Why I am offended by Ellen Pompeo’s response to why Grey’s can’t go on without Derek. #GreysAnatomy

Why I am offended by Ellen Pompeo’s response to why Grey’s can’t go on without Derek. #GreysAnatomy

Pictures Courtesy of ABC

A few weeks ago, in late August sometime, I read an article on The Wrap (thewrap.com) entitled "Ellen Pompeo Is Offended Fans Think 'Grey’s Anatomy' Can’t Continue Without Patrick Dempsey’s McDreamy." In summation, the actress defends the long-running show’s (of which I have been a fan since day one) decision to kill off Dr. Derek Shepherd. For those not in the know, in the most controversial part of last season, Shonda Rhimes decided to murder one of the lead and favorite characters of the show when contract disputes and other behind-the-scenes foolishness went on with Mr. Dempsey. Naturally, fans were upset as this was not the way we wanted to see this heart-wrenching TV love end, especially after investing 11 years in their courtship, marriage and the trials and tribulations of raising a young family. Even worse was the way the show decided to get rid of him—by having him narrate his own death and dying alone, devoid of any other characters interacting with him on his deathbed or any long goodbyes. They didn’t even have a scene of ghost Derek having hot sex with Mere. Then, they skipped ahead a year so they could sprint through the grieving process and, apparently, take on a lighter tone as has been hinted at by the actors this season. Mind-boggling!

These changes left many viewers (including yours truly) sick to their stomach. Don’t get me wrong, Grey’s has a history of killing you off the show if you want to leave. However, the way in which they treated McDreamy felt dirty, callous and just plain wrong. Cristina had a complete farewell season, stocked full of teary-eyed moments and recalls of how great the friendship between her and Mere had been. George got to appear in his military uniform and at least got to be around his friends when he died. Little Grey was surrounded by “family” in the calamity of the plane crash. McSteamy got a whole episode where he talked to everyone he loved and cracked jokes. This is not to mention some of the other more controversial exits of Katherine Heigl’s Izzy and Isiah Washington’s Dr. Burke who talked bad about the show and/or their fellow castmates and got to live for a possible future return.

No, McDreamy was made a bastard for wanting to go to D.C. to cure Alzheimer’s! He was told he wasn’t needed and basically that he was a hindrance to his wife’s proliferation. Then, to try to redeem him in the last second, they gave him half an hour of heroism before a jumping-the-shark-worthy death narration. This felt like a dagger to the heart, a dramatic Shakespearean twist that left you dissatisfied and your literary professor saying, “you just don’t get Shakespeare.” No, I got it, I just didn’t like it (note: I actually enjoy Shakespeare quite a bit and did take a course on it in College to revisit some of my high school favorites).

I thought, wow this was a real disservice to the fans but maybe there’ll be some redeeming quality in the show for the season ahead. And then came this article.

In it, Ms. Pompeo argues that Meredith is perfectly capable of carrying the show all herself just like the two other Shondaland shows How To Get Away With Murder (#HTGAWM) and Scandal (#Scandal). In it, creator Rhimes also makes a psuedo-argument for feminism in some way, saying that

“Meredith could evolve as a woman, independent from a man.” 

What the hell? So much wrong with this.

Side Note: As an author I am always challenged whenever I write something on just how my work will be used, interpretated and consumed. My episodic novella series The Writer (#TheWriter) this summer was meant to explore that very thing. However, I also realize that artists at some point are expected to cater to their fans as the work is no longer theirs. It is for this reason why this phrasing from these two women upset me.

Making this into a feminist move and declaring this as an opportunity for Meredith to grow is missing the essence of the show and why fans fell in love with it in the first place. Grey’s, unlike Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder, was always meant as a coming-of-age love story (or at least viewed that way by the fans). That is how it was presented to the audience. Coming-of-age for adults (baby meds as I called them, fresh from med school) into fully-formed people, doctors, life-savers, and how they navigate those waters. The love triangle was between Meredith, Shepherd/McDreamy and Cristina to see who was going to love and be there for Meredith the most to help form her into the woman she would one day become. It was a romance that also tested the bonds of true friendship and sisterhood. Hell, the very first episode, the very first scene sets up the love affair between Shepherd and Grey. It went from being a fling, to a forbidden love, to a complicated love, to a disdainful love, to a sacrifice everything love, to a real adult love, to a family love to a people will write about us kind of love.

This is what we tuned in for week after week. The people. Not the cases, not the drama with who would be chief, not even to find out who would next be living in that trailer in the woods. No, we tuned in for the McDreamys, the McSteamys, the Averys, the Dennys—and this is coming from a guy. Some of us also tuned in for the music, but mostly the relationships. Shondaland’s other two shows, however, are different.

