If “Glee” and “E.R.” had a baby it would be [last night]’s episode of the medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy,” titled “Song Beneath the Song.” The staff at Seattle Grace had a patient that was one of their own. That tends to happen a lot at this hospital.
After a car accident sent Callie Torres through a windshield, the pregnant orthopedic surgeon spent much of her time on the operating table and floating around the hospital singing lite rock and pop as the staff fights to save her life and the life of her unborn child. And, of course, at one point everyone sings “How to Save a Life.” We’re not joking. It happens. At least nobody sang “Calling Dr. Love.”Alright, look... no, I don't watch Grey's Anatomy. But my wife does, and we just so happen to live together (imagine that), so I've been forced to watch a few episodes over the years--including last night's. It was seriously one of the worst pieces of popular culture "entertainment" I've ever seen.
In the past, I've actually had a fair amount of fun openly mocking the show while my wife has watched it, since it's an amazingly easy target--I've almost begun to enjoy the show because of how absolutely absurd and generally poorly written (and poorly conceived) it is. Everyone in the hospital is emotionally crippled beyond recognition, to the point that nobody in their right mind would ever want to be treated there. Besides the ridiculous amount of back-room sex, the incredibly far-fetched and overwrought drama (not to mention mass-casualty events) that pervade the show, and the generally trite commentary that the title character provides as narration, the show actually typically succeeds at the very least at knowing its audience and staying true to its very bizarre mission.
That ended last night. The "Glee"-inspired episode wasn't just unwatchable (though it certainly was that, a point that even my wife conceded), it also reeked of a lazy network executive seeing the crossover success of a show on another network, envying that success, and then betraying the concept of his own show in order to generate some buzz and make a few extra bucks. For a show that's made sport out of "jumping the shark" (it's done so at least six times already), this marked an astonishing new low.
But what angers me the most isn't that the network executives tried the feat--it's that it seems to have worked. Predictably, the soundtrack from the episode (9 tracks of singing actor/doctors) was posted immediately on iTunes, and 7 of those 9 tracks are in the iTunes Top 200 singles today--4 of them in the Top 100. Lord help us.
The only guarantee from last night's ridiculous episode, then, is that we'll end up seeing much more just like it. If something makes money, it really doesn't matter how bad it is, or how lazy the concept was. That's what has generated the explosion of reality TV, the prevalence of hack movie sequels and remakes, and just about everything else that sucks about modern pop culture (sorry, I feel strongly about this). As a wise man once said, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
So it doesn't matter that the episode has been panned by every serious critic from coast to coast--angry ranters like me will, as usual, go quietly into the night, overwhelmed by the spoon-fed public who lapped up last night's pre-packaged disaster. Sigh... Happy Friday.
[Wall Street Journal]
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