"I get angry when I go without sleep." -- Christina Yang, "Grey’s Anatomy"

TV I should really hate Grey’s Anatomy, the first season of which I’ve finally managed to watch on DVD. It’s not like it’s doing new things with the medical genre, rerunning most aspects of St Elsewhere and Cardiac Arrest under private medical care, not entirely sure how much ever whether it wants to be an ensemble drama about trainee surgeons or a standard complication discovery series. For the uninitiated, it’s the story of a group of trainee surgeons in a Seattle hospital, essentially e.r. Carter’s storyline for the first five or six seasons repeated four or five times with an injection of estrogen.

I’ve never been one for guilty pleasures and I usually have zero tolerance for duff shows and this has all the hallmarks; stock characters such as the kindly department chief mixing with the nerdy intern sparring with a lathario; lapses into montage sequences sutured together with rubbish MOR, tonal collapses left right and centre as the piano swells in as a patient it told they’ll die, usually with characters acting entirely out of character in an attempt to give a scene some substance. It’s gob smacking actually that any series in the naughties can be as popular as this is supposed to be and still spend so much time delivering such predictable storylining in such a bald way, the end of season cliffhanger guessable from about two episodes in.

At the epicentre of its problems is titular character Meredith Grey, an often whiney Ally McBeal wannabe whose oh so nineties voiceovers signpost the themes of the episode in a way in much the same way as My So-Called Life but without the wit. Some of the problem is Carla Bruni-a-like Ellen Pompeo’s performance, all sighs and whispers and bizarre facial ticks but the design of the character’s on shaky ground – though her mother’s incapacity is meant to create some sympathy, she’s clearly from a privileged background and already well aware of life’s pitfalls and more importantly, despite a lapse in judgement in relation to her sexual partner, basically has her life together.

Yet, I sat through all nine episode and I can’t wait for series two. Because no matter how godawful it is in some respects, every now and then there’ll be something, a moment, a performance, a storyline such as forcing Grey to carry a penis around all shift, which makes rest worth dragging myself through. Pompeo's fellow trainees are far more interesting – Katherine Heigl’s trailer park graduate who took to underwear modeling to pay for her tuition in particular seems more like the kind of person who should be dispensing life lessons. Every time I was about to give up, an episode would open with a Nellie McKay track, or there’d be a storyline in which everyone in the hospital had to be tested for VD or a really interesting guest actor such as Dead Like Me’s Callum Blue would show up, say little but add a lot.

But more often then not, when the show’s not trying so desperately to be just another medical drama, the script can be very smart and there’s a real sense of friendship amongst the trainee doctors and some spot on performances particularly from the Heigel and the brilliant Sandra Oh who usually gets the most acerbic lines. It can be deadly funny when it wants to be, as in the final episode when the aforementioned decide to carry out an autopsy, which neither of them have really admitted to not having done before and then Oh pulls out a text book so that they can do it right. The series just needs to be careful (and you’ll know whether it managed this having probably watched more seasons than me) that as happens in a couple of later episodes in this first nine that it doesn’t highlight the patient’s records at the expense of the far more interesting regular characters. If I want that, I’ll rewatch old episodes of Casualty, especially the one about the almonds.