Both Scandal and HTGAWM were always solely about the one woman and not the group around her, but even when you did remove the forbidden love triangle from Scandal, the show veered into something it wasn’t per Shonda’s own admission. Scandal turned into Alias. Sidney Bristow, where the hell are you (probably still chasing Rimbaldi artifacts). They were completely different. They didn’t rely on love. Grey’s did.

Now, Cristina (one part of the triangle; the best part of friendship) is gone. Shepherd (the other part of the triangle; the yin to Cristina’s Yang (see what I did there; holy crap a parenthetical in a parenthetical. You're breakin' the rules, man!) that balanced Meredith) is gone. This is a love story devoid of love, replaced with, what? Independence? Hmph! Well, OK. That’s fine in the end, just don’t try to make fans believe and rally behind something the show never was. I once looked to Grey’s to have my true love and friendship fantasy satiated. I guess I’ll look elsewhere for that from now on.

What do you think fellow Grey's fans out there. Am I overreacting to her comments? Do you like this new direction the show will go in, moving away from the love that once bolstered the show? Do you think it'll be the same show without Cristina and Derek for Meredith to balance herself off of? Let me know what you think in the comments below. Oh, and don't construe this as me never again watching the show. I will watch, but I have to wait and see if I like it anymore as last season disappointed in so many ways. Hint: click where it reads “no comments” to comment.

As always, check out my books on Amazon (if you’re looking for Halloween scares check  #AFuriousWind,  #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or #ThePowerOfTen). For those interested in something a little more dramatic, check out #TheWriter. The final episode of season one of The Writer is coming this Friday. All other 14 episodes are out now available exclusively on Amazon. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to my blog.

Until next time, "... then I'll know how to save a life. Ba-doo ba-doo ba-doo ba. Ba-doo ba-doo ba-doo ba. Ba doo doo doo." 

P.S. OK, so that may be lyrics from The Fray's "How To Save A Life"--a song made even more famous by the early days of the show--but I think they're good lyrics here and they apply, especially since I so hope Grey's doesn't need saving after this season of upheaval. 

Amazon
Goodreads Author Page
Goodreads Books Similar to TV Shows
Twitter@filmbooksbball

It’s Death Season Everybody #GreysAnatomy #Scandal

It’s Death Season Everybody #GreysAnatomy #Scandal

All pictures courtesy of ABC unless otherwise stated.

OK, so it seems as if every show this season has taken a turn to start killing off characters (or in Scandal’s case, giving us every reason to believe that a main character is dead, even saying he is dead only to bring him miraculously back; how the hell is Jake walking around so calmly after one week?) drawing from #HBO’s #GOT or Game of Thrones for those that are uninitiated. Two months ago Sleepy Hollow killed the black guy, Crane’s son and his wife. The Flash killed Cisco but then brought him back through time travel because Kyle Reese hadn’t impregnated him yet with the savior of the human race from the future robot takeover. Wait, why does that sound like a plot to a completely different movie or TV show (#Genisys). Revenge killed of Victoria Grayson, then ABC killed off #Revenge and CBS seems to be doing the same thing for #Stalker. #Empire killed off Vernon and killed in the ratings, but now contract disputes are trying to kill its second season. I feel like somebody is about to die on Nashville, and one of the CSI incarnations should die if only to prevent further world domination.

Of course, the two most shocking deaths came from #Shondaland, both of which I must say disappointed me. The first was Jake’s non-death death. That guy got stabbed more than Caesar and was left on a table to die, which, mind you, should have killed him with the moving of his body alone, right? His would-be killer, from what I remember of the previous episode started stabbing him while he was lying on the floor. He would have had to move his body onto the table after the guy was unconscious.

But did they let him die? No! No, they didn’t. And why not? Maybe for a big May sweeps blowout where everyone dies, I don’t know. But what they did do to me was a bit of a cop-out. Instead of killing Jake they killed some old spy, her grandchildren and her handler—people who we could hardly give much of a damn about. There was some Mellie stuff going on which I still haven’t figured out how I feel about it. If I’m going off on a tangent, it seems like they’re going to try to make Mellie president so they can extend the show longer with there still being a power/romance triangle (Liv and Fitz getting together after his presidency and him not being anything more than a mere citizen doesn’t seem as appealing but who knows). But for the most part, everything around B6-13 is now dead, as in not being pursued... of course, until the end of the episode in which Liv finally figures out who it was that tried killing Jake and leaked about the spy and her grandchildren. Outside of Jake struggling to survive in a dingy, filthy makeshift emergency surgical suite, it didn’t seem as eventful as it should have.

