Makenna Janower
April 14th, 2017
Section 002
Final Essay- “A Hard Day’s Night”, Greys Anatomy; Season 1, Episode 1
“I can’t think of any one reason why I want to be a surgeon, but I can think of
1,000 reasons why I should quit. They make it hard on purpose. There are lives in our
hands.” Greys Anatomy is a dramatic and romantic television series that highlights the
struggles and lives of working at Seattle Grace Hospital. By showing the romance and
drama in the medical-based show, Greys Anatomy also becomes valuable and useful
for analysis. I will summarize this episode, analyze it using both the Story Telling
Method and the Race and Ethnicity Method, bring in an outside source to make further
comments, and evaluate how it supports hegemony and ideology to describe typical
American television.
Summary
The episode begins with Derek Shepard (attending) waking up after a night spent
at Meredith Grey’s house, who happens to be late for her first day as an intern at
Seattle Grace Hospital, the same hospital Derek works at. The group of interns who are
under the supervision of resident, Bailey (also known as “The Nazi”) includes, Meredith
Grey, Christina Yang, George O’Malley, and Isobel Stevens. Their first patient, Katie
Bryce, is having seizures so Bailey assigns each intern a specific job. While Meredith
goes to find a real doctor to talk to Katie’s parents, she ends up running into Derek,
Meredith insists on saying nothing happened and walks away. George’s job is to do
work-ups and gets assigned the first surgery, but messes up under another doctor’s
watch (Preston Burke). He is then given the nickname 007 (license to kill). Katie isn’t
getting better and Derek offers that the intern who finds out the cause of her seizures
will get to scrub in on the surgery. Meredith and Christina figure out Katie has an
aneurysm, and Derek picks Meredith for the surgery. Meredith’s mother is one of the
greatest surgeons and everyone thinks that was why she got the surgery. They
complete the surgery successfully; Meredith and Christina make up. The episode ends
with Meredith leaving to go tell a woman about her first day and an Alzheimer’s home.
The woman is her mother, Ellis Grey who is struggling with Alzheimer’s.
Story Telling Method
This text is evident that it is in the dramatic-romantic genre of television because
every episode a character is hooking up with another character and there is always a
climatic event that is happening. The subject of this text is the interns because it is there
