Grey's Anatomy: At Its Finest Hour

Television was not invented by a single inventor, instead many people working together and alone, contributed to the evolution of TV. Since the early 1900's, the development, convenience and mass population of the television set have changed the way American society as a whole receive media. Without a doubt, the financial and hi-tech renovation of media production could surely be attributed, to the advancement of the television industry. In fact, according to author Jeremy Butler in Television's Ebb and Flow, in the United States the average television set is on for seven and a half hours per day (3) which is the same amount of time an average person is asleep. Therefore, with such an amble amount of television being watched per day by millions of Americans it is one, if not the, most powerful source of interpellating

At the time of birth humans are not given an innate ability to understand and interperllate things, it is a learned behavior we receive later on in life. Technically, interperllation is ideology's ability to assign individual to specific positions within its own communicative representations of reality. Ideology in general is our relationship to the world by which we can access reality, our only portal. In today's society people are interperlated through social situations as well as television media. At large society recognizes these understandings as representations apart of everyday life and uses television as part of their reality, which is socially constructed. It does not matter what particular show or movie we watch on TV we recognize it in that frame of reality, in that ideology, in that understanding and it that relationship no matter any previous knowledge.

In the new primetime Sunday night drama on ABC, Grey's Anatomy, the audience gets an inside scoop on a highly professional job, being a resident doctor. Grey's Anatomy focuses on five new residents' lives under pressure to be doctors and doctors under pressure to stay true to their human lives. The only problem is job training, in this case can be a matter of life and death, and they also try to have a life of their own. It's the drama and passion of medical training mixed with comical, sexy, and aching lives of interns who are about to discover that neither medicine nor relationships can be defined in black and white. Real life only comes in shades of grey.

The television series is based on a woman Meredith Grey who is trying to lead a real life while doing a job that makes having a real life virtually impossible. In the episode that aired on Sunday, November 27, 2005 Meredith is completely horrified when her "one night stand" shows up at the hospital suffering from priapism (a condition involving erection of the penius for several hours) and needing medical attention; a woman carrying quintuplets is weighed down by numerous medical jargon and issues as she is under a high-risk pregnancy; and Alex's shortcomings (literally in the sexual sense) frustrate Izzie. The vast majority of people who watched this particular hour long episode were engaged in a hospital scene, interpellating in the reality being a "fly on the wall" in a hospital. Viewers see several different sub-plots with in the main plot of being in an academic hospital and begin to understand that realm of thinking. As a participant, or audience member they too are checking on patients to see if they are feeling better, finding out what the EKG's are saying about one patient, or even perform a quintuplet sea-section. The plotline becomes real and for that moment, for that hour or elapsed time the audience is a part of saving someone's life, helping the emerged, and all in the midst of romantic passion and betrayal.

The show has impacted my life as I can relate to the characters in the drama with relationship problems with new doctors. For the past two years I have been dating a UNC medical student who will graduate in May to pursue a surgical residency. I feel the show is some what of a foreshadowing depiction of what our relationship might be like once he starts his residency in the spring of next year. In the past or in TV time, last season I was not as hooked on the show as I am to date. In the beginning, especially following the pilot episode I wasn't sure if I liked the setting and thought it was going to be similar to the hit TV show ER. Little to my dismay, I found it had more of a twist in its plot than ER and was not as dramatic because it is a viewpoint of the lives of residents not an emergency room and its staff. Every episode is new and completely different from the previous; however the