'Grey's Anatomy' Goes Colorblind (original) (raw)
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TELEVISION
- May 8, 2005
IT'S a typical week for the surgeons at Seattle Grace Hospital: a woman, complaining of chest pains, is rushed to the operating room. When she is cracked open, a bit of towel is discovered next to her lung. The Korean-American surgery intern, Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh), is sent to Medical Records to find out who is at fault. It turns out that an attending surgeon, an African-American named Preston Burke (Isaiah Washington), accidentally left it there during the woman's last surgery, five years ago. Dr. Yang and Dr. Burke have been exchanging coffee and longing glances for quite some time. Will she turn him in? Will he confess?
After a conference with the head resident, a sharp-tongued black woman nicknamed "The Nazi" by the hospital's interns, the surgeon admits his error to his mentor, Dr. Richard Webber, the chief of surgery (James Pickens Jr.), who also happens to be African-American. Later, as the chastened Dr. Burke undresses in the surgeon's call room, Dr. Yang shyly opens the door. The tension between them has been building, and there can be but one possible cure: massive smooching.
Seattle Grace is the fictional home of ABC's latest hit series, the steamy hospital drama "Grey's Anatomy." Although medical shows have become the cough syrup of television -- sturdy, dependable and widely available -- "Grey's Anatomy" has differentiated itself by creating a diverse world of doctors -- almost half the cast are men and women of color -- and then never acknowledging it.
Perhaps there just isn't time: the series creator, Shonda Rhimes (who helped write the screenplay for the HBO movie "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge"), has conceived Seattle Grace as a frenetic, multicultural hub where racial issues take a back seat to the more pressing problems of hospital life: surgery, competition, exhaustion and -- no surprise -- sex. It's a formula that has paid off for ABC, which leased the show its most valuable post-"Desperate Housewives" real estate, where it has quickly become a surprise hit.
"The face of America is a diverse canvas," said Stephen McPherson, president of ABC entertainment, who as president of Touchstone Television helped develop the series. "And the fact that this show represents a lot of those different aspects, you would be silly to think that doesn't have something to do with its success," he said in a telephone interview.
A lot of this has to do with Ms. Rhimes, who, as one of television's few black showrunners (she shares the duties with James Parriott, a television veteran whose credits include the series "The American Embassy" and "Threat Matrix"), has created a show around her vision of diversity -- one in which color is more description than definition -- that feels almost defiantly fresh for network television.
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