Grey's Anatomy

There's a dozen reasons I love Grey's Anatomy. I started watching it at the height of my hormones when it was first aired, and I'm a complete sucker for American drama. But here are the reasons I love it now.


Christina Yang
She is my favourite thing about Greys. She is charmless, professionally ruthless, and is never caught selling herself short. I find that in the media, very often women's accomplishments are measured by that of a man's. In the Greys universe, you're measured by Yangs.

Seriously charmless

She's the smartest, the most determined and most hardworking. She is driven by professional ambition, rather than the stereotypical need for a happy healthy relationship to feel complete. There's been a couple of times where the storyline has had me worried about where they were taking her, like when she was compromising her career to help Burke, but as the series progressed, you saw Christina really take back control of her life.


Alex Karev
One of my biggest issues about the battle of the sexes is how men are seen in the media. According to tv, it's important to be manly, and to be manly you need to be a muscly sexual predator, with a good face and a job that's respected, well paid and in a position of authority. Whilst Greys still holds a cast chock full of "beautiful people", Karevs character breaks slightly from the normal behaviour of typically manly guys.

Still got a nice face..

Yeah sure, he starts off as a serious douchebag, swinging his bits about looking for pretty young things to have his wicked way with and waxing on about plastics being the real deal, and it takes a couple of series of peeling away layers of troubled childhood issues to get to the real stuff, but you see Alex move away from macho bravado. He's seen embracing more nurturing positions and traits associated with women on screen, like taking care of Izzy when she's sick, and going into pediatrics.


Baggy Clothes
A super easy way to sell a tv show or a film is to get a hot person barely clothed in every episode. Or a hot person tightly clothed. Basically any use of the physical appearance of characters to keep viewers coming back in the hopes of getting peeks at these beautiful people and they're beautiful bodies.

Ooh baby.

There are some scenes in the show that have bits of nudity in, but on the whole, the entire cast wear scrubs and when they're not wearing scrubs, they don't dressed as if they're heading out to the club, or topless. It's seriously refreshing to see the appeal being about the storyline and character development rather than voyeuristic pleasures.


So there you have it. Not a grand list, and not exactly one of the forerunners when it comes to breaking down archaic gender roles in the media, but closer than most.