'Grey's' obsessives are in on the spin
For a long time now, "Grey's Anatomy" has positioned itself as an inside joke -- developed its own lexicon of McThises and McThats, trafficked in the assumption that its viewers are as wedded to the show as its creators.
It's hard to blame the producers, really. Each week, on the blog the show's writers keep, hundreds of fans -- most of them women -- offer testimonials about how the plotlines have kept them from eating or sleeping, or caused them to shed various degrees of tears. Thursday night's two-hour episode was clearly conceived and written with the obsessives in mind; if you weren't in on the scoop, it might have felt like an ambush. The show popped in and out of the familiar dramas at Seattle Grace Hospital (the typical TV fare of affairs, amnesiacs, and easily telegraphed medical emergencies) but spent at least half its time developing characters we'd never seen before, and might never see again.
Devotees, of course, already knew about the supposedly secret spinoff, tentatively titled "Private Practice," that would transfer obstetrician Addison Montgomery to the shiny corridors of a "Wellness Center" in Los Angeles. It has yet to be officially picked up by ABC, but it seems to have the network executives' blessing. And it has attracted a big-name cast that includes exiles from two failed ABC series: Tim Daly of the short-lived "The Nine," and Taye Diggs of the shorter-lived "Day Break."
Of all the "Grey's" characters, Addison, played by Kate Walsh, is the right one to spin off; she's luminous (even with acupuncture needles in her face), funny, and sympathetic in a way that most Seattle Grace doctors no longer seem to be. This is probably a testament to Walsh's presence as an actress; after all, Addison was originally conceived as a villain, and she's no less flawed than the show's other women. Most, by now, have committed acts of cruelty to their partners or spouses or male best friends. And most are still hotly pursued by their equally flawed men.
That's the central conceit of "Grey's"; one of the few TV dramas primarily run by women, it's essentially a female fantasia about how men ought to behave. In creator Shonda Rhimes' universe, guys compete gallantly for their perpetually undecided girlfriends. Grooms beg their brides to taste samples of wedding cake. In the Los Angeles portion of Thursday's show, Daly, as a handsome holistic acupuncturist who (shockingly!) shuns commitment, encountered Addison crying in a stairwell and declares: "I'm gonna kiss you. I'm gonna kiss you with tongue. I'm gonna kiss you so you feel it."
It wasn't the only scene that felt like pleasant self-delusion. "Grey's" writers do their medical research -- more than once, I've thought an ailment on the show was preposterous, only to learn that it was incredibly rare but possible -- so I'll assume that the killer-hiccup story line was technically legit. Still, Rhimes' doctors seem to exist in a blissful world devoid of paperwork, malpractice lawsuits, or insurance issues. Hence, Addison can turn up at her friends' clinic in search of fertility treatment, and, within minutes, wind up with case files in her hands. Before long, she's wearing indigo scrubs and performing emergency surgery.
Reality notwithstanding, the scenes set in LA had the most energy on Thursday; they seemed to glow with a different sort of light. Maybe this was a brilliant stroke of production design -- a peek at sunny California, as opposed to ever-cloudy Seattle. But it was also a sign of how, as their tics have grown more prominent and their personal behavior has worsened, the standard "Grey's" characters have grown a little tiresome.
This new set of neurotics might not be the answer. Daly is charming as usual, but Diggs, no longer playing an action hero, seems weirdly small. Amy Brenneman and Paul Adelstein are in highly twitchy mode -- another quirk of "Grey's" writing that series devotees probably won't mind.
Indeed, the whole episode felt like an extended riff on what, depending on your perspective, are either the series' singular charms or its continued self-indulgences. It kept returning to another "Grey's" conceit, the elevator rides that always seem to lead to romantic encounters, but the joke felt less funny than forced. The true insiders might have been shedding tears of joy. The rest of us were ready to take the stairs.
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to viewerdiscretion.net. 
