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How Lost and Grey’s Anatomy mismanage having too many plotlines at once in unique ways

I’ll admit this up front — I love Grey’s Anatomy, and I love Lost.  But watching the shows can be maddening: they just have too many plotlines going.

But, you have to hand it to ABC for managing to mismanage the number of plotlines differently in each show.

Grey’s Anatomy has too many plotlines that it tries to use in every single episode.  It makes the episodes have little cohesiveness and instead turns them into a big mush of different topics. In last week’s (”Testing, 1-2-3″) episode alone:

… Meredith is stressed because her dad hit her after blaming her for killing his new wife, which was untimely not just because her funeral is on the day of the important intern exams but because Meredith was starting to like the spunky gal who was determined to make Meredith a part of her family, which Meredith sorely needed after the death of her mother, who happened to date the chief of medicine.  When Richard tries to console Meredith, she snaps that he is not her father — an interesting response to your boss trying to be nice, who is having his own post-separation hard times, which are exacerbated by his wife (who happens to have gotten pregnant) showing up at the hospital.  But Meredith tries to suck it up and take her exams, but doesn’t write anything on her paper.  George tries to help, but he’s up to his own ears in his own doo-doo because he has to sort out his feelings for Izzy, who he slept with, despite his being married to a woman he just discovered he doesn’t love.  His solution is to move to a lesser hospital, which pisses off Bailey because she’s put a lot of work into his development, but to move hospitals he has to pass his intern exams which the interns are studying for while also preparing for Christina’s wedding which is… tomorrow!  Who would schedule a wedding for the day after the biggest test of their life is beyond me, but they did, and Christina isn’t being the proper bride — she’s more interested in her career.  So Burke is stressed out while he has to tend to the medical drama of the day — a bunch of climbers coming in off a mountain, one of whom happens to have a pickaxe stuck in his head, while the climbers argue about whether or not they should have rescued him.  Alex, of course, has better things to worry about — namely, the identity of the Jane Doe from about 90 episodes ago, who announces she has in fact recovered her memory but doesn’t want to go back to her boring life as a housewife.  Meanwhile, Addison still can’t get pregnant, because she is barren, and thus everyone around her is having babies, including the gay bar owners who are trying to adopt a baby.

That’s a lot of topics for one hour. And I’m sure I forgot some.

Lost, meanwhile, also has a million topics — but gives each topic an entire episode.  This makes each one really developed, but you can go 8 episodes before finding out something basic, such as what the hell Locke is doing or what the freaking numbers mean.  (Remember the numbers?  They’ve been almost abandoned lately.  The numbers were great — was there anything creepier than them opening the hatch and finding the numbers on the inside?)

Find a happy medium, ABC — have a few, well developed plotlines, then move on to the next.  These aren’t soap operas — but they’re getting close.

Mon May 21st, 2007 2:13 pm

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