'Grey's Anatomy,' 'In Treatment' And Pandemic-Related TV Are Exhausting But Necessary

On shows like "Grey's Anatomy" and "In Treatment," it would have been a disservice to ignore reality and to tell audiences it's OK to look away.

In March, I had one of those “taking stock of things” moments when I least expected it. It was Month 13 of the pandemic, and somehow I was watching the 17th season of a TV drama that had become aggressively about the pandemic, in which the title character had contracted COVID-19. One indicator of the severity of her condition was measuring the physical distance between her and the ghost of her dead husband on a beach in her COVID-induced dreams. A year and a half ago, nothing in those sentences would have made any sense.  For most of this season of ABC’s never-ending “Grey’s Anatomy,” Dr. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), no stranger to perilous experiences, teetered between life and death while her fellow surgeons at Grey Sloan Memorial contended with the grim realities of the pandemic. The four major characters who have died over the course of “Grey’s” returned as ghosts in her dreamscape — most prominently her dead husband, Ghost McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey). It says a lot about both “Grey’s” and the hellscape of the last 15 months that even its fan-service elements, designed to offset the exhausting experience of watching real life unfold in the universe of the show, soon did not feel escapist. The ghosts’ presence, especially the recurrence of Ghost McDreamy, usually meant bad news. After I briefly tuned out during the scene when the correlation between his proximity and Meredith’s condition became crystal clear, I hit the pause button to confirm that, yes, he did move significantly closer to her, yelled at my screen in frustration and then thought that my reaction comically encapsulated just how much the pandemic has broken my brain. I have assiduously avoided most shows that have heavily incorporated the pandemic. Yet I find myself admiring the hell out of the few shows I’ve happened to watch whose writers and producers specifically chose not to shy away from reality, even when their choices didn’t always land. More than a decade after its original run ended, HBO revived “In Treatment” because the network’s executives thought that viewers would need a show about therapy right now. Though the pandemic and the racial uprisings are not the sole focus of the characters’ therapy sessions, the effects of the isolation and burnout created by it all are always there, even in scenes where the characters don’t explicitly discuss them.