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" Oh, you watch Scandal? Good for you. Here&amp;#039;s a cookie. Let&amp;#039;s talk in 2021. Me, I still watch Grey&amp;#039;s Anatomy, all these ten seasons later, and I&amp;#039;m still McLovin&amp;#039; it. Patrick Dempsey&amp;#039;s never-fail hair and Ellen Pompeo&amp;#039;s almost-over-a-cold voice are part of one of the longest relationships in my life: we&amp;#039;ll celebrate nine years next month. And, if Pompeo and Dempsey&amp;#039;s freshly renewed contracts are any indication, we have at least another two seasons before we must part. Yet, while ratings are still high, my personal Grey&amp;#039;s compatriots (best friends from college, a former cubicle mate, Twitter) seem to have fallen off. So why haven&amp;#039;t I? I could say I&amp;#039;m a Thursday-night faithful because the show is progressive and sharp in all the right ways: a diverse cast, sociopolitical storylines, and the organizational fortitude to fire an important cast member when he acts like an intolerant butthead. (How&amp;#039;s that career thing going, Isaiah Washington?) I might suffer liberal guilt if I stopped watching. Which is true. But the simpler, tawdrier truth is, I just fucking love a good soap opera, and that&amp;#039;s what Grey&amp;#039;s remains, all these years later. We are a culture who kept Guiding Light, One Life to Live, and Days of Our Lives on the air for decades, despite unbelievable subplots involving time travel, spiritual possession and doppelganger swamp creatures. So why would we abandon a show in which a medical plane crashes with all of the most important doctors on board, kills two beloved lead characters, and leaves the survivors to sue themselves into owning the hospital where they work? We become deeply attached to these people, watching them get shot, almost drown, get in car, bus and ambulance crashes \u2014 and I&amp;#039;m talking about the doctors, never mind the patients who suffer from every imaginable crisis on WebMD (and twice as many unimaginable ones). Cristina is Meredith&amp;#039;s person; this cast is our people. Here are ten reasons \u2014 ticked off by season \u2014 to love and appreciate our dear Grey&amp;#039;s, which comes back for the second half of season 10 on Feb. 27. 1. It&amp;#039;s Totally Cool to Have Casual Sex, And Lots of It. It&amp;#039;s tempting to cite Meredith (Pompeo) and Derek&amp;#039;s (Dempsey) one-night-stand and budding romance as an essential throughline, but isn&amp;#039;t that a little too obvious? Instead, I&amp;#039;m voting for the STD running rampant among the Seattle Grace interns in the season finale, &amp;quot;Who&amp;#039;s Zoomin&amp;#039; Who?&amp;quot; which scored 22 million viewers. For one, the episode&amp;#039;s record ratings confirmed Grey&amp;#039;s Anatomy as a mega-hit. For two, the STD epidemic sets up the show&amp;#039;s most necessary trope: that all the doctors are gonna be boning each other, all the time, forever and ever, amen. 2. You&amp;#039;ll Always Remember the Snappy One-liners. Season two is the ONE time when Meredith and Derek&amp;#039;s relationship is a crux and not a constant, and it&amp;#039;s because of the smallest slice of script in &amp;quot;Much Too Much,&amp;quot; when Derek is deciding whether to carry on with Meredith or try to work out his marriage with Addison (Kate Walsh). &amp;quot;Pick me, choose me, love me,&amp;quot; is a classic line of dialogue, and I mean among all television and film lines \u2014 right up there with &amp;quot;You had me at hello&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;She rescues him right back.&amp;quot; And the way Ellen Pompeo speaks it \u2014 urgently, breathily, ever so twee-ly \u2014 is quintessential Grey&amp;#039;s.  3. Still Hungry? You Get a Spinoff for Dessert. Season 3 moves at such a frenetic pace that it&amp;#039;s tough to isolate one important moment: Izzie (Katherine Heigl), still recovering from Denny&amp;#039;s death, has an affair with George (T.R. Knight), who is married to Callie (Sara Ramirez); Meredith almost drowns; Mark (Eric Dane) and Derek and like 17 other doctors are competing for the Chief of Surgery spot, including Burke (Isaiah Washington), who leaves Cristina (Sandra Oh) at the altar (IRL, that was Grey&amp;#039;s leaving Isaiah at the altar). But because of the chaos, in &amp;quot;The Other Side of This Life (Part I)&amp;quot; Addison realizes she needs to get the hell out of dodge, thus she flees to Southern California, setting up the premise for what would be the very successful Private Practice spinoff (which I also watched &amp;#039;til the very end). 