Iconic patients like Denny Duquette (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Henry Burton (Scott Foley) are permanent fixtures in the hearts and minds of any devoted Grey’s Anatomy fan. While the doctors have always been the main draw of the show, any medical drama junkie knows that the patients we meet can often have just as big of an impact as the smoking-hot surgeons who treat them. However, in recent seasons, Grey’s has been putting far too much weight on the patient storylines and, cruel though it may sound, assuming that we care about them far more than we do.
It’s no secret that the beloved drama has been declining in quality in recent years, as we’re left with a skeleton crew of the original cast members who seem just as reluctant to be there as we are to watch. Given that the main cast’s plotlines have largely been reduced to either boring marital squabbles or sporadic near-death experiences, Grey’s Anatomy now seems hell-bent on introducing us to random patients, letting us know them for 30 minutes, and then expecting us to either sob as they succumb on the OR table to an acoustic version of an already sad song, or cheer with joy when they survive whatever predicament brought them to Grey Sloan in the first place. If this TV titan expects to retain its dwindling popularity, Grey’s needs to stop assuming that I care about random patients as much as I do the doctors I’ve been following for over a decade, because spoiler alert — I don’t.
Now, it’s possible for one-off patients to have a huge impact on the show. One such character is 6-year-old Jessica (Mary-Charles Jones), who won our hearts with her sweet smile and knit purple cap in the Season 5 episode, “Sweet Surrender.” Jessica suffered from Tay-Sachs syndrome, causing her life-threatening seizures. While her father (Elden Henson) tried desperately to extend her life by taking her to Mexico for an experimental treatment, Dr. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) held Jessica in her arms until finally handing her off to her dad for her final, heartbreaking moments. This ending continues to be one of Grey’s Anatomy’s saddest deaths, even though we only knew Jessica and her father for a single episode.
Other memorable patients with limited screen time include Bonnie Crasnoff (Monica Keena), who was one-half of the human skewer caused by a train derailment in Season 2, and Mandy Moore’s Mary Portman, who was with Bailey during the Season 6 shooting, and then sadly never woke up from a successful surgery in an episode the next season. While we had very little time with both of these women, the intense nature of their storylines combined with the actresses’ emotional performances made us fall in love with them quickly, and mourn them when they died.
Unfortunately, Grey’s patients in recent seasons rarely have the same kind of power over us. In the Season 20 episode, “Walk on the Ocean,” for example, we meet a guy who is clearly supposed to hold our attention as he’s brought into the ambulance bay impaled on steel pipes in a giant homemade watercraft. He cries about how much he loves his wife and then, unsurprisingly, dies on the operating table later in the episode while the doctors look on sadly, and mournful music underscores the moment.
However, the character (like so many of the patients these days) was never quite compelling enough for us to care about his death. Even when we meet his devastated wife, played by an actress who gives it her all but yields no tears, it’s still just another example of Grey’s trying to cling to the emotional potency it used to have.
Perhaps realizing that old Grey’s was the best Grey’s, in Season 19, the show decided to give us an underwhelming blast from the past by virtually recycling the Denny Duquette storyline from Season 2. In Episode 17, “Come Fly With Me,” we’re introduced to the charming Sam Sutton (See? They even copied the alliteration). Sam comes to the hospital with a roguish smile and approximately 100 broken bones following a wingsuit accident, and he’s immediately taken with Dr. Jo Wilson (Camilla Luddington). This mutual attraction is reminiscent of Denny and Izzie’s (Katherine Heigl) magnetic connection nearly 20 years prior, but it lacks the same novelty.
We then meet Sam’s best friend Kwame (Kwame Patterson) and they both seem like totally likable guys who share a strong bond. However, we soon head into the OR with ortho surgeon Dr. Lincoln (Chris Carmack) and his team, and a swelling score plays while Link gives the other doctors a pep talk, saying “We will get through this because we will get Sam through this.” This is all well and good because it’s a complicated surgery and Link is just coming off of a bad outcome in a previous operation, but the drama this moment is trying to evoke still seems forced when we’ve known this patient for all of half an hour.
Sam pulls through and continues to build an Izzy-and-Denny-like relationship with Jo, and this comparison is only furthered by the fact that Link is extremely jealous, just like Alex Karev (Justin Chambers) was of Denny back in the day. Before another big operation, Sam promises that once he’s no longer her patient, he’ll give Jo the romance she deserves (which is glaringly similar to Denny’s declaration to Izzie). No surprise, Sam dies on the table, and in an interesting twist, Jo really can’t care less because she’s outside making out with Link after the two decide to finally declare their undying love for one another. Grey’s couldn’t commit enough to this storyline or this character to make Sam all that memorable, and it only solidifies the fact that they just don’t make patients like Denny Duquette anymore.
With Grey’s Anatomy’s current patient roster getting more and more boring and their deaths feeling more and more inconsequential, there’s a sad, clear solution to this issue: we need to kill some doctors. In the last few seasons, we’ve been teased by the almost-deaths of Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd), Teddy Altman (Kim Raver), Mika Yasuda (Midori Francis), and Levi Schmitt (Jake Borelli), to name a few. In the latest mid-season finale, Jo Wilson and Lucas Adams (Niko Terho) even get held up by a gunman in a convenience store. A shot goes off, the episode ends, and when we pick up in the mid-season premiere, surprise surprise, nothing comes of it.
Now that Grey’s seems hesitant to kill off anybody we actually care about, they’re turning to random patients to carry the emotional weight of the show, and it just isn’t working. While this rallying cry for more dead doctors sounds like the sadistic musings of a bloodthirsty viewer, if Grey’s Anatomy teaches us anything, it’s that life is precarious and precious and can be taken away unfairly under all sorts of circumstances. If the show wants to keep us emotionally invested in these stories, they can’t be afraid to hit us where it hurts.
