TV critic Andrew Wallenstein’s commentary on Dr. Hahn’s departure from Grey’s Anatomy is one of the best I’ve heard so far, and you can now listen to it in its entirety on the NPR website. He starts off by addressing the issue that has bothered me the most about the firing of actress Brooke Smith — namely, that it doesn’t make sense for a show that is overrun with one-dimensional characters played by so-so actors to get rid of an interesting character played by a talented actress.
In Wallenstein’s words:
“What’s most unfortunate is Hahn may have been the most richly drawn character the show ever yielded. Finely played by a respected character actor like Brooke Smith, Dr. Hahn’s sexual awakening provided what’s otherwise a pretty vacuous soap opera some real moments of dramatic heft.”
He also hits just the right note when he goes after ABC at the end of the piece, giving a nod to all the ways gays currently exist on TV (as cuddly daytime talk show hosts, as comic foils, and as one-time ratings stunts during sweeps) and concluding that “Grey’s may have been doing something more provocative by normalizing a gay relationship.” Until they screwed it all up, of course.
Six years later, Buffy fans are still angry about Tara’s death.
Last week I was a tad pessimistic about tonight’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy; I thought there was a chance from the preview that Erica Hahn’s mangled corpse might be wheeled into Seattle Grace. While common sense would dictate the last thing the Grey’s writers, or ABC for that matter, would want to do right now is piss the gays off even more by dusting off the dread Dead Lesbian cliché, Grey’s Anatomy isn’t a show that’s known for its sensible writing.
What made me think that such a development wasn’t outside the realm of possibility was a flashback I had to the creepy way ER once dispatched of one of its interns (played by Omar Epps), who — as I remember it, but I saw the episode a long time ago and the details are hazy — left work one night and returned hours later as an unidentified (until his beeper went off) patient who’d been run over by a subway train.
Since there had been no resolution to the Callie/Erica storyline, since it had been reported that Brooke Smith would not be appearing in future episodes, and since her character was last seen heading to her car after threatening to bring serious legal action against the hospital, there didn’t seem to be many options for tidily wrapping things up for “Callica” outside of having Erica get hit by a bus or something.
In the end, she wasn’t deemed an important enough character to merit a proper sendoff. Within the first minute or so of tonight’s episode, Cristina, who had a contentious relationship with Erica, flopped into bed with Meredith and Derek to announce that “Hahn is gone.” (Ah, lazy writing. It’s a concept I’m well-acquainted with, as anyone reading this can tell.) She quit following her “no gray area” fight with Callie last week.
As if to compensate for the inevitable “Ding-dong! The witch is dead” joke made at Hahn’s expense, Derek reacted to news of her departure by saying, “It’s too bad, she was really talented.” Erica’s replacement, a cardiothoracic surgeon played by Mary McDonnell, was swiftly introduced; like her predecessor, she instantly rubbed a few coworkers the wrong way, but she has been given an autistic spectrum disorder that will presumably make viewers sympathetic to her in a way they never were to Hahn.
Judging by what we saw tonight, it’s possible that “Callica” could resume contact off screen and viewers could get a Hahn update at some point. It’s unlikely I’ll be tuning into Grey’s Anatomy again anytime soon, so I won’t know about it unless someone mentions it to me.
That’s what Erica Hahn said to her kind-of girlfriend Callie Torres at the end of what was reportedly actress Brooke Smith’s final episode of Grey’s Anatomy. After learning of some all-time rule-breaking involving a misappropriated donor heart that had gone on at the hospital, Hahn told Callie off about right and wrong, black and white, gay and not gay kind of matters, and stalked off.
In other words, nothing was resolved. And we’ve been led to believe that Smith is officially out the door. That ABC wanted her gone faster than that Heather Graham sitcom that was practically canceled before its first commercial break had ended. “Forget about finishing the goddamn Cadillac storyline, or whatever those Internet freaks call it” the network suits presumably said. “Get her out!”
So she’s out. But how does “Callica” end? The preview for next week’s episode, which dramatic voice over narration guy warned is trauma-heavy, included a shot of all the doctors standing around either an operating table or a gurney, looking somber, with Callie apparently sobbing. So, yeah, my guess would be there is no gray area here. Just a large, vast area (yes, I get that that’s redundant) of unmitigated suckiness.
We’ll see.
