Knowing when enough is enough …

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Thursday is quite a busy night for television, especially quality television. 30 Rock, The Office, and Lost all within a two-hour period. It’s hard enough keeping up with those shows on a regular basis, trying to follow any more would be quite difficult. Considering myself someone who likes to overcome the difficult, I’ve been following Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy as well this season. After the latest installments of both shows, I’ve realized that I now have definitive proof that I am an psychological masochist.

These shows are clear cases that I don’t know how to quit a television show. As I’ve said at other points on this blog, I’m a television addict and I’m Irish-Catholic, which makes quitting especially hard for me. As Matt Damon’s character, in The Departed, says to his girlfriend, “If we’re not gonna make it, it’s gotta be you that gets out, cause I’m not capable. I’m fucking Irish, I’ll deal with something being wrong for the rest of my life.” Once I get into a television show, which usually takes five or six episodes, I’m in it till the end. I just can’t quit, I’m with it until that show decides to end the relationship or, as is more often the case, is canceled. Both Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy are past their prime, yet I can’t stop myself from keeping up with them on a weekly basis.

Watching Grey’s for any stretch of time required quite a suspension of disbelief. You had to take with a grain of salt the fact that these characters could do anything short of blowing up the hospital and still keep their jobs. That said, the first two seasons were amazing. While a touch melodramatic, the story lines were compelling and kept you hooked. Not only that, the show was all forward motion, it didn’t dally and dither in dead ends.

Scrubs was similarly great in the beginning, though it never achieved the popularity that Grey’s Anatomy enjoys. It had an absurdist sensibility that made it hilarious, but the characters were the cause of forward momentum. It was a comedy with a heart, and in its own way, it was an influence on The Office, another comedy that does not shy away from emotion.

Saying that both of these shows have jumped the shark is not a point worth arguing. It is impossible for anyone to say that Grey’s has the cultural relevance that it once did. Remember, this is the show that launched a thousand Mc’s, from McDreamy to McSteamy to McVet. Even those who didn’t watch the show would understand the references. It was a cultural force to be reckoned with.

There are many moments that could be pointed to as the moment when the show jumped the shark. The three-part ferry crash is probably the most obvious. Devoting three hours of television to one of these catastrophes, the kind that later seasons of ER has excelled at, and dragging out story lines to the point of absurdity. Meredith drowning, Izzie putting a drill into a man’s skull, and the emergence of Eva the disfigured amnesiac.

The real problem for the show has been one character, Izzie, played by the charming Katherine Heigl. She has become a nagging, self-involved, holier than thou, train wreck. This started way back in the second season. When she fell for a patient I began to have doubts about her. At that time it was possible to overlook it because the other characters were so compelling. But as they became more and more predictable, it became more and more difficult to overlook the inanity of Izzie. When she eventually put him in mortal peril in order to move him to the top of the transplant list, well that was the last straw for me. Izzie had to go. She has yet to do anything since then to make me change my mind.

Over at his blog “What’s Alan Watching,” the television critic for the Newark Star-Ledger, Alan Sepinwall clearly enumerated what has been wrong with the past two seasons of the show:

Look, I get that the competitive nature of a surgical residency is one of the key components of the series, and in general I like those moments when Cristina or Karev treats the latest case as nothing more than another rung on the ladder. But between Izzy torturing Cheech and Meredith taking out her own romantic hang-ups on her patient and his poor wife (even though she was right), I feel like [creator] Shonda [Rhimes] took things too far. There’s passive disinterest in your patients as human beings and then there’s actively causing them harm because of your own neuroses, and the latter just makes me hate these people even more, whether or not they appeared to learn their lesson at the end.

These characters have slowly but surely morphed into horrible horrible people. They have no care for anyone else around them, and without empathy it is difficult to be empathetic to the situations that these characters find themselves in.

Scrubs has also suffered from a case of melodrama. The problems with Scrubs are essentially the same that plague Grey’s Anatomy, though on a much smaller scale. I may cringe while watching Scrubs, but I’ve yet to become as enraged and frustrated as Grey’s Anatomy has made me. The Izzie of Scrubs would most definitely be Zach Braff’s JD, the epitome of whiny annoyingness.

Lucky for me, Scrubs only has one season remaining, next year on ABC. Grey’s, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to be ending anytime soon. Which means that I am in store for a quite bit more masochism.

So, what shows can’t you stop watching, no matter how bad or painful it becomes?

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Tags: 30 Rock, ABC, Grey's Anatomy, Lost, NBC, Scrubs, The Office