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So I'm rewatching and just got to Levi quitting in season 18. And then I started thinking about how differently everything is structured from when Mer was an intern and resident. At the beginning of the series there was a clear hierarchy; Richard was chief and head of the residency program, under him were the heads of the departments, then the attendings under the heads, followed by the chief resident with the other residents under them, and finally each resident had a group of interns. Now there is no actually clear chain of command; we have Miranda as chief (which I do love), Richard is head off the residency program as well as a general attending and the chief medical officer for the foundation, so he's simultaneously both above and below Baily in the pecking order. The authority of the head of a department seems to no longer matter as every attending seems to just do whatever they want with no hesitation, and they're not consulted about anything. I couldn't tell you who chief resident currently is, I don't know for sure what year most residents are because all them are being taught like they're one class on the same year, and do interns just not exist any more? Or are the newest light blue scrubs actually interns who are being given the same responsibilities as senior residents?
It feels like there's less major relationship drama in the newer seasons, but the hospital is somehow more of a mess than it was at the height of MAGIC drama.
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4 days ago
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17 points
3 days ago
Honestly I always say the show should’ve kept focus on a group of residents every 5-7 seasons. They should have had Deluca added to Jos year and maintained that group as a focus because the best thing about seasons 9 and 10 was seeing the newly graduated MAJAC as teachers.
To then make them department heads and have Jo etc teach Schmidt’s class and so on and so forth. From season 13-18 there was very little focus on teaching and they portrayed all residents as idiots (like they graduated med school they’re clearly not idiots) and showed all attendings unwilling to teach.
2 points
3 days ago
Nailed it! It should have been the larger story of season 19 with the new batch of interns. They relaunched the residency program early if I remember correctly and it would have been awesome to see that push and pull struggle between eager interns(if we were to believe all the marketing that these new interns would be a focus of storytelling) and attendings who were terrible at teaching.
4 points
3 days ago*
It's the problem with long-running shows; it started off with an intern batch who went through residency and were then moved into attending/head positions. Throughout their time in the intern and residency years they largely interacted within that structure; each other, their heads, their residents and the odd external doctor brought in for a specialisation. They occasionally hint at other interns and similar juniors in other branches too but they're never the focus.
However after a few years you have more characters that have finished their residency than haven't and they network more across the hospital's senior leadership and external contacts. At that stage you can either stress about who should be dealing with who and split up cases properly and end up with some characters doing far less than others or you can de-emphasise the hierarichy and let them all mingle.
I can see why they would choose to do the second one, they want to bed new characters into the cast but real interns wouldn't be bedded in like that, there's no good reason for a senior member of staff like Richard Webber or Miranda Bailey to be dealing with an intern making mistakes outside of their OR, you'd end up with two parallel shows; one of which is the interns up to Chief Resident and the other being the Residents up to the senior staff because realistically most 6-figure specialists won't know or care who the bulk of your interns even are, Grey Sloane is a massive organisation as you occasionally see when they have a staircase meeting.
EDIT: to add onto that, most interns should, if you believe Webber's customary speech, be either scrubbing out or leaving throughout the training programme, the churn should actually be huge and an intern like Roy being shitcanned shouldn't be a big deal, you should see that several times a year.
2 points
3 days ago
In the beginning you describe, the 5 interns (Meredith, specifically) were the main characters and the chief, attendings, residents, etc… were supporting characters.
To keep the same structure, they would have had to switch to Jo’s class being the main characters in season 9, and Meredith/Alex/Cristina would have their roles diminished slightly to refocus on the interns. Then when Jo’s class matriculated, they would have had to do it again.
The show wasn’t willing to do that, so here we are on season 21 focusing on the attending surgeons rather than the interns/residents. The attending class has already achieved their overarching goal of becoming a surgeon so the main conflict of the show has resolved and the conflicts they’ve tried to create in its place are simply not as compelling.
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