‘Grey’s Anatomy’: George’s serial bedside manner

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So, who’d have thought — George O’Malley, surgical tramp. The doe-eyed, baby-faced, stammering intern, ‘Grey’s Anatomy’s’ answer to Radar O’Reilly, has now bedded not one, not two, but three of the female leads. Nice guys do get lucky. Or maybe not. By having a drunken liaison with Izzie mere weeks after marrying Callie, George has lost a lot of nice-guy cred. Which probably means he’ll be making it with Cristina any minute now, since she seems to like mean guys.

See, this is why we love ‘Grey’s.’ It allows us a guilt-free opportunity to advise, counsel and pass judgment on people who are having way more sex with way more people than the average American. No character on the show has children (except Bailey, and I’d like to see the man who could seduce her), so we don’t have to fret about innocent bystander victims of random couplings and uncouplings. All the adult characters have the soap-opera requisite ‘Eternal Sunshine’ mind wipes that allow them to maintain relationships with people who’d basely betrayed them just a few episodes ago.

With the horror of the recent three-episode special event dimming nicely (can we pass a law banning these ridiculous sweeps week specials, which inevitably take perfectly good shows and make them unrecognizable?), Thursday night’s episode was classic ‘Grey’s’ with all the characters having to take responsibility for their (mostly) bad decisions.

Except Meredith, of course, who drips right along, with the suddenly spineless Derek and the always spineless Chief wiping up after her. Only Mark (McSteamy) sees what’s going on, offering her a chance to perform some (gasp) actual surgery. When Meredith (drip, drip) accuses him of using her to impress the Chief, he tells her to lose the lost puppy dog act if she wants the Chief to view her as a surgeon again. In his self-imposed celibate attempt to prove to Addison that he is not a ‘man-whore’ (one of the less savory terms the show has lifted from ‘Sex and the City’), Mark seems to have gained some wisdom and unexpected depth. How did he do in the recent contract renegotiations anyway?

Meanwhile Cristina continued to obsess over her perpetually cold feet — everyone keeps telling her what a great thing she has with Burke, ignoring the fact that it has been months since he has said one single nice thing to her. (‘Will you marry me?’ doesn’t count, since it was not preceded by any endearment, compliment or anything else much.) I guess we’re supposed to think Burke is a saint for putting up with her ambition (shocking, a female surgeon with ambition!), but emotional abuse is still abuse.

The race for Chief continued to rage in a really boring way — James Pickens Jr. just got a new contract, so I’m assuming the current Chief ain’t going anywhere — but there was some actual time spent in the operating room — reconstructing the face of Jane Doe (an appealing character left over from the dreaded special event), amputating a diabetic’s foot and dealing with a woman who has a rare disease that causes muscle to turn to bone.

This was a good thing, because ‘Grey’s’ needs actual medicine the same way a salad bar needs lettuce — to make us feel better about ourselves as we smother that lettuce with cheese, bacon and fried noodles. We care about more than who’s sleeping with whom, yes, yes, we really do!

In the George-n-Izzie plot, they decided to do the honorable thing and keep it a secret, but that never works, at least not on television, so it looks as if Callie’s going to take it in the gut at some point.

But seeing that she can forgive in one day her new husband’s previous-episode attempt to assuage her concerns that Izzie ‘has feelings’ for him with the ‘how ridiculous, Izzie is way too hot to want me’ defense, we assume she can survive anything. If there was a Nobel Prize for great moments in television, that one would win, as women around the country winced in pain and empathy.

And that’s why the silliness of ‘Grey’s’ works — buried in the soap and the voice-overs and the extra sauce, there is inevitably a real moment of truth.

-- Mary McNamara