The Most Popular Medical Series Ever Is Just A High School Drama Set In A Hospital

If you’re wondering why I think a bunch of 20-somethings fresh out of medical school act like a bunch of high school students, I have a working theory as to why the residents and interns in Grey’s Anatomy fit this description.

In the fiction of the series, every single intern is wide-eyed and bushy-tailed because they’re eager to learn and want to be the best at what they do (saving lives). At face-value, this is noble, but let’s think about the mechanics of their respective career trajectories.

It’s reasonable to believe that after high school, everybody went straight to university, and not for a Liberal Arts degree (like yours truly). While I spent my college years close-reading Victorian literature and goofing off with my friends during my down time, the aspiring doctors and surgeons in Grey’s Anatomy were subjected to what I would imagine to be intense and grueling studies. In my opinion, putting their education first stunted their emotional growth in a way that makes forming relationships in their early adult years difficult because they probably weren’t socializing like other college students.

What’s more, we need to talk about the work environment in Grey’s Anatomy, and how experiencing high levels of emotional stress and trauma can also stunt one’s emotional development.

While working through their residencies, Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) and company are constantly exposed to severely injured trauma patients, have to tell anxious parents that their child died during surgery, deliver stillborn babies, and navigate through one-in-a-million flukes in the form of botched blood transfusions or medical anomalies that require them to think on their feet in order to safely address under impossible deadlines.

In other words, they have incredibly stressful jobs. The closest way I can relate to anybody in Grey’s Anatomy is admitting that while working as a line cook, I once got overwhelmed by an unexpected lunch rush before prep was finished, and repeatedly punched a head of romaine lettuce in the walk-in cooler to bring myself back.

After a long shift at Seattle Grace Hospital, nobody’s celebrating, however, but rather unpacking the multitude of emotional ordeals they were subjected to during an 18-hour shift. There’s also a healthy amount of drinking in the early seasons, and you can’t really blame them.

So when Meredith Grey laments about her on-again-off-again relationship with Derek “McDreamy” Shepard (Patrick Dempsey), an immensely talented and experienced neurosurgeon, with her fellow intern, Christina Yang (Sandra Oh), I can’t help but poke fun because she sounds like a teenager who dreamily scribbles “Meredith Shepard,” in her Five Star trapper-keeper.

This bickering comes to a head in season 5 when Yang has had enough of this high school-esque romance, and yells “Shut up, Meredith!” before slipping on ice, falling down, and getting impaled by an icicle that fell off the awning of the hospital.

After Yang recovers from her injuries, and Grey puts some ice on that epic burn, it doesn’t take long for the locker room talk to once again devolve into the most brilliant minds in the medical sector bickering about their love lives.

Before coming to this realization, I literally referred to George O’Malley (T.R. Knight), the struggling intern who somehow screws up his relationships with both Callie Torres (Sara Ramirez) and Izzie Stevens (Katherine Heigl) as the “Mope Master”… on account of all his moping.

Now that I’ve had some time to think about why everybody acts the way they do in Grey’s Anatomy, I’m more sympathetic to his plight because he’s the most socially awkward character in the series. Not only does O’Malley fail the first round of exams at the end of his internship, he’s trapped in a problematic love triangle that he’s not emotionally equipped to handle because he devotes his time to continuing his studies instead of learning how to read the room.

While I still think that everybody in Grey’s Anatomy is insufferable on a good day, I now understand that their high school approach to every aspect of their lives outside of their work is by design, and a direct consequence of the nature of their work.

Sure, I find myself screaming at the TV whenever I sit down with my wife and I can’t secure control of the remote so I can watch Mountain Monsters, but now I’m screaming with and for everybody, not at them.

If you’re in a similar situation to myself, try to re-frame the series as a high school drama instead of viewing it as a medical drama, and you’ll understand everybody’s motives in a way you couldn’t previously. You may even find yourself enjoying an episode or two in this context.