Is there a doctor in the house? Miss Kitten takes us on a tour of Grey’s Anatomy.

With a mother diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and living in a nursing home, and a seven year long surgical residency at Seattle Grace Hospital ahead of her, Meredith Grey already has enough on her plate to deal with. But what happens when her drunken one-night-stand the night before her first shift turns out to be her new boss? Will she fall for his charm or manage to maintain a strictly professional relationship?

Grey’s Anatomy is a medical drama (oh, I can hear you already; ‘oh, no, not another one’), but unlike previous shows in the same category, Grey’s focuses mainly on the interns, the grunts, the bottom of the surgical food chain: their ambition, their drive, their ability to screw up something fierce. Show creator Shonda Rhimes said that one of the reasons she wanted to make this show was firstly, because of her fascination for watching filmed surgeries and secondly because she thought it would be more interesting to show a different side of a hospital than the existing medical shows did, where the main characters aren’t established doctors/surgeons, but rather people still in the middle of the learning process.

The show is mainly told through Meredith’s (Ellen Pompeo) eyes, and focuses on her and fellow interns: Christina Yang (Sandra Oh), Isobel Stevens (Katherine Heigl), Alex Karev (Justin Chambers) and George O’Malley (T.R. Knight), their friendship, their rivalry and their individual struggles to make it through one of the toughest medical programs there is.

Other featured characters are (starting with my favorite character) the five interns’ resident, Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson), often referred to as “the Nazi”; the attendings Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) and Preston Burke (Isaiah Washington) and their rivalry over who’s to become the next Chief of Surgery; and finally, the current Chief of Surgery, Richard Webber (James Pickens, Jr.).

As for why I love this show so much, I first have to point out that I’m not a fan of medical dramas at all, but for some reason, this show just pulled me in. I find the characters highly interesting, and I guess I can just relate to that hopeless feeling you have when you start a new job and feel like you’re the only person who has no idea what to do. The characters feel human, feel reachable. They are not on some pedestal, but rather are just as big of a screw-up as the next person; it feels empowering to then watch these characters find a way to deal with their screw-ups, overcome their fears, and just do whatever it takes to get the job done, to save a life.

Fan fiction for this fandom is mainly split into three types of stories. First there are medical-focused stories, where the plot generally centers around one or more abnormal medical cases. Then there are the more character-based stories, looking into the past or the current struggle with a particular character. And then, of course we have the romance stories, which happens in pretty much every fandom. Here we can find popular pairings, such as; Meredith/Derek, Christina/Burke, Izzie/Alex, and Addison/Derek to name a few.

The thing to be careful about when writing for this show, which is the main reason I haven’t attempted writing a fanfic for it, so far, is the medical aspect of it. The main scenery in the show is set at the actual hospital, and for most longer stories that aren’t AU, hospitals scenes are more or less bound to come up. Grey’s Anatomy, like any other show, uses artistic liberty to bend the truth of the world they are portraying, such as recovery time, but the actual medical cases presented in the show are thoroughly researched to match real-life cases. So to do the show justice, a background in health care or friends in that sector would be very helpful. If not, then research will just have to be your friend.