TV is the new reading

‘Grey’s’ is off and running

Meredith still looking for happiness in fifth season premiere

Despite the examples set by her friends, first-year Seattle Grace Hospital resident Meredith Grey is still trying to believe in the happy ending.

Her best friend, Cristina, was recently abandoned at the altar. Another friend, Izzie, lost the love of her life. A third friend, George, got married to a resident, Callie, in Las Vegas and cheated on her almost immediately.

Meanwhile, the object of her obsession, Derek, had been married (although separated), then involved in side relationships while Meredith was figuring out what she wanted.

At the heart of this messy bundle of loves and liaisons is Callie’s theory that everyone’s still in high school. That is, the overachieving teens who graduated high school and focused on their med school studies like a laser never had a chance to learn all of the basics of having relationships. So they’re all running around falling in and out of love like emotionally stunted junior high school students because basically that’s who they are.

And with all of the distractions caused by these brilliant children running around committing medicine, things are starting to fall apart. In two years, teaching hospital Seattle Grace fell from a top-three ranking to 12th in the nation. Chief Webber attributes this to a failure on the part of the hospital to maintain discipline – and, less publicly, on his own unwillingness to enforce the rules with Meredith, the daughter of his old flame, pursuing her residency at his hospital.

Yep, the guilt feelings about Meredith’s mom, the brilliant Dr. Ellis Grey, and her broken marriage and all of that history run deep, dark and twisty in this show.

But so does the wacky fun. Like when Bernadette Peters and her friends, on their way to a gala party, get into a limo accident and are admitted wearing ball gowns. Their husbands arrive later, having gotten into their own limo accident (there was ice on the road).  It turns out one of them has no insurance because he lost his job eight months ago and started an affair with Bernadette’s best friend.

This naturally gives Meredith a lot to think about because she’s decided she and Derek should pursue the dream and move in together. Now she’s got to imagine their life together 40 years in the future – whether they’re still together, whether she’s cheating on him, whether they’re still in love.

Heck, Cristina actually envisions it. When a painful sequence of events gets her impaled by an icicle (don’t ask) Christina gets a vision of a distant future in which she and Meredith, now old and gray, have moved in together and resumed their endlessly bickering arguments.

In the end Webber determines that this season is about his staff transcending specialties, and learning everything about everything. It’s about becoming the best doctors they can be and getting the hospital back at the top of its game.

Looking around at what he has to work with ... good luck with that.

“Grey’s Anatomy” airs at 8 p.m. Thursdays on ABC.

---

‘Fringe’ is worth your time

“Fringe” is, much like its main character Dr. Walter Bishop, a lot like the Frankenstein monster, cobbled together from bits and pieces of other science fiction TV shows and movies.

That’s not to say the new series, which airs at 8 p.m. Tuesdays on the FOX network, isn’t entertaining in its own way, just that it would be nice to be surprised now and again. So far the plots of the first three episodes bear a strong resemblance to “The X-Files” and to creator J.J. Abrams’ shows “Lost” and “Alias.”

The aforementioned Dr. Walter Bishop spent 17 years in a loony bin and is prone to grinning and making comments such as “Let’s make some LSD!” You expect him to rub his hands together and cackle maniacally. He’s half Dr. Frankenstein, half Igor, with moments of lucidity that hint at dangerous immorality. I hope for a Halloween episode with him dressed up in a cape and fangs or as a hunchback stirring a cauldron. Walter, played by John Noble (last seen in “The Lord of the Rings”), and the cow he keeps in his laboratory in the basement of a building on the Harvard campus are unquestionably the best part of “Fringe.”

Through a typical TV plot contrivance, Victor’s estranged son, Peter, a high school dropout with a 190 IQ and a checkered past, is now his guardian. Peter is played by Joshua Jackson, a teen heartthrob from “Dawson’s Creek,” a show I never watched. I don’t buy him as a romantic lead, much less as an uber genius, but he’s likeable. So far his best scenes are his wry exchanges with Walter. When insomniac Walter hid in a closet in the middle of the night,  Peter sang him a lullaby that one of the other patients at the mental hospital used to sing to Walter. On the other hand, it’s  been strongly hinted that Walter cooked Peter up in the lab back in the 1970s, when he was conducting his notorious fringe science experiments, so their relationship probably won’t stay good for long. At the end of the second episode, viewers got a good look at three Peter clones in deep freeze somewhere just waiting to awaken and stir up mayhem during sweeps.

Then there’s FBI agent Olivia Dunham, played by Australian Anna Torv with a wavering American accent. Olivia is a typical J.J. Abrams heroine: serious, hard-working, both beautiful and brainy, and loaded down with a ton of angst. In the first episode of “Fringe,” Olivia risked her own life and sanity (via submerging herself in a tub of ice cold water, letting Walter hook her brain up to electrodes, and loading up on LSD) to find a cure for her partner and boyfriend John after he was poisoned by a chemical spill. She succeeded only, oops, her boyfriend was a traitor and she had to shoot him dead again.

So Olivia cries a lot, when she isn’t acting like a tough FBI agent and investigating wacky cases with weird gadgets invented by an evil corporation. Little does she know that this evil corporation has revived her traitorous ex and Zombie John is being kept on ice, probably so he can come back and battle Clone Peter in the aforementioned sweeps episodes, a la “Alias,” which also had zombies, clones, evil corporations and mad scientists.

This is a J.J. Abrams series. It’s what he does. And even if I know where he’s going with this, I also know that  no one does it better.

Andrea Johnson is a staff writer for The Minot Daily News