The authentic and most disappointing death to me was on Grey’s. SPOILERS! Derek died. Yeah. Yep. So that happened. If you’re not reading my feelings (and I know you are, you’re probably pretty smart), I hated this departure from Grey’s. When I wrote “Derek died” I realized that that was exactly how it felt watching it. It was so simple, so brief, such a flippant add-on to the season to me that it felt devoid of something. It honestly felt less like one of the two stalwart main characters of the show died, and was more akin to someone’s fat lazy hamster dying. You still feel sad about your friend’s hamster, but... they didn’t really care about that hamster; why should you? Whereas so many others that left Grey’s that might not have been as deserving of their exits were showered with the presence of others, Derek was left alone to mentally monologue his way toward a brain injury that would ultimately prove too severe for him to recover from.

This came after he saved the lives of four people on a mountain highway (after the Callie car crash why the heck are they still traveling those seemingly deserted scenic mountain roads?) after two vehicles got into a crash. Then, while he was busting a U-eey (that’s how the cool kids say it), a semi-truck T-boned his vehicle. He can’t even say his name but the doctors at the nearest hospital don’t do a CT scan and that is when he dies because they ignore the brain bleed.

It wasn’t the fact that he didn’t get to say goodbye to Meredith or that she came and quickly shut the machine off giving up hope in a matter of hours, but it was how the entire episode made it feel like there was drama going on behind-the-scenes with Patrick Dempsey. Yang got a long drawn-out goodbye that took essentially the entire season, Lexie and Sloan got a nice sendoff and at least got to say stuff to their loved ones. George got his 007 signature and a dream sequence where he showed up in uniform. Teddy got a strange declaration of love where Owen loved her enough to let her go. But Derek didn’t get any of that. To me, his death was about as bad as Webber’s wife passing away and him mentioning how she died. Maybe he’ll do a Denny and come back to have some hot ghost sex with Meredith one last time, but outside of that, I didn’t care for this “tentpole” character, the original McDreamy, the one that girls were going crazy for in the first season—I didn’t care for his departure. I know he wanted off, but it was better ways to send him off than that.

If that weren't bad enough, the next couple of episodes deal with his death in a strange way to me. First, I didn't appreciate the full one-year jump in time over the two-hour special. Don't get me wrong, I have enjoyed these jumps in time in the past on other shows and even on Grey's, but those were generally made at the very end of the season/beginning of the next season. I watched this week's episode and had to constantly stop and remind myself that it had been a year since Derek died and apparently Mere had a baby. What? This didn't even come after a long hiatus, just a big "we're skipping nuanced character development because we don't wanna continue mourning Derek, so here you go fans!"

Then they introduced this young new guy which, let's be honest, looks like a younger Dempsey clone. Luckily, he's only an intern right now, but I can't fathom any turn where they didn't bring him in to be a new guy for the female fandom to obsess over. I don't mind that at all, but the entire episode felt strange. Did anybody else notice the music? Remember those many years ago when Grey's first came on and was partially made famous by the soundtrack of up and coming artists like The Fray and others that brought a soothing calm, emotionally tethering us to the characters, that voice-over and the situations in the show? Well, last night didn't really have that. I know, some episodes have it and others don't, but it didn't feel good like the old Grey's did. It felt like ER which is not what I ever wanted from Grey's.

Finally, there is Derek's sister. Between her and Meredith, they seem to be the only two still reacting to his death, but for some reason I just can't bring myself to like her character. I never watched Private Practice. I tried, I didn't like it, I didn't go back. One of the reasons was because I didn't like the characters all that much. Now that Derek's sister is on here, it seems like the entire season has been about her. While I'm sure she has her own fans, I am not one, nor do I really like the other "black" Grey/Webber.

For me, with the killing off of Derek, the news that Ellen Pompeo wants to leave too, and the changes to the show, focusing on characters I just can't seem to care about, I might finally have to walk away from the show after this season or next. I know, diehard fans will hate me, but it just isn't the same and that is the real shame.

 

What do you all think, readers? Did you enjoy the ending of Derek (#RIPMcDreamy; #EndofMere-Der)? Or did you think that it wasn’t as good as some of the other notable departures from the show? What do you think about all the deaths in shows this season? Is it keeping your favorite show interesting, or is it starting to get a little overdone? And most importantly, are you still sticking with Grey's? Is it better than ever or do you also hear the death bell tolling for your viewership? Let me know in the comments below (click the no comments button if no one has left a comment yet).

As always, check out my books on Amazon (out now: The Provocateur, The White Cockatoo, A Dangerous Low, A Negotiation of Wounds) and soon to come (#BrandNewHome, #ThePowerOfTen, #Darker, and #TheWriter). Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV. Subscribe to my blog and leave your comments below.

Until next time, It was the Best of times. It was the Worst of Times.

P.S. OK, so I kinda went literary with my signoff. I’m still working on it, gosh! Get off my back about it people. It’ll come naturally and when it does, it will be a spectacular signoff. Anyways, Books!
 

Amazon
Goodreads Author Page
Goodreads Books Similar to TV Shows
Twitter