.
In your head you can put together some kind of best spontaneous moments. You remember that, while Meredith was training as a doctor in Seattle (and surviving bombs and shootings and drownings), you were in college, testing the extent to which television fiction could be understood as cultural journalism.
You stole your neighbor’s Wi-Fi to download the episodes in their original version because, even if you didn’t always understand the diagnoses, you could capture all the sexual tension that two bodies that are locked in an elevator could emanate.
So, when you thought of Patrick Dempsey as Dr. Shepherd, you still saw him as a little older, to later grow up and understand the virtues of mature beauty, of those stylish gray hairs that inspired shampoo advertisements. And, without wanting to, you start doing the math.
How many minutes, hours and days of my life have I allocated to it? At the moment, about 18,275 minutes, which is 304 hours, which implies that, at least, you have spent at least 12 days of your life in front of the television, computer or mobile screen with Meredith suffering or surviving any calamity that befell her. creator Shonda Rhimes, or one of her disciples, had him prepared.
How can it be that actors Ellen Pompeo, Chandra Wilson or James Pickens Jr have been present in my life for more years than the father of my children? And how much time will I have spent to understand all the sudden dismissals of the series like those of Isaiah Washington, Katherine Heigl, Patrick Dempsey, T.R. Knight or Justin Chambers, what would they give for a behind-the-scenes meta-television spin-off as passionate as the series itself?
When it began broadcasting in the United States, George W. Bush was president and Barack Obama was only a senator from Illinois. A month earlier Clint Eastwood had triumphed at the Oscars with Million Dollar Baby. Rhimes couldn’t even consider having a black protagonist like her, something she would later do in Scandal, because it could be interpreted as too risky a maneuver commercially. The process had not even begun: Pasqual Maragall was in the Generalitat and José Montilla was warming up on the sideline.
Thinking in this context, one is about to call the sociological research centers to study how many Grey’s Anatomy addicts may have died before the series closes (and if those of us here will live to see the Gray Sloan Memorial throw out the final closure, whether with a collapse, a “it was nice while it lasted” or with all the surgeons and residents, on their way to a conference, falling off a bus into a ravine and the subsequent explosion, in true Anatomy style).
It’s obvious that at this point it hardly matters what new showrunner Meg Marinis has to offer. The attempt to renew the relationship, even partially, with the weight of the new residents is appreciated (even accepting that Alexis Floyd and Niko Terho are the weak links and only Midori Francis transmits the character and determination of the generation of Christina Yang). The drama is also not as effective as the first seasons, even when it involves Ellen Pompeo, who now appears whenever she feels like it.
Because the series, year after year, represents a mature marriage better and better: the one that goes out to dinner on Friday nights and where presence and tradition are valued more than passion. In life it is possible that sparkling should be prioritized but, in a television context where so many series say goodbye after a couple of handfuls of episodes, a constant like Grey’s Anatomy is appreciated.
Which existence will end first, however, is still unknown: the series or us.