To cheer up any depressed Hahn fans who might be reading this, I’ve posted a picture of Penelope Cruz looking really dykey and grabbing Salma Hayek’s ass. I know that always makes me feel better when I’m upset about something.
Another day, another opinion about Grey’s Anatomy trying to straighten itself out like a Saturday Night Fever star hooked up to an E-meter. This time it’s Vancouver Sun blogger Shelley Fralic who caught my attention, mostly because I’m not entirely sure what she’s talking about:
Sometimes, even in television, relationships just don’t work out, lesbians and otherwise. And you have to wonder why the ABC executives would be skittish about a gay storyline. It’s not like this one was breaking any new ground: gay relationships are now almost standard fare on TV, and no one much bats an eye over them any more, whether they’re on daytime soaps or on primetime chart-toppers like Will & Grace and Brothers & Sisters.
That, of course, is incorrect. Eyes are still batted, and they’d be batted even more if network television bothered paying attention to lesbians, which they don’t. At all.
TV Guide’s Matt Mitovich, who earlier this week wondered if Brooke Smith’s dismissal from Grey’s Anatomy might fit a newly emerging pattern of ABC eliminating LGBT content from its shows, has now come out with a curiously upbeat appraisal of the move, writing that:
GLAAD may be “disheartened,” but this Grey’s Anatomy fan is thrilled to see the Erica-Callie romance put out of its misery. What was touted over the summer as being daring and informed in its exploration of someone’s coming out instead too often played on-screen as awkward, devoid of chemistry and titillating purely for titillation’s sake (Mark knows Callie’s bits better than she does?). Kudos to Shonda Rhimes for taking a precise scalpel to this romance.
If the reports are accurate, Shonda Rhimes didn’t do anything — ABC did. And that last line of Mitovich’s is so hilariously off-base that at first I assumed he was being facetious. It doesn’t appear that anyone who writes for Grey’s Anatomy is capable of precision; precise writing requires some degree of subtlety, and in Grey’s land they seem to prefer repeatedly knocking their viewers over the head with heavy objects.
Matt Roush, another TV Guide writer who disliked the “Callica” storyline, takes a different tack, criticizing the show’s scribes for their “ick-inducing” treatment of Callie’s sexual confusion and going so far as to question whether Callie can remain a viable character in the wake of it. He parts with the line “I’m not so sure even a miracle worker like Bailey could fix this mess.”
Remember us? We’re the ghosts of ABC’s lesbian past.
TV Guide‘s Matt Mitovich responds to news of Grey’s Anatomy actress Brooke Smith’s firing by suggesting that ABC, previously recognized by GLAAD as America’s most gay-friendly TV network, isn’t showing equal love to all parts of the LGBT community:
Might have this frank exploration of two women coming to terms with new sexual orientations proven too hot for ABC to handle? Smith saw no such signs. “At work I had no sense of it. And more fans seemed to like it than not,” she tells EW. “I don’t think I’m ever going to know [why this happened].”
The answer may be obvious, if one looks at a pattern of recent story “twists” across ABC. Ugly Betty last season introduced with much fanfare Rebecca Romijn as a post-op transgender; now she’s gone. Right out of the gate, Dirty Sexy Money lathered things up by pairing aspiring politician Patrick with a great transgender love; last week, she walked out of his life. So Grey’s writing out a full-fledged lesbian such as Erica — versus the simply lez-curious Callie — would seem to fit this pattern. Meanwhile, gay males such as Brothers & Sisters‘ Kevin appear to go unpestered… at least for now.
Lesbians almost always get fucked over on TV, when they’re on TV at all, so that part of the story isn’t anything new. But for ABC to snuff out Erica Hahn in the wake of eliminating two transgendered characters — and to apparently de-bisexualize Melissa George’s upcoming role as a Seattle Grace intern at the same time? I think it’s fair to say that’s a bit alarming.
It’s a good thing Erica Hahn is a doctor, ’cause she’s about to get thrown under the bus.
When I last wrote aboutGrey’s Anatomy and its horribly botched attempt at a lesbian storyline, I ended my lengthy, lengthy (sorry about that) post with this:
There are people who will always be happy with crap, and there are networks that will always be happy to supply it. Will Grey’s Anatomy continue that trend? We’ll know soon enough.
That was a little more than a week ago. Since then, another episode aired. I had planned on publishing something about it later tonight or tomorrow. The thrust of the post, as presented in its opening line, was going to be “This storyline just isn’t going well at all.” I was going to briefly recap what happened in the episode (you can view the Callie and Erica-oriented scenes online) before moving onto this analysis:
On Grey’s Anatomy, saving lives is easier than having lesbian sex.
