Grey

Dear Ira Glass,

This is a story about how television changes our lives.

I’ve only seen the show Grey’s Anatomy once, and in that episode a doctor was pierced through the stomach with a twelve inch icicle that fell from a gutter on a hospital supposedly set in Seattle. I live in Seattle, and our icicles don’t reach anywhere near a foot in length; they are more like iciclets. I don’t like people misrepresenting my city, so naturally I gave up on the show right away. I haven’t seen it since, but a few months ago Grey’s came back into my life with a clarity only a t.v. show that’s gone to water cooler status can bring (though, let’s be honest- who drinks from a water cooler anymore?).

So, rewind to late May 2010. I’m on my way to go bowling in Tukwila with some girls from work. We’re reminiscing about television sitcoms from the 90s and singing spotty lyrics from their theme songs, the anthems of my early teen years: Growing Pains, Step by Step, Full House…I’m feeling nostalgic for a time ten years in the past when I unashamedly patterned my analyses of life, death, and love on the twenty-one minute plots I watched as reruns on the Disney Channel (anyone?). In so many words I mention the weirdly intimate intensity of t.v. to the girls. One friend, S, gasps: “Oh my god. Does anyone watch Grey’s Anatomy?” We shake our heads and when I tell her I have no intention of picking up the show at any time she goes on to tell me about the season finale that had just aired. <SPOILER ALERT>.

S: “Oh my god. I’m still processing. It was so intense. I couldn’t sleep after.”

Me: “Did people die?”

S: “Yes, people died. Two people died in the opening credits.”

Me: “Did main characters die? Did Patrick Dempsey die?”

S: “Lots of main characters died, like right in the beginning, you just see them get shot in the head, Patrick Dempsey didn’t die but he almost did. This guy came into the hospital and just started shooting people and they didn’t even get a chance. I don’t even know, it was so crazy…”

The way she spoke caught my attention: with such immediacy, such empathy. So human. So real. So…television. But I believe in it. There’s a scene in the show Boy Meets World, perhaps the most pivotal television show of my past, where Cory is lamenting his girlfriend’s impending move out of state to his best friend Shawn. Shawn isn’t worried at all, and gives Cory several examples of main characters on popular television shows who were all set to move and at the last minute always end up staying. Cory asks Shawn if perhaps it doesn’t actually make sense to compare what’s happening in their lives to what happened on those shows. Shawn stares at him earnestly, with full sincerity, clearly awed that he even has to say the answer out loud: “Not if television is the true mirror of our lives.”

It’s been about ten years since I saw that episode, and still it’s stuck with me all this time. I can’t get the quote out of my head, and it comes to me like a Bible verse, like a favorite song, like a line from a love letter in difficult times, when I need comfort, when I need a familiar pattern. Because if television is the true mirror, we are never totally alone: other people are watching too. Other people are interpreting, making meaning, laughing, keying in.

A few days later I walked Greenlake with my friend R, who is also my brother Nige’s girlfriend, discussing deep things as kindred spirits tend to do. Fear of death came up. “Oh my god,” she asked, “do you watch Grey’s Anatomy?”

Me: “No, but I heard about it. I heard it was life changing.”

R: “It totally is, was, did. Nige watched it with me and it made us talk about things. Big things, like death, like the future. It makes you realize how you can lose everything in an instant, and you have no idea what’s going to happen ever.”

So we discussed it all the way through, and it wove its way into our analysis of our mutual irrational fear of death, our conversation that stretched around the lake, into the building of our friendship in its relatively early days. And later we discussed it again, at dinner, with Nige, and I half-laughingly said, “Oh Nige, did Grey’s Anatomy change your life?” The king of sarcasm and mockery stared at me earnestly, sincerely, with complete empathy: “Yes Corn, it changed my life. It launched a conversation about the future.”

And I think in the end that’s the true mirror, that’s the pattern that seduces us: when the twenty-one minutes are up, there’s a clear break between the screen and the life. Our lives. The television show can launch us into the big, laughing, dying black space where we make sky, where we make glittering pinpoint stars blurred out of memories our own, or shared, or just heard about. Where we bring the colors alternately marred and threaded, watered and concentrated, bright and scaled in grey. Where we make it together, this life, this anatomy.

Sincerely,

Courtney

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