4. There&amp;#039;s So Much Man-Meat. In season 4, Katherine Heigl began to get on our collective nerves, both with her off-set backbiting of the show&amp;#039;s writers, and with Izzie&amp;#039;s increasingly boring presence (not unrelated!). But let&amp;#039;s raise a glass to Grey&amp;#039;s two biggest man-hos, Alex (Justin Chambers) and Mark. If Alex weren&amp;#039;t grouchily sleeping around (In &amp;quot;Forever Young,&amp;quot; he starts a thing with Lexie (Chyler Leigh)) and Mark weren&amp;#039;t cheerfully doing the same (In &amp;quot;The Becoming&amp;quot; his promiscuity is to blame for a new kiss-and-tell policy at the hospital), we would be missing a lot of great plots. 5. Primetime Civil Rights. Need I Say More? What&amp;#039;s the most excruciating way to write an ungrateful actress off your show? Give her brain cancer, then cure her of it and show her the door so that the audience doesn&amp;#039;t even need to mourn. This is the beginning of Izzie&amp;#039;s long goodbye, though she&amp;#039;d not gone until season 6. Meanwhile, hello, Arizona (Jessica Capshaw), a key character to season 5. Callie had been exploring her lesbian feelings in season 4, but when Arizona starts flirting with her in &amp;quot;Beat Your Heart Out,&amp;quot; a homosexual relationship becomes a series regular. 6. When Familiar Faces Stagnate, There Will Be Fresh Blood. Hands down, &amp;quot;Invasion&amp;quot; brings the best part of season 6: a merger between Seattle Grace and Mercy West, which means a much-needed infusion of new characters and new drama. Out of this we get one of my favorites, the sexy-eyed Jackson (Jesse Williams), who makes it to series-regular status along with April (Sarah Drew). 7. The Writers Take Chances (Even With Bad Ideas)\u2026 Let me just say: I did not like this episode, but &amp;quot;Song Beneath the Song&amp;quot; was a musical, starring Callie and songs by Snow Patrol, The Fray and other current rock-pop hits. It was weird, and way outside the scope of a medical drama (this was also the season of a &amp;quot;documentary&amp;quot; episode, which works much better with the genre). But it shook things up. 8. \u2026And They&amp;#039;ll Take Even Greater Risks With Ideas That Matter. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s Gone,&amp;quot; which aired directly after the season 8 premiere, is exactly what I&amp;#039;m talking about when I say Grey&amp;#039;sconfronts some controversial subject matter head-on. Several seasons ago, Cristina has an ectopic pregnancy, though she had been contemplating having an abortion. This time, during a new unplanned pregnancy, now with Owen, her husband who has stated he wants kids, Cristina decides she wants an abortion. And she goes through with it, no miscarriage, no moralistic-feeling complications. Recappers called it a &amp;quot;primetime abortion,&amp;quot; and they weren&amp;#039;t wrong \u2014 this show is brave. 9. Chandra Wilson. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) is the one character I haven&amp;#039;t mentioned yet. But she&amp;#039;s essential, and not only to the cast composition (she&amp;#039;s no-nonsense &amp;quot;The Nazi&amp;quot; boss), but because she directs episodes as well, starting in season 6. In season 9, she gets two episodes \u2014 &amp;quot;Second Opinion&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Transplant Wasteland&amp;quot; \u2014 neither of which is a watershed hour, but neither are they throwaways. 10. There Are Plenty of Happy Endings\u2026 Probably. Grey&amp;#039;s is among the TV shows experimenting with split-season, year-round programming, so half of season 10&amp;#039;s 24 episodes aired before Christmas. Sandra Oh is leaving after season 10, which I think is a huge blow to the show, though I know Cristina has her haters. But what I hope happens this season is that she doesn&amp;#039;t get killed off. Almost every major character who leaves goes via the reaper \u2014 George, Lexie, Mark, almost Izzie. They can&amp;#039;t come back, unlike on other soaps, where people return from the dead on the regular. So, I&amp;#039;m hoping Cristina simply leaves, alive, and happy. (And that Shonda Rhimes and Co. leave the door open, just in case... ). And if April doesn&amp;#039;t go through with the wedding so she and Jackson can be together forever, a la Meredith and Derek, I won&amp;#039;t be mad. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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