[Bring back Preston Xavier Burke!]

i like this article. hee. =D

SPOTLIGHT: SHADES OF “GREY’S”

The Anatomy of ABC’s Hottest New Drama
The New Physician, May-June 2006

by Linda Childers	Volume 55, Issue 4

It’s early morning, and Dr. Preston Burke, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Seattle Grace Hospital, is exiting the operating room after a particularly grueling procedure.

The surgery had gone well, and Burke is in good spirits. When he encounters his girlfriend, surgical intern Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh), in the on-call room, they share a steamy kiss.

The next day, back in Hollywood, Burke’s alter ego, actor Isaiah Washington, gets a call from a real-life surgeon at a local hospital. The doctor praises Washington’s performance on the hit television show, “Grey’s Anatomy,” but he also offers some friendly advice.

“He said no self-respecting surgeon would walk around the hospital wearing a stethoscope,” Washington says with a smile. “And then he chided Burke for disobeying hospital rules and dating an intern.”

Averaging 20 million viewers each episode, “Grey’s” is the fifth-ranked show in all of prime-time television and the fourth among the most upscale audience—viewers earning $100,000 or more—according to Nielsen Media Research.

The show features voice-over narration by the character of Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), and follows the personal and professional lives of her surgical intern peers. The show mixes medical sensibility with overt sexuality, making it a primetime hit on which everyone—including most medical students and residents—has formed an opinion.

“It’s pretty inaccurate medically, but a lot of fun to watch socially,” says Mary Elizabeth Tetzlaff, a second-year pediatrics resident at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.

ACTING CHIEF

To prepare for his role as the cool and extremely talented Burke, Washington spent three months job-shadowing physicians in several Los Angeles hospitals. He continues to call upon local surgeons for technical advice to ensure his character is accurately portrayed. “I certainly don’t know everything about being a doctor,” he concedes, “but I’ve learned a lot about their behavior and how they respond to death and trauma.”

An actor with more than 20 years of experience, Washington takes pride in thoroughly researching his roles. From the beginning, he knew the kind of surgeon he didn’t want to portray: an arrogant, standoffish, token-African-American doctor.

“I want to appear honest and credible in the eyes of viewers who actually do this for a living,” he says. “I didn’t want to be put on a successful show and just be put in a box. My goal is to make being a heart surgeon cool because everybody can’t be Kobe Bryant.”

Washington admits his character has morphed into a kinder, gentler Burke since the beginning of the show. “He did start out sort of stone-faced,” he admits. “But he’s evolved into an effective leader and someone who learns how to love and be loved.”

Surprisingly enough, Washington initially auditioned for the role of Dr. Derek Shepherd, played by Patrick Dempsey. He didn’t land the part, but Shonda Rimes, the show’s creator, offered him the role of Dr. Burke, with the promise that he could make the role his own.

“Isaiah played Burke as someone who intensely loves his job,” Rimes says. “He brought a sense of honor to what Burke does. And with Isaiah, suddenly there was a sexiness to the role, an intelligence and a wit.”

To research his role as a cardiothoracic surgeon, Washington observed several open-heart surgeries, practiced suturing on a fake arm, and learned to mimic even the subtlest nuances of surgeons, such as attaching his wristwatch to his scrubs before surgery. His research and diligence have earned him the respect of local doctors and fellow cast members.

“If I had to pick someone from the cast to perform surgery, it would be Dr. Burke,” says Kate Walsh, who plays Dr. Addison Shepherd. “He thoroughly researches each procedure he has to perform, and he has the steadiest hands.”

ONE WACKY HOSPITAL

But the steamy scenes between his character and Yang is one area where his real-life M.D. counterparts have hesitated to offer him advice. “All the doctors I’ve spoken with adamantly deny that extracurricular activities take place in the on-call room,” Washington grins.

But that’s exactly what sets “Grey’s Anatomy” apart from other medical shows—its mixture of medicine and a large dose of personal relationships. Rimes is quick to point out that “Grey’s” is not a medical drama per se, but a relationship show set in a hospital.

A self-proclaimed “medical junkie,” Rimes briefly considered going to medical school before realizing that she was scientifically challenged. Before penning the show’s first episodes, she conducted her own extensive research, calling on friends like Dr. Karen Pike, a fellow Dartmouth alumna, to review scripts.