We have already established that I have not been a regular viewer of Grey’s Anatomy, that ABC show about Patrick Dempsey’s dimples and Eric Dane’s impressive pecs. (It is also, sometimes, about practicing medicine. And I think it might exist in part to drive viewers over to iTunes. That’s one of two possible explanations for why they showcase so much new music so prominently in each episode; the other is that the people who make TV shows have become so lazy — Nip/Tuck was also guilty of this back when I bothered tuning in — that they’d sooner crank up the music at dramatic moments than create big emotional pay-offs themselves. As long as Jeff Buckley’s rendition of “Hallelujah” keeps being licensed to everyone who asks for it, writers will never have to come up with anything deep and meaningful ever again!)
My reasons for not loyally watching Grey’s are simple: I like good writing (which does exist on Grey’s Anatomy, as far as I can tell, just not with a great deal of consistency), and I’m immune to the charms of hunky male doctors in various states of undress. Every time I’ve seen the show, or parts of the show, it has struck me as little more than a pop culture savvy version of a Harlequin novel, filmed in high-definition.
Having spent yesterday caught up in debate mania, I missed this Times article about the progress openly gay actors have made in landing TV roles. It doesn’t say much that gay viewers don’t already know (the headline is “Out in Hollywood: Starring Roles Are Rare”), but it’s nice to see actors like Bryan Batt of Mad Men and Jasika Nicole of Fringe mentioned alongside the usual suspects like T.R. Knight and Neil Patrick Harris. One thing that caught my eye:
Never before have gay story lines been so prominent. Nor have there ever been so many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters on television — 83 by a recent count from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, not counting reality shows, daytime dramas or gay-oriented cable networks.
Hollywood, with its depictions of cowboy lovers and lesbian neighbors, has done much to make gay men and women part of mainstream American life.
That makes things sound much rosier than they are. Gay characters in general and lesbian characters in particular don’t have nearly the kind of visibility on network television such reporting would have you believe. Or, if you will: There are gays on TV, you just have to strain your neck to see them.
If you haven’t already, you can dig through GLAAD’s findings yourself. For the record, there are currently zero lesbian leading roles to be found in scripted broadcast programming. (We’re typically underrepresented on network reality shows as well.)
In supporting roles you’ll find zero confirmed lesbians, though FOX’s Bones and House each have a bisexual supporting character and ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy has something brewing between the heretofore heterosexual doctors Torres and Hahn. (I’ve already weighed in on that; my expectations are low.) NBC’s Knight Rider, meanwhile, has a supporting character who is either bisexual or lesbian; as AfterElton’s Michael Jensen reports, the creative geniuses behind that show aren’t sure of her orientation. With cancellation looming on the horizon, they’re running out of time to make a decision.
That leaves the recurring character category, the paltriest category of all, and naturally that’s where we make a showing with the town mayor on NBC’s Friday Night Lights and Marge’s sister Patty on The Simpsons. There will also be a lesbian couple on The Goode Family, Mike Judge’s upcoming animated series on ABC, voiced by former SNL-ers Laraine Newman and Julia Sweeney. But never before have gay storylines been so prominent! Yay for gays! That lesbian chic thing has really taken off, hasn’t it?
The French Open starts in a little more than 90 minutes, fellow gays, and that early round action can’t come soon enough. I’ve been bored out of my mind for weeks now, which is why I’ve been giving the Internet the silent treatment. There’s nothing to write about. Fine, so the lesbian world is abuzz with talk of Jodie Foster reportedly ditchingher partner for Melanie Mayron’s partner, but is there anything interesting about any of that?
(I’d like to point out, since I’ve seen a spike in Melanie Mayron-related traffic in the wake of the Foster hullabaloo, that while Mayron has previously opted to have journalists describe her as a single mom rather than acknowledge her long-term relationship with Cynthia Mort, their union was hardly cloaked in a veil of secrecy, so I didn’t exactly out anyone when I wrote what I wrote about her — and I hardly wrote anything at all — back in February.) It only gets interesting if the tabloid feeding frenzy moves Foster to issue a denial or offer some kind of confirmation, and image-conscious as she is, it’s hard to imagine the latter happening anytime soon, assuming there’s any truth to the rumors.
