'Grey's Anatomy': 'House' hunting

Well, now we know what the writers of "Grey's Anatomy" were doing during the strike, when they weren't walking the picket lines of course. They were watching "House."

Last night marked the first new episode of "Grey's" in many, many months. Not content with beating its fellow medical drama out of the post-strike box by five days -- the first new "House" airs on Monday -- show runner Shonda Rhimes and her crack team of writers seem to be poking gentle fun, and paying some homage to, the strange powers of their rivals at Fox. First there was the resident's contest in which Meredith (Ellen Pompeo), Cristina (Sandra Oh), Alex (Justin Chambers) and Izzie (Katherine Heigl) competed for points based on things like number of sutures stitched or surgeries scrubbed in on. It looked suspiciously like the competition Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) set up last season to choose a new diagnostics team, especially since "solving a medical mystery" was assigned the highest point value.

So Meredith diagnosed a brain tumor by considering a patient's hasty marriage on the rebound a symptom, while Izzie put a patient (Cheech Marin) with a sprained ankle through a battery of tests, including a spinal tap (she did stop short of the Housian favorite, the MRI).  Meanwhile, Derek (Patrick Dempsey) and Mark (Eric Dane) had mildly flirtatious conversations on elevators, a la House and Dr. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard).

If someone was walking around with a cane, though, I missed it.

It was pretty funny for those of us who follow both shows. Rhimes has a knack for lassoing the zeitgeist, whether it be her cast of many colors or her enthusiastic use of the Internet to connect with her viewers, so it's not surprising that she would unabashedly grab the general trend toward media cross-pollination and inject it into her show. (At the end of the "Grey's" episode, the Chief (James Pickens Jr.) even totted up the cost of the tests Izzie had run just as Dr. Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) does so often on "House.")

The recognition from the creators of one hit medical show that another exists, and has its own strange set of foibles, not only makes for interesting television, it creates another level of shared intimacy with the audience, an inside joke for us bazillion viewers. As the rest of the media world grapples with tone and transparency, the folks at "Grey's," who dominated the Web with their pro-strike shorts, have given us another point of connection: there are people at work behind these shows and apparently they watch TV too.

Of course, "Grey's" is not "House" and never pretended to be. The personal lives of the staff remain front and center, though everyone seems to be taking a bit of a breather from the pell-mell hook-up and breakup pattern that threatened the show last season. Derek is still pursuing Rose because he apparently has not read the countless magazine articles in which Rhimes has assured everyone he and Meredith will get back together for good. Callie (Sara Ramirez) is chumming it up with Erica (Brooke Adams) and they will win cutest couple if hints from "next on "Grey's" are anything more than a big tease. (How does Ramirez get her hair so shiny?) Although it was a relief to see Meredith retraining her focus on medicine -- and getting into therapy! It's never too late Meredith! -- Lexie (Chyler Leigh) seems to be picking up the neurotic/neediness slack, redecorating her ratty apartment with bedpans so George (T.R. Knight) will remain her roommate.

Oh, and there was a grizzly bear attack, which was pretty unnerving considering that a Hollywood trainer was recently killed by a grizzly. But I don't think even Rhimes could have seen that one coming.

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo Cheech Marin and Katherine Heigl, courtesy ABC)   

Comments

[Gus]

I really like that you acknowledged that Grey;'s never tried to be House but I still disagree with you about a lot in this article. First of all, they are both medical dramas and they will have their similarities even without trying. Second, MRI's have always been used on Grey's... always. And I don't think that solving a medical mystery was so much a bite off House as just something that happens a lot on Grey's and separates the viewer a bit from the soap-opera of it. Also, Mark and Derek's conversation was very different from House and Wilson just because if what they were talking about. And the chief was not like Cuddy at all. The Chief went into a whole spiel about being a lion and being proud about it. It's interesting that you didn't mention what House took from Grey's. Grey's three part ferry crash featured the surgery that Izzie had to do with an oridinary drill, which sounds familiar to House's big Super Bowl episode (another bite off of Grey's Season 2 bomb epi.) where someone had to drill into another person's head.

[Sam]

Erica Hahn is played by Brooke Smith, not Brooke Adams.