In addition, Rimes and the show’s other writers rely on a bevy of medical experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health to help keep the episodes real. Surgical nurse Linda Klein serves as the show’s on-set technical adviser and medical producer, routinely coaching cast members through the detailed procedures they simulate on each episode. As a bonus for fans, The “Grey’s Anatomy” section of the ABC Web site lists all of the medical procedures covered in past shows, as well as a writers’ blog explaining the rationale behind some of the episodes (abc.go.com/primetime/greysanatomy/ writers.html).

The show’s first-year surgical residents have already confronted the death of a woman with a 60-pound tumor, extracted a set of keys from a man who swallowed them when his wife threatened to leave him and survived a “Code Black” in the operating room. Real-life residents say it’s a good thing they don’t routinely face the same challenges as the cast of “Grey’s.”

“Thank God there aren’t affairs with attending physicians, people having sex in call rooms and patients with live bombs inside their chest cavities,” says Tetzlaff. “If we had to work through everything that takes place on the show, our hospital would be an inefficient place to work.”

Tetzlaff admits that she, like many medical students and residents she knows, rarely misses an episode, even if the show does draw a fine line between fact and fantasy. One clunky conceit of “Grey’s,” she notes, is that “surgeons are consultants at most hospitals—not the primary caretakers of most patients.” Nevertheless, “the show accurately portrays the amount of time spent at the hospital and the closeness you feel with residents in your class. However, the lack of professionalism among the doctors who fraternize with one another is inaccurate.”

Some episodes in particular have struck chords with physicians-in-training viewers. “One of the most memorable shows featured Meredith having issues with a child who needed a heart transplant,” Tetzlaff says. “It was pretty accurate in that the child was angry at his mom for praying to get the transplant when, in essence, she was praying for someone else to die to give it to him. I thought it was one of the more realistic plots, and it showed a lot of insight.”

WAY OF THE VA-JAY-JAY

Rimes is passionate that the “Grey’s” cast represents real-world diversity. That’s why there is a black chief of surgery and numerous women preparing to become surgeons.

Overseeing the show’s residents is Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson), a relentless drill sergeant who is referred to as “the Nazi” by the interns at Seattle Grace. “Bailey is an African-American female surgeon working in a field composed primarily of white men,” Wilson says of her character. “She has the odds stacked against her, so she’s developed a certain thickness of skin and feels she needs to work extra hard to prove herself.”

Wilson not only takes pains to portray Bailey as a fearless leader; she also has observed several surgeries to ensure that Bailey is seen as a skillful physician. One of her most memorable experiences was watching as surgeons performed bypass surgery on an infant girl born with two holes in her heart.

“The first thing I noticed when I walked into an operating room was how calm everyone was,” Wilson says. “I expected chaos, but everyone was entirely focused on the patient. Nothing mattered except their tiny patient, and how they were going to repair the holes in her heart.”

Watching actual surgeries not only gave Wilson a crash course in surgical procedures, it also cured her of any squeamishness. “When Linda Klein, our medical adviser, brings in chitterlings for me to practice doing a GI procedure with, I don’t even flinch,” she says. “I’m more concerned with how I need to hold my hands, and what part of the body I’m suturing together. I don’t want to shame the medical profession!”

Jacquelyn Jackson, a second-year at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School—who has yet to miss an episode of “Grey’s”—says she identifies most with Wilson’s character. “She’s the doctor I aspire to be. Like me, she’s juggling motherhood with her work as a doctor. I’m interested in seeing how she balances both of these important roles.”

Since the cast often works long hours (14-hour days are typical), playing a fatigued surgeon isn’t that much of a stretch. But unlike their real-life counterparts, the doctors on “Grey’s” will never appear disheveled—each cast member’s scrubs are perfectly tailored to their bodies by the costume department. They have darts, tucks and are made with Lycra. “Fortunately, we wear masks during surgery, so if we slur our words at the end of the day, we can go back and correct the scene later,” Wilson says.

Perhaps one of Wilson’s most memorable turns was the Feb. 12, 2006, show in which her character gave birth. (In real life, the actress had her first child, Michael, in October 2005.) The episode entered the annals of pop-culture history when Wilson introduced a new euphemism for a part of the female anatomy: “va-jay-jay.”

“For every 30 times you can say ‘penis’ on television, you can only say ‘vagina’ once,” Rimes explained in a recent interview with TV Guide. “All the other words that people use seem so childlike and insulting. It’s the kind of hip slang that Bailey would use, and the proof of that is we’ve heard from a lot of people that women all over the country have started saying it.”

So what’s up next for the interns of Seattle Grace? Cast members are forbidden to reveal any juicy tidbits, so stay tuned.

Or, as Rimes has often said, “If we tell you, we’ll have to kill you.”