Grey’s Anatomy, Progression Fantasy, and the Cross-Genre Appeal of Tropes

This isn’t something I broadcast on the regular, but I have actually watched a lot of Grey’s Anatomy. None of it was by choice, which makes it all the weirder to me that I’m as invested in the show as I am. Now, I attribute this at least partially to some kind of narrative Stockholm Syndrome, but at a certain point I kind of have to admit that I just kinda like the show.

And the more I’ve thought about this, the more I think I can pinpoint the exact thing that made the show really clicked for me.

At the point where I was dragged into watching the show, most of the big names of the cast were all major department heads. Miranda Bailey was the Chief of Surgery, Meredith Grey was the Head of General Surgery, Alex was the Head of Pediatric Surgery, and so on. (If you don’t know who those people are, doesn’t matter, just go with it, this’ll all make sense in a second.) And then, after an indeterminate amount of time spent on then-modern Grey’s Anatomy, my partner at the time, the one who actually watched this show, decided to go back and start watching the early episodes. The first episodes.

And suddenly, the characters I’d passively gotten used to seeing as established, renowned, and successful people were . . . babies. Nobodies. Interns at the absolute bottom of the hospital’s food chain. They were young, confident, but still with so much to learn. And suddenly, I wasn’t just watching a bunch of doctors be bad people to each other (another rant for another time), I was watching these characters on a journey from the absolute bottom to the absolute top.

And that was absolutely spell-binding.

At its core, I argue that Grey’s Anatomy is not about medicine. Not really. What it’s about is a group of professionals’ interpersonal (often romantic) relationships, the struggles and triumphs of their professional advancement, and how those two things interplay with each other in their day to day lives. You could replace the hospital stuff with anything, and that core idea, the core identity of those characters and their struggles, would still be appealing.

I don’t actually care about cardiothoracic surgery, but I absolutely cared about someone as ambitious, talented, and uniquely twisted as Christina Yang becoming better and better at what she does, learning from multiple mentors, and eventually coming into her own as the top dog of her specialty. But I would be just as invested, if not more, if she was a writer. Or a hacktivist. Or a fantasy adventurer.

Speaking of fantasy, if you take the core structure of Grey’s Anatomy, rip out everything hospital related, and replace it with some fantasy setting full of magic and punch-ups like what I’d probably cook up, then you’ve essentially just come up with progression fantasy—which is, not-so-incidentally, one of my new favorite subgenres.

And I just find it so fascinating that something like Grey’s Anatomy and—just throwing out an example—Super Powereds by Drew Hayes could look on the surface like completely different things (medical drama vs superhero school story), and yet underneath the hood have, at least for me, the exact same core appeal and the exact same driving structure. Whether it’s Meredith Grey growing as a surgeon to overtake the shadow of her mother, or Vince Reynolds training to become a superhero in memory of his father, it’s the same dance. We just picked a different song to do it to and changed the tile on the dance floor.

And now I’m back to talking about fanfiction

This all ties into a broader idea I’ve had regarding storytelling for a while now that I imagine somebody has found a more official-sounding term for (like my Layers of Engagement post) but which I refer to as The Bones.

During my fanfiction days, I frequently indulged in alternate-universe fics both as a writer and reader, and that inevitably lead to me thinking about how to properly construct them.

And the notion I hit on is that the components of a story—setting, characters, plot, all that Secondary Layer jazz—have certain bones to them. Things structurally essential to the very idea of what it is, and that everything else was so much wallpaper and set dressing that could be swapped out while still retaining the core. We’ve already talked about this in the Grey’s example. The medical stuff is set dressing. You could swap it all out, replace it with working in a coffee shop, and it would still be the same story with the same core appeal. It would just be a lot funnier because five people dedicating themselves to the long, arduous journey of becoming a skilled and renowned barista just doesn’t quite lend itself to being taken as seriously as surgical careers do. Although the active shooter episode would probably still be a nail biter.

Just as a different example, you can strip Batman down to his bones and rebuild him as a detective hunting jack the ripper, or a cowboy, or the Greek god Hades.

Certain characters and story structures just work, regardless of the wallpaper you wrap them in. And I can’t help but wonder if this might be the key to broadening our horizons while still finding satisfaction. The vast majority of the fiction that I tour in is speculative. Science fiction, fantasy, and whatever strange middle ground superhero stories occupy (maybe a topic for another post). But I wonder if I might find more stories I can get invested in outside my typical wheelhouse—more Grey’s Anatomys—if instead of choosing stories based on the wallpaper, I start looking for stories that have the bones of what I like, regardless of set dressing.

If someone can point me to a story about young outcasts banding together to face down the adversity inflicted upon them by the terrible adults in their lives, for example, I might just find something to fill the Persona 5-shaped whole in my life, now that I’ve beaten it, Royal, and Strikers. Or, in opposite, if someone can actually find me a story that has the same balance of romance and professional advancement that Grey’s Anatomy has, but in an action-oriented setting as opposed to a medical one, I’d be super jazzed and probably sell two weeks of my life to whoever wrote it.

Not just because I’d read/watch the shit out of it, but because if I can’t find it, I’ll have to write it myself, and I’ve already got my plate full in that department for the next year or two.