Stress, illness and grief this year has had me watching medical dramas. Perhaps that's no excuse, but there's something I find compelling about them, not least because I don't have to think much. Years ago I loved ER, and loved seeing an older Noah Wylie win awards for the more recent medical drama 'The Pulse'.

However, since I'd watched every other medical drama of recent years, I decided to see what the fuss about Grey's Anatomy was. Did I really want to committ to 21 seasons, with a total of 448 episodes? Hell yeah. I had some no thinking to do.

I can't believe I've missed twenty years of this behemoth. Perhaps that's a blessing.

What I didn't expect was a) for it to be so terrible, b) for it to be so entertaining and c) for it to be a study of society over the last twenty years and in particular, attitudes to sex and woman. Who knew that 2005 was so long ago?

There's HOW MANY seasons of Grey's Anatomy??

The show starts with a bang - literally. Meredith Grey, an intern at Seattle Grace and later Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital (and I've just accidentally found out what it will change to, which is a little devastating - fucking plot spoilers) wakes up in bed next to a man she picked up at the bar, and she'll find out within hours is her attending. Oops. In 2005, apparently, it was okay for men to relentlessly persue womoan in the workplace and not take no for an answer. Thanks to the #metoo movement, I am not sure this is a plot point that writers would touch these days without some moral critique.

In fact most of the men get laid in the show because they harass the women to sleep with them. I'm still waiting for someone to say that's not okay, and have them on sexual harassment in the workplace charges. They're going to be in massive trouble when the #metoo movement gets going because, you know, workplace pressure and consent. In 2005, this is sexy. He's Doctor Dreamy, after all, with that hair.

There's a ton of inappropriate jokes, flirting in the hospital, or sexualized commentary among doctors - it's really cringeworthy. Whilst it's obviously comic relief at the time, I'm not sure it would be aired today.

Izzy Stevens, who used to be an underwear model to fund her university debt (and hence being debt free) has a horrifying scene where she arrives at the lockerroom to posters of her plastered everywhere. She strips to her underwear and screams at them, but there's no case for workplace sexual harassment here. It's appalling. But then Izzie herself has an inappropriate relationship with a patient, and is party to sexualised banter herself, often in front of other staff and patients.

I liked Izzy, but was glad when that storyline wrapped up. The scenes with her having sex with Danny's ghost were terrible. In fact, the whole 'I see ghosts' and the suggestion of an afterlife where characters die and see people they love were totally corny. I nearly gave up at that point, but I had knitting to do.

George is an utter flake and when he dies no one cares. But there's issues with his flakiness, indecisiveness and general kind manner as being - 'gay'. Oh dear. The inclusion of LGBTQI in drama hasn't quite begun in television, then. When they finally bring same sex relationships in, a 2025 audience recognize the social shift that must be happening. Still the stories are cliche - the army guy who has a brain tumor and can't admit to his Dad he's in love with a soldier. It's okay, he dies, so that was the end of that. But perhaps Grey's Anatomy is breaking ground here. The normalisation of queer relationships on television has to start somewhere, after all.

Ellen Pompeo made 20 million a year from this show!!

When finally they make a main character gay (Calliope), they make her bisexual, because then they can have more options. She can bang a pediatric AND a plastic surgeon, and if the plot sours, hell, she can have his baby.

Somehow we are meant to believe the plastics guy has matured because he also wants a baby, but he's still banging his best mate when he's meant to be passionately in love with a woman much, much younger. He (Sloan) enjoys his job as he gets to give women bigger breasts and asses, and look at the breasts and asses of surgeons, nurses and patients - he doesn't discriminate.

The best surgery is when two strangers are impaled on a pole and come in joined together. People are hit by trains, cars, and there are many gunshot wounds, because America is a dickhead. Good looking people die because it's way more tragic than ugly people dying. One guy has some wart growths that give him dragon like claws and a spider crawls out of them during surgery. There's a morbidly obese person used as a lesson to be compassionate about morbidly obese people. One guy gets a double arm transplant and there's a touch and go moment where they worry he won't accept it because there's a tattoo on one arm of the arm guys wife. Perhaps the plastics guy was busy that day. Instead of getting the name Nicole removed he gets 'thankyou' tattooed next to it. How sentimentally mawkish.

Everybody fucks everybody, because they're all delightfully good looking. Someone must have complained that ugly doesn't get a look in so the Chief Resident Bailey, who is short and fierce and called the Nazi from the first episode, gets to sleep with a few hot guys too. Imagine giving a character the nickname Nazi these days. You may as well call them Netanyahu.

Every now and then there's a mind-blowing episode where they get all the blokes to take their tops off. Must have done wonders for ratings. Jamie usually looks up from whatever he is doing at this point to ask me what the hell am I watching, and what happened to Izzy.

The absence of social media is rather quaint. Calliope says to her best mate and fuck buddy - well everyone's fuck buddy - that at least they can keep in touch via email when she's in Malawi. But by end of season seven they're watching surgery updates on Twitter. The chief, perhaps predictably in hindsight, says 'what the hell's a Twitter?'. Wait til he encounters Facebook live streaming and Tinder.

Most of the blokes are assholes I wouldn't date. The only one I'd trust is the one everyone says is bad news and that's Alex Karev, because at least he has an excuse and isn't masquerading as a nice guy. Plus, he is a really nice guy, just won't show anyone that. He's the one that picks Izzy up - literally - when she's paralyzed by the death of Danny, despite being mad at her for falling in love with someone else. He does try to unsympathetically fuck a virgin and is cruel about it, but it's Karev and everyone knows what he's like and weren't they warned?

It's okay, just get everyone in season 7 to admit it's all rather inappropriate. And let that be a lesson to anyone studying medicine. Don't bang each other at work. Oh and if you're a woman and you bang someone and your partner bangs someone whilst you're on a break, you have done a terrible thing and he is justified.

There's some sweet scenes which show just how far the actors have come to pull them off, like Sandra Oh (Kristina) holding a fish and crying because she feels joy at last and is now completely recovered from being held at gunpoint in surgery. Or the team laughing hysterically at George's funeral, because they're messed up surgeons no one understands and life is so tragic and crazy you may as well laugh in the face of it. In fact most of the really good moments belong to Kristina, whose character is my favourite next to Karev, mainly because they're both incapable of being real human beings because of their life trauma like Kristina's Dad dying in a car crash or Karevs whole family being utter nut jobs. Yet still, they're very excellent at their jobs and when they show they care in their odd ways, like Karev cradling a premmie baby all night against his bare chest (lucky baby) or Kristina having a breakdown from PTSD, you have to care about them too.

I've still got a few seasons to go and I know some major characters are going to die because I accidentally peeked. Don't tell me the details. I didn't think it'd be worth watching after Izzy left but here I am at the end of episode 7 and have many more episodes to half watch whilst I knit.

I've also just had a minor stroke realising they've just renewed it for another year, to a total of 22 seasons.